Stranger than Fiction

It’s an old cliché that truth is stranger than fiction.  No place is this truer than law enforcement.  Even after 5 years, I still get amazed by things I see, things people say and do.  I suppose it’s because we get called to handle the strange and unique situations that most people do not want to deal with.   I remember one situation in particular that was in fact strange.

I was called to investigate a guy pooping in the backyard of a vacant home that transients frequented.  I was actually quite interested to find the guy, not just because it would be funny or entertaining; but it’s a serious degradation of the quality of life to look out the window and see someone planting sewer pickles in the backyard of the house next to you or in the alley behind your house.  I mean really, nobody wants to see that.   I check the backyard, of the vacant home.  I am careful to avoid lawn sausages.  I was there a while back and one of the other officers stepped in a sewer pickle and it was a major hassle to get it off his boots, so I am looking to avoid that inconvenience.   The backyard was negative so I check the alley. 

I find a guy hiding in an old sofa.  It was one of the pull out sleeper kind but, it was just the frame with nothing inside except a partly nude guy.  I will call him Sammy (not his real name) is ducked down inside the sofa laying down.  I see a tube of lotion next to him and can’t see his hands.  I advise him that if he is rubbing one out we are going to have a significant problem.  I get him out as my back up is arriving.  I ask  “are you the one droppin a duce in the vacant house yard?”  he denies any felony or misdemeanor pooping.  At this point I am not inclined to use more probative investigative techniques to determine if he is in fact the pooper I am looking for.  I am more concerned with him reaching his hand down his pants and touching himself as he talks to me.  I advise him that it is offending my sensibilities that he is touching himself as he talks to me and I explain how it’s in his best interest to cease this activity. (It didn’t really sound like that, it may have had some colorful adjectives and metaphors and  possibly some veiled and not so veiled threats about what might happen to him if he didn’t stop, but that was the point I got across.)  My problem at this point is that his activity is public sexual indecency, but in this state I need a victim.  I as an officer am not allowed to be a victim of disorderly conduct and such.  It has to be an active crime against me like someone assaulting me or something like this.  So I am looking around to see if someone, anyone has seen him roughing up the suspect.  I contact the caller who called about his pooping and she didn’t actually see him she assumed what he was doing.  I don’t blame her, I would not watch for the gritty details either, but it doesn’t help my quest to put him in jail. 

So with no luck on taking him to jail we document the contact and the suspicious nature of his behavior; his outfit should have been the tell tale sign of things to come.  A white guy, (besides me, the only one in a mile any direction) wearing a derby hat, a vest from a three piece suit no shirt, snake skin vinyl pants and cowboy boots. (rule of thumb, never trust a guy in snakeskin pants and a derby hat)  We release him because he has denied us a consent search for drugs and I have no probable cause to search him and to be truthful I am not willing to find any evidence that may link him to the sewer pickle planting incident.  So after he is warned about trespassing and loitering and public sexual indecency, on his way he goes. 

The next day I was checking the ally much later in the shift to see if Sammy is back.  I stop and talk to the original caller and she tells me his is hiding in an irrigation junction box.  In this alley is a concrete bunker of sorts.  It’s like a giant T to send water in different direction, it’s about 4 feet deep, 3 feet wide and shapped like a giant T.  I leave my car on the street and quietly make my way back to this concrete box.  I shine my light inside and sure enough, Sammy is in there, surrounded by porn on ever side of the inside of this concrete junction box.  But now there is the fact that he is wearing woman’s yoga pants with the crotch cut out so the twig and berries are out and about and he is taking care of business.  I ask him what the hell he is doing.  His left hand shoots into one of the pipes that makes this den of iniquity a T.  Not knowing what he is reaching for, I draw my gun and tell him not to move.  I advise him that if his hand comes out of the pipe and into visibility with a weapon, I will in fact shoot him.  He slowly pulls his hand out with and drops a baggy of what looks like meth.  I keep him at gunpoint until I have the units I requested to meet me in the back are with me.  I get him out and realize that his tight whites are around his neck, yep, neck through one of the leg holes and the waistband and yes, his junk is in fact out and about for the world to see.  This because he chose to cut the crotch out of these woman’s pants.  I cuff him up and the female officer that was backing me up asks him why his underwear was around his neck and not covering his goodies.   His response “Pffft” with a look like “duh, why wouldn’t you”.  

