Let me clarify that I’m not much of a traffic cop. Even though I pull many people over, I don’t write many tickets. Giving warnings is more my style.
A couple of weeks ago, in the late evening, I had to squint against the oncoming high-beams of an approaching car. When the car failed to switch the beams from high to low after repeated flashing of my own lights, I made a u-turn and pulled the motorist over.
The driver was a woman (let’s not get into any jokes about female drivers, okay? Remember I’m a female driver, too 
). She was very friendly and polite, but genuinely confused as to why I had pulled her over. When I tried explaining about the high-beams, I knew she had no clue what I was talking about by the blank stare she was giving her dashboard. Her hand reached out and plucked at the headlights lever, but all she succeeded in doing was turning the headlights off.
I pointed to the bright blue light in her instrument panel and told her what it was.
She still didn’t understand.
Then I had her turn her lights back on and reached my own hand into the car and toggled the switch back and forth while telling her to watch the blue light. On-off-on-off.
She nodded.
Then I told her to look out of her windshield to see how the angle of the light coming from her headlights changed. High-low-high-low.
This time, she gasped and smiled.
“So that’s what that light means!” she said, clearly happy that I had solved the mystery of the blue light.
When I told her that by driving around the city with her high-beams on she was likely blinding cars coming towards her, she was very apologetic, saying she had never known what the light was for, and hadn’t really given it any thought. I gave her a quick lesson on when high-beam use is appropriate, told her to have a safe night, and sent her on her way.
Sans ticket.
During my career I’ve entrusted my life to other officers knowing those officers had my back.
It’s no different in the Dog Squad.
Even though my four-legged partner can’t talk, the two of us have our own lines of communication. Any dog handler or long time dog owner knows what I’m talking about.
A head twitch can mean the ‘bad guy’ is around the next corner, a very high tail can mean a cat is in the vicinity, and a nudge with his nose can mean my partner is playful or melencholy – depending on the lay of his ears.
We’ve been in some tight spots, but by working together as a single unit we are able to get the job done. I rely on his sense of smell, his keen sense of hearing, and his unwavering loyalty to do as I bid him. He relies on me to be the ‘brains behind the braun’, to think about how we get deployed, and to keep us both as safe as possible.
Today, PSD Hondo relied on me in another way.
We were assisting with the investigation of a serious crime, and had been called in to do a evidence/property search of an elevated garden in Downtown Vancouver. We had just arrived at the scene and were making our way to the area to be searched when, for some reason, PSD Hondo vaulted the cement wall we were next to.
We were two stories up.
Above a concrete parkade.
I yelled, “No!” as the officer behind me yelled at the same time, and I pulled back hard on Hondo’s leash. Hondo caught his paws on the ledge, his ears went back and his eyes rolled in my direction. I raced my hands up the leash, trying to keep Hondo on the ledge while trying to get close enough to grab him. I was not quick enough.
My partner disappeared over the edge.
The leash went taught. I knew the collar around Hondo’s neck would act as a ligature, so I ran to the edge while trying to absorb the shock by leveraging my arms out. I looked over and saw Hondo, writhing around like a fish, dangling in mid-air.
Pulling him back up was not an option. He’d be strangled by his own body weight.
So I let the leash burn through my hands and I lowered Hondo to the pavement below as quickly as possible. Even at twenty feet the leash wasn’t quite long enough, and Hondo dropped the last few feet. As soon as his paws touched down I told him to lay down. He did so, his ears flat against his head.
I raced back through the building we had just come through and burst out through the parkade door. Hondo was still laying there. My hands flew over his neck, his shoulders and his legs.
Physically, he was fine.
Emotionally? Well, if anyone tries to tell you dogs do not feel emotion then you tell them they are wrong. Hondo shrunk his body against my legs. He must have thought I was mad, but what he was reading was my fear.
We had a few moments in that concrete parking lot. I ruffled Hondo’s fur to reassure him everything was good, and he gave me an almost human expression of “Let’s NOT do that again, okay?”
A few minutes later we were back at work conducting our search, which ended in success. Hondo’s reward for finding things is a game of tug-o-war, and let me tell you – no dog has ever seen such a great game of tug-o-war as my dog saw today.
