Page 260 - NIXBOOK

On routine patrol, I spot the strangest-looking dog I’d ever seen wandering in the roadway. Turns out it was a potbellied pig;
the kind with little tusks. Pig had gotten loose from his yard and was lost. I corralled it and helped an animal control officer load
it into his van. Did you know that potbellied pigs will squeal really, really loudly when you load them into an animal control
van? The chief posted a picture on twitter and the next day a news crew from KOMO in Seattle came out to interview me and
the pig, which had been reunited back with its owner on the farm. If you google “Mr. Wiggles KOMO” you can see the short
video they produced and aired. Kinda silly, but there are much worse ways for an officer to get on TV, so I won’t complain at all.

Me, with a drug user in custody. He’s got a small baggie of what sure looks like crystal meth. Unfortunately for him I have a way
to tell for sure: in my patrol car trunk I have some small one-use in-field testing kits for just this sort of thing. It’s a simple matter
of opening the top of the kit – a clear plastic pouch about the size of a container of tic-tacs- and dropping in just a tiny little bit
of the meth. Seal it shut, break open a glass ampule containing a liquid chemical reagent. Slosh it around a bit, and break open
glass ampule #2, again mix it all together. Then break open the last ampule and watch to see what color the liquid turns to show
a positive or negative result. Virtually every time I tested drugs, it was a positive confirmation, although sometimes I’d have to
test two or three samples to determine if what we had was white powder heroin or cocaine or meth or something else; each
specific drug required a specific test kit. Only once did a broken glass shard from an ampule pierce the plastic pouch and poke
my finger through it. After that incident I used my metal baton to open the ampules in there.

Because our department was an early adopter of the police bodycam technology, we attracted the attention of a local Seattle
news reporter who was working for Al Jazeera America, Seattle Bureau. He came over to Poulsbo and interviewed me, and rode
around for a bit in my patrol car while I demonstrated how we were using and adjusting to the new norm of recording things
on bodycams. I don’t know how many times the news story ran on the national channel, and it’s not on youtube but I did save
a copy of that video for the grandkids to enjoy someday.