Page 107 - NIXBOOK

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July 4 festival; a million people are in town, walking around downtown. A couple of dudes who stole beer from a store get away
in a car but they are headed my way and I catch them, right next to the old police station. Myself and another officer arrest them
and recover the beer. After the guys are cuffed and stuffed into my car, I realize one of them is missing his ballcap. I remember
I had set it on the back trunk of my car for a moment while I was frisking him, and I remember a lot of folks were walking back
and forth during this event. Conclusion: somebody walking by, feeling quite brave, saw the hat unguarded, and swiped it off the
trunk of my patrol car. Probably on a dare or a bet. I was more impressed than mad. It wasn’t my hat, so I didn’t care that much.
And the guy who got arrested for stealing beer had bigger problems then about his hat being stolen. “Looks like your hat got
stolen,” I told the beer thief. “It’s sucks when people steal your things, huh?”

The old police station we were in for 20 years was in an old doctor’s office; before that it had been a dentist office, built before I
was born. The exam rooms were converted to sergeant’s offices, and the bathrooms still had small pass-through doors in the
walls where urine samples could be placed for the nurses in the next room. The building was close to 50 years old when we
moved in, and 20 years later when we moved out it had been remodeled several more times it still didn’t exactly fit our needs.
But it did have a great view, overlooking Liberty Bay and the Port of Poulsbo. A visiting police chief from some other agency
told us that our view was probably 2 best in the state. First place went to the Medina police station, on the shores of Lake
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Washington. Home to a small and very affluent community of millionaires and billionaires, (Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, for two
examples) the area between the PD and the lake was determined by the locals to be a very safe place for ladies to set up towels
and lay on the beach to get their summer tans. The police officers certainly didn’t mind, and kept an eye on them to make sure
they stayed safe. So…win/win I guess.