If you have been a faithful follower of these offerings, you
are aware that during my (first) college years I was employed as a Sheriff’s
Cadet with the County of San Diego. If
you are not a regular reader, or like me, forget at least half of everything you
learn on any given day, you may want to read the blog posts “A Rip in the
Fabric of Society” (2/14/13) and “ACME Keyless Entry” (2/21/13). They will bring you up to speed on the
essentials and allow me to save key strokes and space here.
My second posting during this employment was to the Communications
Center (CC). The CC, more regularly
referred to as the Business Office (BO… heh ,heh, heh) by the old-timers, was
where the Deputies (oh yeah, and me too… performing exactly the same tasks for
way less pay) would take phone calls from the public and, if warranted,
dispatch patrol units by radio. To learn
more about this, you may want to read “The Greatest Invention of My Lifetime”
(6/20/13).
The CC was located in the Sheriff’s Administrative office
facility in Downtown San Diego. I spent most of my time thus engaged assigned
to the second-half of the PM shift (7:00 PM to 11:00 PM) which meant the female
clerical staff had gone home. It was a
boring assignment with little opportunity for exercising initiative, personal
or professional. And when such
opportunity did arise, I usually ended up getting my ass chewed by a Sergeant,
or in cases of especially creative thinking, a Lieutenant.
As the ultimate perk, Cadets could, on their own time, ride
with patrol Deputies (as the Deputies’ were so inclined). Hey, look at me; I’m dressed like a cop,
riding around in a cop car: Heady stuff
for a nineteen year old. But alas, the department did not deploy units from the
CC because it was a long way from areas of County of San Diego jurisdiction. So
the opportunity to ride was not resident.
However, in the course of my employment, I had made friends with Cadets
from other stations. Through these
connections, I was able to arrange for the occasional ride along out of one of
the many Patrol Stations. Just such a ride along occurred one hot, August,
Saturday afternoon.
My fellow Cadet, we’ll call him Bozo, arranged for us to
ride with Deputies deployed from the Vista Patrol Station (where Bozo was
assigned). We thought we would ride with
units in adjacent beats. We could meet
up during a lull at some eatery or Foster’s Freeze, cooling down (cop cars had
no air-conditioning in those days) and listening to the Deputies try to one-up
each other with war stories. For reasons
still eluding me this forty years later, Bozo was assigned to the Vista
unit. And I was not assigned to the
neighboring beat of San Marcos, but to the Escondido car. This is relevant because the beat does not
share a border with Vista, and it is
huge! It basically is the (at that time) sparsely populated unincorporated
areas that surround the City of Escondido.
Even on the slow day we were experiencing, the travel time between calls
ate up most of the time. We never did
arrange to meet with any of the other units that day to swap lies. But all of this
is just background.
About mid-shift (B-shift ran from 2:00 PM to 10:00 PM) we
received a radio call dispatching us to a 459 silent alarm at a residence. The code 459 refers to the California Penal
Code section defining burglary; a break-in.
A silent alarm indicates that the CC had received a call from a private
security monitoring service informing them that the system at one of their
customers’ homes was indicating a breech.
This is considered an urgent call for two reasons: the first is that the
residents may be on-site and under threat from an intruder; the second is that
it is considered a crime in progress and affords the responding Deputies the
opportunity to apprehend a criminal in the act.
Take my word for it, it’s the kind of call Deputies get all dressed up
in their uniforms for.
In this era, residential alarm systems were somewhat rare
and often unreliable. But we didn’t let
that dampen out enthusiasm. En route, we
discussed our tactical approach. As I
was not a sworn peace officer, I was unarmed.
So my Deputy instructed me to make use of the shot gun (each car was
equipped with a shortened shot gun) while he would rely on his service
revolver. The nature of this call would result
in cover units being dispatched, but the distance they need travel to assist us
would almost guarantee that what ever action ensued would be concluded by the
time they arrived.
The particular residential area where our call took us was
very common in the semi-rural areas of San Diego County during the 1970s. As was often the case, the address of the
residence was on a public road, while the residence itself was accessed via a
private, commonly maintained road that serviced several lots that may run five
or six deep from the public roadway. The
trick of locating the correct residence was to find the gang of mailboxes at
the intersection of the public and private road and then explore the maze of
driveways until the target was located.
We did not handle the trick very well.
The Deputy decided to park the patrol car at the mailboxes
and have us scamper up the ice-plant covered slope to the yard of the first home,
giving us the element of surprise by not announcing our arrival via police car. Upon achieving the top of the bank, we
encountered a family lounging by their pool in their best effort to shake off
the August heat. We were taken by
surprise. They seemed nonplussed. Without prompting, they indicated that their neighbor
experienced false alarms on occasion and pointed out the house. A quick check of the address confirmed it to
be the source of the alarm. Furthermore, the sunbathers informed us that they
had been at poolside for some time and had seen no unfamiliar persons lurking
about.
Wind completely knocked out of our super-cop sails, we decided
to retrieve the patrol car and drive to the subject house. Just to err on the side of caution, I
retained possession of the shotgun as we approached the house. A ring of the doorbell prompted no response
from within. The Deputy instructed me to
remain where I could watch the front of the house while he checked the back for
signs of forced entry. He found a gate
in the fence separating the front yard from back and disappeared around the
side of the house.
After a few moments I realized I was hearing that sound so
peculiar to a police officer running.
There is something about the gun belt and assorted accoutrements squeaking
as his weight shifts from foot to foot with each step, in harmonic accord with
beat of boot soles on a grassy surface that is unmistakable to the
initiated. And my young ears could
discern that he was coming my way. I
raised the Remington expecting to encounter some miscreant fleeing my partner’s
pursuit. To my surprise, the first
personage to appear was my partner. I
was somewhat stunned at this unusual sight.
I thought to myself, “What would make a Deputy Sheriff run in apparent flight?”
Then I saw the German Sheppard round the corner. My mind raced forward to the inquiry that
would be held to determine the fate of the Sheriff’s Cadet who had dispatched
the faithful family pet. To my salvation,
the Deputy deftly reached out as he cleared the gate and pulled it closed
behind him, trapping the speeding pooch in the back yard. That’s when Fido began to bark. I learned two valuable lessons from this experience. Dogs do not bark when seriously closing on
their prey. And we run because something
with teeth is chasing us. 
