Page 155 - NIXBOOK

More than a few times in my career I got dispatched to reports of cars being stolen, when the actual case was that the owners of
the cars got drunk, crashed their cars, and then the next morning they tried to say somebody else did it. Sometimes we found
the crashed cars before they called, and sometimes they called afterward. Or sometimes we’d find the crashed cars in a ditch,
call the owners, and they’d pretend like they had no idea what had happened. Pro Life Tip: If you ever crash your car, leave the
scene, and think you can convince the cops that it wasn’t you who was involved, must have been somebody else, officer…you’d
be making a really bad decision to try that.

There I am in my patrol car, parked alongside the highway watching for traffic violators. A black car zipping by in heavy traffic
catches my eye; I turn to look and follow it and I become alarmed to see that the driver, having obviously spotted me, stomped
on the gas and accelerated quickly to put time and distance between us with no effort at discretion. I pull out into traffic and I
see the black car up ahead of me turn off onto a side street so fast he’s just about drifting sideways, leaving tire marks in the
road, kicking up dirt and almost hitting at least one other car in the intersection. I speed up, hit my lights and siren, and the
chase is on. I catch up to him and see him dart up a side road; he’s still got a good lead on me but I’m closing in. A couple blocks
later I catch a glimpse of him going into an apartment complex and I get my chance; he probably didn’t know that road looped
out into another entrance/exit – I speed over to the second way in and out, zoom into the complex, and wait for him to come
out. A couple seconds later he turns the corner in the parking lot and we’re face to face. He stopped for the briefest moment,
and then accelerated toward me, from about 50 feet away. He found a gap between my patrol and some parked cars; for better
or worse I had left just enough room for him to squeak by me. The other officers later told me that I had sounded quite excited
on the police radio at that moment. Because I thought for sure he was going to scrape the shit out of the drivers side of my patrol
car. In fact, after he drove past me and got away, I had to get out and look at my car; it actually was unscathed. I could not
believe that he had missed me. He couldn’t have missed my side by more than a couple inches. Twenty seconds later the other
two officers on duty found his flight path and they started chasing him but he got away from them, too.

Residential structure fire, fully involved! I was in the area on patrol when the call came out so I beat the fire department there
by a few minutes. I will never forget running up the front door (wide open) and staring in wonderment at the inside of the house;
the stairwell almost directly in line with the front door revealed the entire second floor was totally engulfed in orange roaring
roiling flames. It was like looking into a giant woodstove that was set on high. I backed out to the front yard and found the
owner of the house who was of course freaking out, saying she needed to get some things out of the house. I directed her instead
to move her car out of the driveway to save it, and get it out of the way of the fire trucks that were coming. She moved her car
and a minute later the firefighters showed up. I briefed them, and then realized that the woman was MIA. And realized that she
might have gone back into the house when I wasn’t looking. The firefighters grew quite alarmed and started putting on their
SCBA’s and gear. About 30 seconds later we discovered the woman was actually next door, being consoled by her neighbor, so
we all cancelled our panic mode and the firefighters went back to getting the hoses out.