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.
"Can we get a police story?"
There are some redeeming qualities here. When I was at work, I tried to be protecting and serving as much as I could.
The last night of my night shift I was sitting at a spot where I knew people were drunk driving, where there was a good stop sign and where I could put my patrol car in a good spot to pull people over.
The last night of my night shift, a guy came blowing through a stop sign right in front of a pickup truck.
I can't believe still they didn't wreck.
The pickup truck was almost at the stop sign. This guy in a four-door sedan came blasting through the stop sign and hooked a right on three wheels practically, if not actually, and the pickup truck put his hand up, got
so mad and was raving in his truck lucky they didn't wreck, and for him I bet he thought, "Damn, and the police were there."
When he was telling the story he said, "I almost wrecked and the police were there that time."
I was right on top of that shit. I hit my blue lights and I was all over that guy right as soon as it happened. This literally happened a few feet away from me and as soon as I saw it, blue lights on, I was chasing this guy.
I pulled him over a few blocks down. He seemed pretty drunk, but he was with it well enough that I was thinking, "We need to get him off the streets, but I'm not sure if I can get a DUI good on him."
I had arrested six people for DUIs by this point, even though they didn't exactly encourage that at the time. They were mostly having us sit in our garages and not do anything, but I decided I was going to be out here and do something useful while I was at work. I was going to push the limit.
I actually was a certified Breathalyzer officer and I made the call on this guy as I thought, "I'm not sure if I definitely can get a DUI on him. He probably would get out of it. I'm certain I can arrest him and take him to jail for reckless driving right now and I have a real conversation with him."
I said, "Look, you need to get off the street tonight. You're drunk. You seem drunk. You were driving recklessly. You almost caused an accident. We need to do something about this."
He did the field sobriety test and he did all right on them and I thought,
"All right, this isn't going to look good for court if he does pretty well."
I said, "All right, we need to take you to jail. Look, I'll do this for you. I'm going to take you to jail tonight for reckless driving. You're going to be really nice and not cause any trouble, and then I won't give you a DUI tonight.
How about that?"
He said, "Okay."
He got in the car, I took him to jail for reckless driving and he was off the street. So, I did actually do some shit that was helpful too in the middle of all this drama.
I took that drunk driver or at least a reckless driver. He said he was on his phone and didn't see the stop sign, which I believe. That's what it looked like and I asked, "Did you see that other car you almost hit?"
He said, "Oh, yeah. I didn't mean for that to happen. My bad," or something like that.
So, I arrested him, took him to jail for reckless driving. He spent the night in and didn't hurt anyone. That was my last night shift at USCPD.
Now, there is a little something that I forgot to mention. We had a little bit of drama at work right before the night shift ended. You see, my talking had gotten a little bit out of hand and a couple of nights before this, when I was off duty, I ended up going over and hanging out with a different dispatcher at her house.
Actually, the other one whom the sergeant could have put me in the office with that night, but didn't. I ended up going to hang out with her and I ended up telling her all about the thing I had with the dispatcher, and then she proceeded to tell me how they actually made out and everything, and they got pictures and they were having all these parties hanging out together. I never heard the end of this shit and I was really mad and crazy.
So, I dropped it all on her. By now I had told damn near everyone. I told my sergeant that I had two girls I didn't know if they were going to be pregnant at the same time. I had all kinds of good drama and shit. I was
telling it to everyone by this point and it still hadn't got all the way around though.
Most people had been keeping their mouths shut pretty well, which was impressive. I went and brought it all in. The next day was Friday when we were starting my last weekend night shift. The arrest I made was on my last night shift, which was Thursday.
So, the weekend before this, I brought this into work and right before this, that morning, I had the dispatcher over to my house. I was hoping that if I could talk things out with her, I was having this whole fantasy that we will have sex and get back together.
She had to go to the tire shop or something, and then she came over to my house when I had a hangover after being up and drunk driving all over, and doing all this drama with a different dispatcher.
On that Friday morning, before I had to go to work, it was probably like 1:00 p.m. or something, then the dispatcher came over to my house and we watched an episode of "Two and a Half Men" and I was thinking that we would just get right back into things because we had been kind of talking off and on through the month.
I thought, "Okay, she's here. She obviously wants to do something."
I didn't realize that she probably wanted me to apologize, and then promise to behave well and ask her to be my girlfriend.
I wasn't very good at thinking what she might want. I was thinking all about what I wanted. What I wanted was to have some sex because on that last couple of days I hadn't had any sex since that little thing with the security guard a week or two before.
So, I was thinking we were going to have sex.
I actually gave the dispatcher a kiss on the lips, but she was totally cold and didn't respond, and then I got all pissed off. I didn't know what to do and then she left.
I thought, "Oh, my God. I need to take this into work. I can't be on night shift with her anymore. I need to ask them to put me on a different shift from her."
It was like the other officer who had the thing with her, they moved her to the shift I was on so that the two of them would be separated.