The bad part of this incident, I know your thinking, what?  The other stuff wasn’t the bad part.   Nope, I had to climb down into his den of iniquity to retrieve his meth bag and meth pipe.  I asked him to tell me where his “DNA” would be found in this little pit so that I could avoid it.  I assured him that he would be rather displeased with my reaction to getting his DNA on me down there.  I took off my vest and shimmied my not so slender frame down into this hell hole and got the evidence I needed.  I will leave it at that.  I took him to jail for the drug possession.  He admitted that he was in fact the sewer pickle planter so the caper was solved and ended well.  And really, how strange is it to take a guy to jail wearing women’s yoga pants with the crotch cut out exposing his junk, wearing a derby hat with tightie whities around his neck.  Not quite as strange as the double horse rape report I took, or when the guy jumped out of the house wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and nothing else but it was a still something I could never have made up. 

Where the blame belongs?

I have not been one to jump on an blog about political or social issues.  A recent event near where I grew up in Southern California had brought me out of the wood work so to speak.  On July 5^th a subject that was apparently being arrested ended up in a physical struggle with members of the Fullerton Police Department and subsequently died.  I don’t have very many of the details, only what I have read in the media and in comments of blogs.  The only videos I have seen show very little if any of the actual incident but rather all of the spectators reactions.  I know many of you that know me will assume that since I am a cop I will side with the cops.  Well the simple fact is I have not seen enough information, I have not interviewed any witnesses, I have not reviewed the evidence, i.e. video, and audio recordings;  to side with anyone about anything.  Do I have concerns with what I have seen (only part of the picture)?  Yes I do.  Do I think it warrants an investigation?  Yes I do.  It’s hard to tell what is fluff and what is fact in this case because there is so much emotion attached to it. 

The subject that died was a local homeless transient named Kelly Thomas.  I did not know him and I am not a mental health professional.  Most say he suffered from sczchophreina.  Most say he was homeless because of his SMI (serious mental illness) for nearly 20 years.  I have read just about everywhere that he was a kind and gentle person.  I have also read that his mother had a restraining order against him because he had choked her and stripped naked then urinated on her front porch.  Again, I don’t know exactly what happened that night, I wasn’t there, I haven’t reviewed all of the facts so it would be irresponsible for me to comment as to guilt or innocence.  Like I said before, there are concerns that should be investigated.

Just about everything I have read has morally convicted the officers.   And let’s face it that is the easy path.  Our proxy guilt seeps in on situations like this and takes over.  We are outraged that a mentally ill homeless person gets beat up by cops and dies.  The second easiest place to assign blame is on the family.  Why let their child live on the street to be cared for by nobody?  That’s an easy place to point the finger too.  I am of the opinion that the real blame resides with all of us, you me and everyone we know.  I will get to the specific reasons for that claim in a bit.  But first I need to explain a few things.

We as society have assigned police officers to deal with the things and people that we don’t want to.   We have them deal with the problems that we don’t want to take care of deal with ourselves.  If the neighbor is playing his music too loud, we call the police and want them to tell the neighbor to turn down their music.  We have the police deal with the criminal element of society because again, we don’t want to.  We have officers deal with suicidal persons because we don’t want to.  We want officers to take bad guys to jail when they break the rules we make.  We also have them deal with our mentally ill.  Law enforcement is the gateway to the mental health industry more often than not.  You may not like this or agree with it, but it is a fact and you have tasked officers to deal with your mentally ill.  Many of you have even called to have them moved along from the bus bench or from the park.  You get offended when they pull down their pants in public and defecate behind the 7-11 and want them “dealt with”.  You, me and everyone else does not want to deal with them.  We want them out of sight.  We don’t want to smell them as we walk into a convenience store and they ask us for money.  In essence we have asked police officers to be our garbage men.  To deal with the refuse of society is the task we all have given them.  Yet we harbor utter distain when officers acting as garbage men smell (figuratively) like garbage men.

