Page 117 - NIXBOOK

I can’t remember how this came out, but at one point a criminal had offered to me what he had heard about me on the street –
my reputation as a police officer was “hard but fair.” Hmm…..I guess I’ll take that.

Driving on patrol, I come up to a stop sign controlled intersection to make a left turn. Across from me, another driver is already
stopped, waiting to continue straight across. The driver motions me to go ahead first. I decline, because they got there before I
did, they’re going straight, and I’m making a left across in front of them. So it’s their turn to go, not mine. The driver motions
again, being friendly. But I still don’t go, because I’m following the rules of the road and I’m not going to turn in front of them
out of turn, even though I’m in a patrol car. They motion again for me to go first. I still decline because I’m in no rush and I can
wait. Finally the other driver decides to just go. How often did that happen to me? Just about every single day I was on patrol.

A woman driving her car but paying more attention to the phone in hands than the stopped cars in front of her ran into a
stopped Jeep in front of her and the impact destroyed her Honda. The Jeep was okay. She had a warrant for her arrest, because
a judge had called her name out in court for a prior offense and she had not been there. So her crashed car got towed away and
she went off to jail in handcuffs. The driver of the Jeep was pretty wide-eyed at how that turned out.

At the Jack in the Box: the manager called one day because somebody had locked themselves in the public bathoom there and
was not responding to any knocking on the door. They had been there a couple of hours, at least. I called for the fire department,
and when they arrived we all agreed it must be somebody zonked out or dead in there with a heroin syringe stuck in their arm.
The firefighters brought out one of their big axes and they pried the door open. Inside was…nothing. Nothing at all. That was
the day that the manager realized that somebody could (and did) lock the door from the inside, close the door, and it will lock
shut with no way for anybody to unlock it from the outside. That was a design flaw, for sure.