The home computer connection is again on the fritz and I am writing to you today from my ever-handy Blackberry. It’s a great little tool but hell on post formatting.
The earliest my internet provider can fix the problem is Thurs, so unless I’m able to gain access to another internet connection, any longer posts will have to wait until later in the week.
That said, I’ve approving post comments and reading emails but trying to respond to anything has been making the formatting go wacky. Mind you, I’m suspecting user-error. 
Have a great few days, everyone, and I hope to ’see’ you Thurs evening.
There has been a flurry of activity on the political front in the last few days with the HST, Olympic funding, medical funding cuts and additional budget cuts, including cuts the RCMP are facing.
The result is a number of new recruits will NOT be going through Depot.
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I work the front lines. I see what happens when there are a lack of resources.
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I have many RCMP friends. They are good people. Great people. They give everything they have to upholding the oath all of us wearing a law enforcement badge have sworn to. They are people just like you and me – they believe in justice, honour, integrity, team.
The RCMP cannot afford to have their budget slashed. The men and women of the Red Serge deserve better. They need reinforcements. Additional officers. Additional resources.
Bicycle mounted suspects can quickly out distance an officer on foot, and can out maneuver an officer in a car. I’ve gone after peddle pushing crooks in my day and I’ve lost a few, usually when the cyclist bikes down a footpath, a set of stairs or into a non-vehicle friendly environment. Frustrating? Oh yes.
So last night, when another unit was trying to arrest a man on a bike, I went to assist.
The suspect was peddling like mad on the sidewalk and I was driving beside him on the road. A line of parked cars was all that separated us, and we had a conversation of sorts over their passing rooftops and through my open window.
“It’s the police. You’re under arrest. Stop the bike.”
“No! I’m not going to jail!” Peddle-peddle-peddle.
“Yes, you are. Stop the bike.”
“No!” He cast his sweaty face at me, grinned, hit the brakes and zipped between the parked cars, behind my truck and to the opposite sidewalk.
I rolled my passenger side window down.
“Hey, knock it off. Stop the bike, you’re under arrest.”
“Huh-uh.” Peddle-peddle-peddle, brake, zip. I braked too. He weeble-wobbled around the back of my truck.
“You’re just going to go to jail tired,” I said (I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to use that line for YEARS), “Stop the bike.”
“No!” Peddle-peddle-peddle, brake, zip. He was using parked cars as obstacles, placing them between his bike and the various police cars trying to hem him in.
We continued with our unlikely waltz for the next couple of blocks, the suspect displaying an amazing array of physical skill at curb jumping and vehicle avoidance. Sadly, he was lacking in endurance.
The game of cat and mouse came to an end when the suspect, so intent on watching the police cars, peddled into a foot officer.
Take down accomplished.
It was early in the morning and, of all things, I was driving to a Homicide Conference. I was listening to Rock 101 and thought the DJ’s were up to their usual shenanigans until one of them swore.
“Oh Shit! A plane just flew into a building! Holy Shit, oh my God!”
For the next several minutes, I flipped from radio station to radio station, thinking of Orson Welles and his well plotted radio broadcast from several decades ago.
But as all of you know, this was not a prank. It was the single most horrendous act ever committed against the United States, one of the most powerful countries in the world.
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We watched the Towers fall, live on TV, all of us police officers from across Canada and the United States. All had signed up for the Homicide Conference, not knowing we would be getting the greatest lesson of all time.
Fear knows no boundaries.
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By that afternoon all of the Americans had left, trying to get back into their own country through locked borders.
We carried on with the conference. Barely.
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That evening my husband and I fielded calls from various family members. Most were in tears, some sobbing uncontrollably.
Did we know that hundreds of firemen had died? Dozens of police officers?
We knew.
We felt it.
My husband and I looked at one another. We read the uncertainty in each other’s eyes, and knew all we cherished could be vaporized in an instant.
He is a firefighter. I am a police officer.
Thank God our children were too young at the time to make the connection.
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Everyone reading this has a similar story. You remember where you were, what you doing, when you first heard the news and knew it to be real.
Firefighters, police officers, citizens, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, lovers and friends all died in the 9/11 attacks.
The memory is so close as to feel like yesterday, and it amazes me that eight years have gone by.
