On patrol last night, and something pissed me off.
It was raining last night- not too hard, but enough to make driving a bit tricky. Temperature juuuust above freezing. You have to enter the weather conditions into your logbook heading when you begin your tour. I quote from my logbook:
DATE: 1/3/06
TIME: 1930
WEATHER CONDITIONS: NASTY
The radio is quite and we are bored. All BS jobs- family dispute, alarm, alarm, collision to a parked car no injuries, alarm, alarm, ringing siren, dispute, alarm, car alarm, etc. The most exiting job was a complaint about two guys selling sweaters out of the truck of their car without a license.
Bored to tears, we head to Prospect Park. We are looking for trouble and Prospect Park is a good place to find it. We get there and its deserted. Driving around, we finally see something- a homeless guy sleeping under a bridge.
We try and wake him up but he is out cold. We try lighting up the car- no reaction. We tap on the PA- no reaction. We whoop the siren, terrifying the squirrels and sending the rabbits fleeing in all directions, but we get no response from the urban outdoorsman.
We are arguing if we should get leave or get out of the car and check if the guy was dead or drunk or what when we hear the magic word over the radio:
CENTRAL: …gun at that 53 dispute on Avenue P.
Some idiots had been fighting in the street for some time- I remember hearing the 53 being called in about half an hour previously.
And now someone had called and reported that a gun was involved.
Did that mean someone mentioned they had a gun? Did that mean someone was waving a gun around? Did that mean someone was shooting everyone and everything in sight? No one knows.
So we tear ass out of the park and haul ass across Coney Island Avenue and we go to warp speed down Avenue O, and so does every other unit on the radio.
Remember, it’s raining, the streets are slippery and beginning to ice up, and it’s about 10:00 PM, so traffic is still pretty lively. Units are racing to the scene from all directions, except for a single unit en route to a report of a drug sale and/or a drug related dispute aaaaaall the way on Church Avenue and Ocean Avenue.
We are within spitting distance of the job when the responding unit tells Central “no gun, absolutely no gun, slow all the units down”.
Shortly thereafter, Central reports a gun at the dispute on Church and Ocean.
Later we learn that the problem on Avenue P had been an intoxicated female and a male (boyfriend or husband or whatever) attempting to get her home in one piece. She had been resisting, wanting to go back to the party, and he, seeing that she was three sheets to the wind and getting worse, wanted to her to go home. She had been yelling and screaming and carrying on and apparently the good people of Avenue P (a quite, solidly middle class residential section) wanted some peace and quite. Frustrated at having to wait for the police, some freaking retard upstanding citizen decided to tell the police that someone had a gun, figuring- correctly- that it would get the police there quicker.
And now most available units are in the vicinity of Avenue P, a good six or seven minutes or so from Church and Ocean in clear weather with no traffic. If the gun run at that location turns bad, the responding unit will pretty much be on his/her own till backup can respond.
I wonder what the moron taxpayer would say if a cop would have got into an accident responding to the job. I wonder what the taxpayer would say if someone had died.
The gun run at Church Avenue turned out bogus too.
Please note some details have been changed both for clarity and because I’m really not sure how legal it is for me to be posting details of this kind in a public place.
UPDATE: Speaking of bogus gun runs...
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