ArcaMax

I went on my fifth police ride-along this week. The first one was before I was elected, slightly on a whim. I put in for both the city police and the university police. The university emailed me back faster.

That day we patrolled the university land, much more expansive than I knew, even having worked there for years. The patrol officer mainly scared off kids who might be climbing abandoned radio towers in the desert. We did one uneventful traffic stop, and I sat on my hands, or they'd start reaching toward all the cruiser's buttons because curiosity might be one of my best and worst traits.

Other days, I saw arrests. One was for suspicion of soliciting minors at a school crosswalk. The officer, giddy as she picked me up, had been working the case for a long while. She called backup, another female officer, and pulled a meek-looking man out of a small apartment. We took him to the county detention center, watched his intake while she joked with the detention officers, and brought paperwork to someone she had earlier arrested for shoplifting, explaining that the amount of theft was now considered a felony.

We got held up waiting to be let out because the drive-through nature of the detention center had her parked behind another agency's car.

There was a lot of waiting around each time: waiting for support, waiting for a call from another agency, waiting for the manager to get keys. Another ride-along had us at the hospital for two hours. As we drove, the officer recognized someone with a warrant. But that person hadn't taken their medication, and the detention center wouldn't take them. Back into the police cruiser, we drove them to the hospital, where a nurse gave them their pills. We waited until their blood pressure came down.

This week's ride-along was three councilors with three officers and a supervisor, showing us hotspots around town. There was a couple under a tree outside the tunnels. One officer recognized someone who had run from him before. The officers had nicknames and formal names. There was Bear, who knew about a certain house, and later there was disheveled Mr. Chavez slowly crossing the street. There was empathy for how people showed their identity in their spaces.

At one point, we ended up in the backyard of a house that our city's nuisance abatement team was checking, their bright blue polos and khakis speaking a different language than the tool- and weapon-filled belts and vests.

The house we stopped at was one that emerges in a neighborhood -- sometimes in a transformation after a death -- where poverty, circumstance, and a town's undercurrents meet in quiet confluence.

The officers recognized the RV outside from another house across town they had worked to bring up to code. As my assigned officer slowly went in to check if someone was in it, a woman walked quickly out of the backyard with bags and a purposeful stride to be where we were not. No one stopped her.

After the frightened pitbulls were put inside, someone else was discovered in a tent, allegedly unknowingly to the main contact at the house. Stern-faced, the man from the tent gathered his things, including two rimless bike tires, and walked easily around the extension cords balanced over drying puddles of rainwater. The blue polos had marked those cords down earlier, peering into the rough hole punched in the wall to send three cords into the yard from the house.

It was my first time not being the neighbor watching the action from my porch, and since the officers were part of the community engagement group, we all went to talk to the residents who had been watching. They were happy to see us, unhappy about the length of time the legal process took, and grim about the stories of abuse they knew had happened in the house that I had been prepped on before we arrived.

"When you hear them hurting people, and no one comes," one woman said simply, "It makes good people want to do bad things."

The last stop was on the hillside of a park, under the shade of a tree, viewing a known drug house. A whistle made me turn toward a nearby apartment. An officer met my return toward him with an explanation -- the whistle was likely a warning to others that they were there because those across the street saw their identities, too.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To learn more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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