Once a year, I linger on thoughts of the survivors and the expectant mothers whose children will never know their fathers. I still have the PEOPLE magazine with the women’s photos on the cover, and I wonder where they are now.
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“Where were you when the world stopped turning?”
– Alan Jackson
Police work is a number of things. Routine, monotonous, exciting, dangerous.
No day is the same.
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Since I’ve been assigned to the Dog Squad I get compliance from almost everyone I deal with. Perhaps the ever watchful eyes of my four-legged partner have something to do with it as since 2005 it’s been “Yes, ma’am”, “No, ma’am”, “I understand, ma’am”. Almost everyone is agreeable and easy to deal with.
And then this past weekend it all went to hell in a hand-basket.
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A fellow K9 officer, who happens to be one of the toughest guys I know, was conducting an arrest of a very violent individual. I had finished gearing up and had just put PSD Hondo into the police car for night shift when I heard it. A voice calling for cover over the radio. It was my fellow K9 officer, yelling for help.
This from a guy who almost never calls for assistance. From the tone in his voice I knew it was bad. Very bad.
I think I broke a land speed record getting there (my apologies to the motorist at E 1st and Clark Dr – I did see you, even though I suspect you did not see me and this accounted for your surprised reaction at my rapid approach) and was the fourth or fifth unit to arrive. By then the suspect was in custody, but my fellow K9 officer was in rough shape.
His face was ashen and he was on his knees. His dog was beside him, both of them utterly spent. The other dog handlers and I went into ‘team mode’ and looked after him and his dog, ensuring they both got the help they needed in the following hours.
The rest of the units at the scene were awesome, and it is during times like these I’m very proud of the officers I work with.
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Two hours after midnight I covered another unit at a domestic call. Circumstances were such that PSD Hondo was left in my vehicle. It wasn’t a ‘routine’ call (thinking ANY call is routine is a sure way to get yourself hurt), and tensions were high.
And then, for the second time in one shift, a K9 officer called for Code Three cover.
That officer was me. Even though there were four of us at the call, we desperately needed reinforcements.
I can’t go into specifics as the case is now before the courts, but I’ll tell you one thing – in the middle of the melee with my radio and only way to communicate with my dispatcher knocked loose, it was a relief to find a radio mike dangling in front of my face. I had but a moment to snare it and hit the ‘emergency’ button. It sent an alarm to the dispatcher that all was not well at our call, and the troops came a’running.
God bless you guys. Responding sirens are the best sound in the world.
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In the end, all of us had a few bumps and bruises, but we all went home to our families. That’s the most important part. Family.
It was clear on that night that I have two families. The first is the one constructed of my husband, children and loved ones.
The second is that of my siblings in blue.
I’ve been asked repeatedly why I author this blog, and the answer is always the convoluted reasoning of an officer trying to come to grips with working in a challenging field. Believing in communities, supporting and protecting the good in society, allowing change and accepting differences are all issues I try to address.
It’s a constant battle.
A lot of it is personal. A way to come to terms with the things I have witnessed and the atrocities played upon our society. It’s about experiences, and beliefs and a way of life. Rare vignettes of beauty make everything worth it. Many of you know exactly what I’m talking about, and author Kurt Vonnegut says it best:
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
- When about to be involved in a foot pursuit, put the police car in park before jumping out with PSD Hondo in order to prevent having to chase said police car down the hill
- Make a note in my training log that PSD Hondo ’calls off’ in a real life situation when targeted on the wrong person
- Buy the recruit, upon whom PSD Hondo was targeted, a new pair of undershorts
My last post illustrated how important it is to always be prepared for the unexpected. Most officers I know engage in mental “what-if” scenarios, and this is a habit I hope all new officers get in to.
That said, when the unexpected DOES happen, it can still catch you by surprise, and it pays to have a cool head and a plan.
Shortly before my transfer to the Dog Squad, my partner and I were on patrol in the South East part of the city known as District 3. As one of the District’s plainclothes cars, my partner and I were wearing civilian clothing and driving an unmarked police car. We were not operating in a covert manner, as could be seen by the car we were driving - the unmarked car was a Crown Victoria. Any crook worth his salt knew we were the police from a mile away.
