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traffic to make it safe for them while they hunted around in the middle of the road for their cigarette butt. I loved the fact that
everybody watching could tell exactly what was going on. One time I did that to a lady who threw her cigarette out right in front
of a busy car dealership. She was not exactly thrilled to be out in the roadway looking for her cigarette butt while a half dozen
nearby cars salesmen were watching the spectacle, highly amused, while I made a big show of blocking traffic for her and keeping
her safe. She was so pissed off about the public humiliation that she went to the police department to complain to the police
chief. The chief asked her if she got a ticket? She said no. Chief told her that it sounded like a pretty good deal to him and she
had no grounds to complain about anything.

I had a (much different) police chief later – his tenure was for five long years - who was unofficially diagnosed as a psychopath.
He wasn’t a complete monster, but he did have an apparent personality disorder of exhibiting “persistent antisocial behavior,
impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.” So…it didn’t take long for all of the officers to hate
him. It didn’t help when at one point he decided all the patrol officers should each start doing Special Projects. We got to choose
our Special Projects, at least. Minimum of one per month. Fulfilled with all kinds of supporting paperwork. The goal was for
each officer to identify and problem in the city and fix it. Probably worked great in the Chief’s previous large city in California,
but when you make a dozen patrol officers in a small town do a dozen special projects a year, that total comes up to 144 per
year. Special Projects were things like identifying junked cars parked at the ends of dead end roads Ok fine, we’ll target those.
There were maybe like seven. After those were quickly used up as special projects and removed, then we had to start targeting
junked cars parked in front of people’s houses, only because we were running out of ideas. I mean, 144 total projects in 12 months
was pretty difficult, so after we did all the things we could think of like having public works clear those branches away from that
speed limit sign on that one road, or do a traffic emphasis patrol in front of the elementary school, it became really hard to find
things to fix. Basically he wanted us to clean up the town, but it was already pretty clean. Which meant our special project ideas
started getting lamer and lamer. Eventually that whole idea went away. Then he decided to the divide the city into sectors, and
assign officers to take special care of their sectors; get to know the apartment managers, the business owners, the dark alleys,
etc. Again, a great idea in a bigger city but at only 3 square miles, our city was way too small to divide up, and all of the officers
already knew everything about everybody anyway. Eventually that stupid plan also went away, thankfully. He was not a smart
police chief.

Unfortunately, I’ve got a few more stories about the psychopathic police chief who had come from California. In case you’re
wondering what a frustrating police chief looks like, sometimes it looks like requiring each officer to submit a “Daily Activity
Report” at the end of every shift. With points for arrests, or traffic stops, or tickets written. The problem was that the stats
generated were stupid; because the very nature of police work makes quantifying productivity very difficult. If you want to rank
officers by numbers made up, does a cop who writes 11 parking tickets (11 points) get more points for an officer who is on an
stakeout for 7 hours and then catches a felony suspect (1 point) that everybody else has been trying to corner for months? Does
an officer who spends 4 hours working traffic enforcement deserve more or less points than the officer who has to spend 4 hours
typing up a DUI arrest report? Yeah, that whole thing was all about making up number and statistics; eventually he gave up on
that whole idea too.