This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
I don't know if I said please, but I asked all three of them, "Look, sit over here on the curb. We're going to talk about this," because they were all standing up.
One dude took his ass over and sat down on the curb. He did exactly what I said. The other two started mouthing off. They kept talking shit telling me I didn't have jurisdiction to do anything with them.
I know damn well that in the parking lot of a dorm room on campus with statewide jurisdiction, a police officer can make an arrest. They thought I was security, they later said. They found out I was not.
They started talking shit to me.
I said, "All right, you're under arrest. Turn around and put your hands behind your back."
They said, "Oh, no, no, no, no. We're not doing that right now."
I said, "Oh, we're not doing that right now? Okay."
I rarely asked for help on the radio, but on this particular night, I called up.
I said, "I could use a little assistance over here for this call in the parking lot at the dorm."
Five officers arrived.
I usually would talk to people like a regular person. I used my charisma on people and I generally did not need to get into stuff, but it wasn't working in this particular instance.
So there were like five officers that just swarmed over there and all of a sudden these dudes were shitting their pants.
"Oh, we fucked up. We're so sorry."
I said, "No, no, no, boys. No, no, no. You see, now you're going to jail all that dumb shit talking. Now you're going to jail."
They were setting off fireworks. They didn't live in the dorm. They were just visiting someone.
But the dude who shut his mouth and sat on the curb got nothing.
So, that's the difference between going to jail and not sometimes. Do what you are told, sit your ass down and you might not get in trouble.
The two mouthy dudes were from Charleston.
I believe it was right after the election in 2008, I had a court date with them. I called up the court and asked for some kind of continuance because I was sick or some bullshit.
In reality, I just wanted to stay out and drink, and get hammered all night, which is what I did, and I was not available to show up to court at 9 a.m.
Those guys drove all the way up from Charleston to Columbia and the court case got continued.
I guess they didn't see when it got continued next, and the next time the court case was called they were not there. They got tried in absence, found
guilty, then warrants were issued for their arrest for not showing up to court.
Again, this is a beautiful criminal justice system.
This is how defense attorneys also work basically to try to get the case continued as many times as possible. I was on the receiving end of that from defense attorneys a bunch of times.
"Continued."
A lot of officers just didn't even do DUIs because it was guaranteed if the offender got an attorney, it was almost certain you were going to get a bunch of these cases continued.
I don't know how the attorneys know how to work it, but they know how to get a case continued, at least when I was there before.
If you had a DUI, it was probably like a 50 to 75% chance it would be continued if they got an attorney, and maybe even if it was the first time it would be like a 80 to 90% chance. You still had to show up to court usually though. They would not let you know.
What I tried to do is schedule all my court dates at once. I would find the traffic court date, and get everyone in that same date. But if you had something like disorderly conduct, it wasn't Traffic Court, then you had to go to Magistrate Court, and then that was a separate thing.
So, I just had the one court case and got it continued. It was totally unfair to them since they drove up, and they didn't get any notice. It was continued because I requested the continuance totally at the last minute after not realizing I had scheduled the court date right after the election and I was trying to go out and drink with my friends that night.
Yep, that's criminal justice in reality for you, the ugly reality of the
system.
Is there anything else you might like to hear? Any other stories?
I think I've gotten into most of the interesting ones. Oh, here we go.
Here's a good one I almost missed.
One day we got a call at the Counseling Center that there was a crazy guy in there who was schizo or whatever. He would not leave the office and the counselor was afraid for his safety.
So, we went over there.
Sergeant came over there with me and a female officer who was probably about 45.
We went over there and at the time everything was cool. The counselor was still talking to the guy. The sergeant didn't think there was a problem.
Sarge wanted to leave and I said, "No, no, no, Sarge."
Sarge was built and he had been a police officer for like 20 years. He was probably 300 pounds, he had tons of muscle, he was very strong and in pretty good shape. He worked out a lot.
He was exactly who you wanted to get into a wrestling match with and you would prefer to have him on your team. You would not want to be on the other side of his wrestling match.
He said, “No. It is cool. I am going."
I said, "No, no, no, no, Sarge. You don't understand. He is mental."
The mental ones are the least willing to negotiate. The mental ones don't give a shit about what you have to say. The mental ones, you have to be there and wrestle them most of the time.
I told him, "I know this from working at the Department of Mental Health. The mental ones do not reason. You've got to just go hands-on with them. Please stay around for a minute and see how this goes as we had never got a call like this."
This dude was a white guy talking about wanting to die burning the
Confederate flag on the State Capitol.
This was one of the issues I had encountered a lot in South Carolina.
Another time I will talk about what I would call race confusion, where there is this like die hard cause for which it seems a little out of place with the particular race, but it makes sense in a past life context.
But anyway, this was a white guy that was just incredibly passionate against, kind of like I was earlier in my life actually, about getting rid of hatred, but ironically, like being a martyr for it.
He was talking a bunch of crazy stuff he planned on doing, lots of dying and stuff like that, so the counselor said, "Look, he needs to go to a mental health facility."
We asked him, "Hey, we'd like to give you a ride over to a mental health facility."