I wanted the same treatment, but the problem was that there wasn't all that drama that everyone knew about from her and him. No one in the command staff at least was aware that this had been going on.
So, I went in to work on that Friday afternoon. I started telling my sergeant this stuff. The problem was that I tried to make it out like it had been a thing between the dispatchers. I tried to manipulate stuff that the dispatchers were having issues with each other and that they needed to be moved, and that way I minimized my involvement in it.
Well, that backfired because the command staff got involved and immediately went in and talked with both dispatchers, and they both banded together, dimmed me out and said that I was the problem, which seems pretty reasonable looking back.
After that, they got me and sat me down, and said, "Jerry, we think you've been harassing these dispatchers. We don't want you to talk with these dispatchers anymore. In fact, we're ordering you not to talk with either of these dispatchers anymore and we're not changing your shift. We think you can continue working with them."
I said, "Are you fucking kidding me? I need to be off shift. I don't want to work with these two anymore. I don't want to hear them or see them."
They said, "Jerry, you need to be professional."
I said, "Of course. My man. My respect."
They asked, "Jerry, can you have a professional relationship with them?"
I responded, "Well, sure. Of course, I can. Yeah, I can have a professional relationship with them. No big deal. All right, I can do that."
I signed something agreeing that I would keep a strictly professional relationship, which means I would not call the dispatchers off duty or see them while I was off duty, and anything at work would be kept strictly professional.
Now, just a week or so after making that agreement, on the last day of night shift, I was at home drinking after a night shift, which I didn't normally do, but I was going all out in this period.
I started drinking as soon as I got off work about 8:00 a.m. after that last arrest. I started drinking and playing, "Call of Duty: World At War."
I got my vodka, my diet Dr. Thunder and by 1:00 in the afternoon I was drunk and lonely.
Guess who I gave a call? The dispatcher.
I called her up, "How are you doing?"
She was in bed. She was going to work something that night and she was trying to sleep. She had just gotten off work. We had a nice pleasant conversation, nothing out of the ordinary. I hang up, and didn't think
anything of it.
We started day shift and I was having some girls I was dating online.
The girls were getting crazy. I had two dates in one night and I was starting to hang out with my friends because on day shift it was easier for me to hang out with them.
I was going to things like, it's not kayaking, but tubing, where you go down the river and drink.
Life was starting to return to normal, and yet I had this little sense of unease about things too. I had this dark, sick fear in the back of my mind about what I might do if they ever fired me. My mind would go to violent, catastrophic, homicidal places, and to suicidal ones too. I'm not going to give those fantasies any detail, because they horrify me now. What I'll say is that they were a measure of how sick my mind had become in active addiction, and of how much pain and self-hatred I was carrying. Thank God I never acted on any of it.
Going into the final day shift, I didn't realize that I was just getting into this illusion that things were going back to normal.
I was starting to get over the dispatcher a little bit. I was dating several girls at the time trying to get with them, including a girl, another officer I met at court, the one in Charlotte, and just going to work on every dating site I could, going to work trying to meet every girl I could at work.
I kept it professional with the dispatcher most of the day shift until there was another little drunken day where I gave her a call just a week before my final shift.
I thought she initially hadn't reported that first one or maybe she had, but then a week after that call or so, was my last day in law enforcement.
You may say, "Thank God."
It was September 9, 2009.
I remember getting up that morning putting on my bulletproof vest about 5:00 in the morning. Two days before that I had gone tubing with my friends down the Broad River. I had gotten a sunburn on my belly from rubbing it. I was the designated driver that day. I had probably had five or six beers in a
couple of shots while we were tubing. I got home. On the Breathalyzer, I was .06 or something, which was slightly below the legal limit.
I said, "Yes, see. That's how I roll."
Both of my friends were over the legal limit and I had driven them home and they hung out with me for a while to let their blood alcohol go down, and they continued on with their day.
I drove up to Charlotte that night to see a girl I was dating there. She had come down to Columbia a couple of times. We spent the evening together, and it was just another way I was distracting myself from the wreckage of my life.
After that, I had a pretty relaxing Tuesday, came back, and then was ready for work on Wednesday.
I had put my vest on with my sunburn over it, got to work actually early before it was even light out, feeling pretty good about myself.
I went to my usual breakfast that day, did my usual patrols around campus. I responded to a call at maybe four in the afternoon, maybe a little earlier. There was a teacher or a professor who reported a suspicious person walking around the building.
A lot of officers got calls like that. We would just go take the report, do kind of a cursory walk through the first floor or something, and leave because usually by the time you got that report, the person would have already left. I don't know if they said, "went 10-8" or something like that.
Usually by the time you got a call like that, you weren't going to find the person. They had already left and walked out and were gone.
For some reason, I stuck around.
I said, "I'm going to search this whole building just to see if he's here."
I went the extra mile like I often did at work to try to do a good job. I tried really hard at work to be a good officer because I felt like a complete scumbag the rest of the time. I walked through the rest of the building and I found the guy on the first floor exactly matching the description. He talked to me for a bit.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.