Page 126 - NIXBOOK

Somebody called 911 mildly freaking out that there was a car cruising slowly by in their neighborhood, and the driver was taking
pictures! Of houses! Oh no! Okay first of all, it’s not illegal to take pictures of houses. Second, that’s in the job description of
professional realtors and appraisers. They do that all the time. You don’t need to call 911 when that happens, okay? How many
calls like that did I get dispatched to? About three per year.

Another common call was people reporting their boyfriend or girlfriend or ex-husband or ex-wife was not returning the kids on
time to them after custody visitation. If there was a judge-approved parenting plan in effect, then the violation was a civil matter,
not a criminal case for the police to get involved in. “You should go tell your lawyer” I’d advise them. If there was no parenting
plan because the parents were too stupid or lazy or poor to get one filed, then the complainant was really out of luck because
since the other parent had equal custody, they had every right to the kids. ‘You should go get a lawyer” I’d tell them then.

A dad called 911 to report his teeneage son had been punched by another teenager for no apparent reason. After hearing the
dad’s version of what he had heard happened, I suggested that he might want to re-consider having a police investigation done,
since there was a distinct possibility he might not like what the investigation unovered. He thought about it for a few hours and
recontacted me, and said that he did want me to proceed. I started interveiwing witnesses and halfway through my investigation
when it started to become clear his son had more than some culpability, the dad asked me to never mind the whole thing please.
Sigh..okay, case closed.

I was at a defensive tactics course one day many years ago and although I forgot pretty much everything the instuctor taught us
that day I do remember clearly one thing he explained to the officers lined up in front of him: “A fight is nothing more or less
than a series of mistakes made while trying to subdue somebody.” That stuck with me. He meant that if you get into a “fight”
with somebody, what is going on is you both are trying submission techniques that are not working out. He suggested skipping
the whole “fighting” part and just go straight to the knockout punch or the perfect take-down move to prevent or end all of the
grappling and scuffling attempts. That should be the goal, every time. Best accomplished by considering it as a kind of a physical
chess match; you should plan your moves out ahead and be ready to change tactics on the fly without hesitation if a method
doesn’t work out.