He said, "No, no, no, no. I'm not going anywhere. You guys aren't taking me anywhere."
I think what we were doing is called a Baker Act or something in Florida,
and it's like a psychologically based commitment.
He said, "No, no, no. You guys aren't taking me anywhere."
The sergeant then locked the door. I'm glad he stayed.
He said, "Young man, you need to come with us and we're going to take you to the mental health facility."
The guy then put his hands up and said, "You aren't taking me anywhere right now. I'm walking out of here."
The sergeant said, "No, you're not. You're coming with us."
The guy said, "Oh, yeah?"
So the sergeant gave me a little nod because I was all about positioning.
They taught us that in the police academy and that stuck with me.
You don't stand there and fight someone fairly. You play unfair, and one of the most unfair plays to play is you hit people in the legs, take the balance out, and then you can get on top of them.
Now, if that doesn't go well, you might be in for an ass beating, but my basic tactic was to get in position behind someone and legs are way stronger than arms.
My move was to kick the shit out of you. If I was going to hit you, the first thing I was going to do to you was kick the shit out of you as hard as I possibly could, take your balance out, distract you, and then I was going to get my full body weight on you.
So that's exactly what I did to this kid.
I was right behind him and I grabbed his shoulders. I put with my whole body, I kneed him right in the pressure point in the back, right on the leg and threw him down on the ground.
This was a big boy like 6'2, muscular and well built. I hit him in the back.
He went back, Sergeant and I got on top of him. He went down to the ground.
This guy was so strong that with me and the sergeant on top of him, that's probably damn near 500 pounds of police officers with the equipment and everything.
This dude stood up again and threw both of us off his back. This is why I told the sergeant to stay because me and that female officer would have got our asses whooped by this one guy, or we would have had to use something like a taser or baton, which required a lot more paperwork than just a few little hands on.
I don't know what Sarge did to this kid. I did not see exactly. I think he karate chopped his ass in the neck. I think that's what he did because this kid folded like a shitty hand in poker.
He folded like an 8-2 in poker. "Jerry, that metaphor sucks." He folded like a lawn chair.
There you go.
You got to work into it sometimes.
This kid folded like a cheap ass lawn chair.
As soon as he stood up and Sarge realized he had gotten thrown off the
kid's back, Sarge cocked back and crushed this kid right in the neck with the karate chop.
The kid just flopped down like a lawn chair.
We handcuffed him and got him in the car. Then, he was telling me all about these white racist things, that he was going to take down all this and he was going to get shot burning the Confederate flag on the State Capitol.
I thought, "This kid is so full of bullshit right now. I can't even stand it,"
and it was funny.
I ended up having kind of a little more person to person talk with him by the time we got to the mental health facility, seeing him more like a person. He didn't have any lasting blows, which was nice, because Sarge chopped the shit out of him and I kneed the shit out of him. He probably had some bruises, but we didn't have to fill out any paperwork, which was nice.
If you hit someone with a baton, sprayed them with the pepper spray, shot them with a taser, and sure as hell if you shot them with the gun, you had to do a ton of paperwork and all that, but Sarge and I managed to get out of there with no extra paperwork, which was nice.
It was all about how much paperwork you were trying to do because we hated doing paperwork. If you want to empathize with a police officer, realize most officers want to do the least paperwork possible. In any way you can help them out with that can work in your favor.
So we drove this dude and dropped him off at the mental health facility. I didn't see him again.
This guy though has reminded me of another guy.
This dude, in this second case I’m about to share with you, was a
massive black guy like 6'5. He was called as a suspicious person for stealing food from the Russell House.
So he was just taking food and not paying for it. We caught up with him downstairs.
Now, this guy was talking about how the Aryan Supremacy Movement
was working through him, that they were summoning him to assist.
At the time, I thought this sounded like the dumbest shit in the world. I said, "First of all because you are black there's no way the Aryan
Supremacy Movement is trying to work with you. And second of all, no one is talking to you in your head. You're just full of shit."
But now, I have some more empathy with the dude, I'm not saying that is the likelihood, but maybe he was talking about how the Aryan Supremacy Movement was trying to work with him.
This is why I was talking about racial confusion because these two guys seemed like opposites. The white guy should have been talking about the Aryan Supremacy Movement stuff and this black guy should have been talking about burning the Confederate flag, but at the time, it seemed totally backward.
This black guy must have been out of his mind for thinking about the Aryan Supremacy Movement, that he was trying to help them or work with them or they were trying to recruit him or something like that.
He was talking all kinds of gibberish and shit. They brought me down a receipt of all the stuff they said he had stolen, and it was $120 worth of food.
I said, "How many fucking Whoppers did this guy have? Are you
serious?"
It was like six or eight Whoppers at Big Fries.
I guess he had been just stealing his ass off and just eating food there for hours, and they finally called the police on him.
I thought, "All right, this is his seventh Whopper or whatever the hell."
They wrote up a $120 or something receipt of food this guy had stolen.
I said, "You've got to be shitting me. How did this guy eat so much food?" because he did hardly have any of the food left by the time we got there.
He was compliant though because Sarge was there.
Sarge laid it down for him.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.