In the 80’s the US Supreme Court decided that we could not keep people locked away in mental institutions against their will any longer.  In order for a person to be seized against their will taken to a mental institution they must present a danger to self (DTS) or danger to others (DTO) and be mentally ill and refusing treatment.  Well, they can only be kept there for a limited time without a court order to do so.

So why is this all of our faults.  Because you, me and everyone else has turned our back on the mentally ill, we chose to pay our CEO’s Billions of dollars a year.  We chose to pay our sports stars billions of dollars a year all the while our mental health system is underfunded by millions.  We as a society have placed more value on our entertainment than treating our mentally ill.  Look at our country compared to other countries.  In Japan, CEO’s make 11 times what the average worker makes compared to the US were the Average CEO pay is 200 times what the average worker makes.  How much do professional athletes in other countries make compared to the US?  How many mentally ill live on the streets compared to the US?  Yet we all sleep just fine in blissful denial of our massive problem of how we have turned our back on the mentally ill in this country.  We as US citizens have decided that we want the state (government) to care for our mentally ill.  We have also decided to cut funding to the programs that help treat these people.  You can point your finger at the officers involved for this incident, but the root cause for this happening is our collective denial of taking care of our mentally ill.  The officers will be held accountable for their actions here.  But it is your guilt for how you have treated the mentally ill that fuels the fire of outrage over this incident.  And if the officers are found guilty of a crime, what will change?  You will still be sitting on your ass watching your flat screen TV super duper NFL game day package and expect police officers “deal” with the homeless mentally ill.  So it will happen again, and you will shove the dirty secret into a corner until your guilt overcomes you again and you will voice your outrage, but we will still be standing in the same place asking the same questions.  So if you want someone to blame for this incident and the thousands just like them.  Look in the mirror.

As with all in death incidents, it would have been investigated.  With in custody deaths they are treated like a homicide from the onset.  The important thing to look for with an in custody death is cause and manner, which in this case the medical examiner was not able to determine.  The most common “cause” of in custody deaths is MI (Myocardial Infarction or heart attack) this would be indicative of a subject struggling so intensely that his heart gives out.  The second you would expect in a case like this is BFT (Blunt Force Trauma) from intrusive impacts delivered  by the officers.  Once the cause is determined they can move to the manner.  Which is Homicide (death caused by another) suicide, natural or other.  So until the professionals can definitively determine what caused his death everyone is just speculating. 

I have seen many comments about how people can’t understand why they just couldn’t restrain him.  When I see that I see a comment from a person who has never attempted to restrain a person in a full blown psychosis (SMI or drug induced).  As with most things it’s not as easy as it seems.  In fact the last person in a psychosis I was restraining was a 105 pound female.  I weight 215 and with 33 lbs of equipment on makes 248 lbs.  And she threw me off of her (and two paramedics) like we were rag dolls.  She literally sent me flying.  All the while she was biting big chunks meat out of her cheeks and spitting  the bloody chunks out.  You see she was in a psychosis and thought we were devils and were trying to destroy her.  She thought by destroying her mouth she could keep us from defeating her.  When dealing with SMI people in crisis or worse a full blown psychosis it is not as easy as people make it seem.   Have you ever seen the orderlies at a mental facility?  The look like pro football linemen.   So when I hear people say how they can’t understand how it takes so many officers and tasers and such, I think the person is ignorant to the facts of life.  Not ignorant as in not smart, just no experience in dealing with mentally ill persons in crisis.

As to if the officers or Kelly Thomas were right or wrong in this situation, I do not have enough information to make an educated statement.  I think it needs to be investigated.  I think the video needs to be reviewed as well as audio recordings and witnesses interviewed.  What bothers me about the whole situation is many of the people outraged and protesting are the same people that have called the police to move along smelly SMI transients from in front of their business or from the park.  I hope the guilt that drives their rage is not misplaced and they look into the root cause of this situation.  I hope they have the courage to make the hard choice to finally look at how we treat our mentally ill in this country.