It was the middle of our shift and the middle of the night, and from what I remember, it had been busy shift. Patrol units were scattered across the district and most were tied up on calls. My partner and I headed south to grab a coffee during a lull in the action, and as we turned into our destination, a flurry of activity across the street caught our attention.
On the other side of the road was a closed gas station. The entire lot was cast in shadows, with the nearby streetlights throwing just enough illumination into the lot so we could see two cars. Four men were standing between the cars and were doing a hand off – their back and forth from the open trunks is what caught our attention. Packages were exchanged from hand to hand, a small package for a large one. The packages were placed into the open trunks of the cars, then all the men quickly got into their rides and raced out of the lot.
That, my friends, is called a clue.
My partner pulled into a u-turn and followed after the two cars. One went straight east and the other took the Knight St Bridge – we stayed with the one on the bridge as I broadcast the description of the eastbound car so other units could go after it.
There were no other vehicles in sight as we followed the southbound car across the bridge deck, waiting for dispatch to advise on the status of the car. My fingers flew over the keyboard on our computer trying to find any links to known criminals. At that point, we were investigating suspicious behaviour, but we really did not have anything else to go on.
Both of us were intent on the car in front of us. I never looked behind us, and I’m not sure it would have even registered in my partner’s mind if he had noticed headlights closing the distance in his rear view mirror. This was about to be one of those times when the unexpected happens.
Bridgeport Road exit. The car we were following glided onto the off ramp.
Shell Road. Left hand turn lane. A red light. Only our Crown Vic and the suspect wheels were at the intersection. The civilian cars who had just been around us dissipated like smoke, like they knew something was about to happen and wanted no part of it.
By then we knew the occupants of the car had ties to some of our more prevalent criminal gangs. We were waiting for reinforcements. We heard the sirens during the broadcasts of units coming to cover us. We were on high alert. And then it happened.
“Oh shit,” my partner muttered, looking in the rear view mirror. At the same time, the side view mirror on my side of the car was filled with the high beams of an SUV coming up from behind us, very bright and very close. My neck muscles tightened in anticipation of the contact with our rear bumper.
The tail lights of the car in front of us suddenly flashed white as it backed up, closing the distance between the front of our car and the rear of theirs.
“Fuck,” my partner spat, and threw the car into reverse, trying to give us some space, a route of egress.
We were being boxed in.
“You take the front, I’ll take the back,” was all I said. In an instant, even though we were still belted in our seats, our guns were out. I gave a quick broadcast on what was happening, that cover was Code Three. I dropped the mike. Belts unbuckled, hands on the doorhandles. We were ready.
Then, in surreal slow-motion, the traffic light turned green. The car in front of us rolled forward, creating a gap. My partner took it. We made the turn in a conga line, and the SUV behind us dropped back. I tried but could not see the license plate, only a hazy description of the SUV through the glare of high beams. My heartbeat was hammering in my throat.
Another turn, which the SUV did not make. It slowly crawled through the intersection, dim faces like masks barely visible through side-window glass as the driver opted out of whatever situation had been about to unfold. Perhaps it was not until they had us pinned did they realize our car was a police car. But I don’t think so. They were trying to scare us, intimidate. They have still not been identified.
We eventually conducted a stop of the car in front. The driver and the passenger were belligerent and hostile. Bit part players in the drug trade with cash flow, fancy cars and an expedited pass to jail or an early grave on the first major slip-up. They denied trying to box us in (and who were we kidding…they HAD boxed us), and denied even knowing we had been behind them. A search did not uncover anything incriminating, only an empty satchel bag.
Later, on our return to Vancouver, my partner and I debriefed what had happened, about how the incident had been a real wake up call. We discussed the likely possibility of the eastbound car having had all the loot, that the car we followed and the SUV had orchestrated the ballsy move of boxing us in to draw other officers from going after it.
We didn’t relish that we had not seen the SUV coming, that we had, in essence, been sitting ducks. We stayed calm, and we a plan, albeit a hastily planned one (you take the front, I’ll take the back), but it wasn’t a good feeling, given both my partner and I were always aware of our surroundings.
It showed that no matter how alert you are, how well trained, or how ready you are to engage, sometimes a call can still catch you off guard.
