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Traffic stop time; I’ve caught a motorist going way over the speed limit. He’s an active-duty military officer, and I don’t feel like
completely ruining his day with a ticket, mostly because he seems genuinely sorry that he got caught. So I just yell at him for a
bit. During my scolding, I think back to when I was an enlisted sailor in the navy, still a teenager. If you had told me back then
that someday I’d be in a position where I could yell at a military officer I would have thought that would be the most amazing
and mind-blowing thing. And then to make it really interesting, I noticed on the officer’s drivers license that he had been born
well after I had already started my police career.

A driver crashed into another car but kept driving; a hit and run. It happened in another jurisdiction and he was headed into
mine; I was alerted and able to intercept him as he arrived in my town. I stopped him and quickly determined that he was
completely zonked out of his mind not on alcohol, but on some serious medication. State Patrol Troopers arrived and took him
into custody. The front of his minivan had massive damage to it, from his bumper-car style of driving. What made it memorable
was that not only did the guy not remember hitting the other car, he was incapable of seeing that his minvan was smashed up.
We made him look at the still-smoking mangled and smashed mess and marveled how his brain could not compute there was
fresh damage there. He literally could not recognize there was damage to his car. I called his wife to come get the minvan; she
was quite distressed to see her husband was so far gone on some kind of meds that he just about in zombie mode.

Back in the old days there was a detox facility where we could take drunk folks to dry out safely; the staff there would give them
a bunk and watch them closely for a day or so. It wasn’t any good for curing alcoholics, it was mostly just to keep them safe from
wandering out into roads and getting run over while completely shitfaced. You’d might be surprised how common it was to get
dispatched to drunk people laying down in the road somewhere; I’d have to take off a shoe and sock to count the number of
times I heard calls for drunks passed out alongside a road, or yes, actually in a road. And yes, sometimes they’d get run over.

Also back in the good old days there was a secure facility where we could take runaway teenagers who were chronically
delinquent; the place was a juvenile group home, fully staffed with locked doors. They would hold onto the kids there for a
couple days and make arrangements to get them and the family resources to help solve their problems. When budget cuts ended
that program, our only option when we caught runaways was to take them back home, and yep, sometimes those little rascals
would of course just run away again a half hour after we returned them home.