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.
He moaned a little bit, but we walked him out. I don't remember whether we arrested him or not, but we did humiliate him in front of the whole stands and the people might have even clapped or something like that.
We were there to take him out of the stands like heroic police officers saving the crowd from a drunk opposing team fan.
That was kind of an ordinary day working the football games. You would get calls about people smoking.
A lot of the calls, I felt like, "That's bullshit. I'll go up there and look around and act like I did something."
You would get calls of like people with liquor. I didn't take a lot of this stuff too seriously. To me, if you were disturbing other people I was going to take that seriously and if it was something overt that was easy to see, then I was going to get right in the middle of it.
But some people were just like trifling and called stuff in like, "I'm not getting in the middle of that. I'm not doing paperwork over this little of a call."
So if people were smoking, I usually went pretty easy on it, but it depended on the day. One night, I was in a pissed off mood and I said, "I'm going to write some motherfuckers traffic tickets. That's how I'm going to feel better."
There was a "No turn on red" sign, and I was ready for a "No turn on
red" tickets.
You can turn right on red, but if it says, "No turn on red," that means you cannot.
So, I sat two of these "No turn on red" lights and I wrote two different college students tickets for hundreds of dollars for illegally making a right turn on a red light where prohibited.
Both of them cried and felt bad about it.
They knew I was just trifling. I was just looking to make someone's night shitty and my sergeant even called me out.
He said, "Why are you writing these kids tickets for no turns on red tonight?"
I said, "Motherfuckers need to stop."
I don't know if I said it like this, but this is what I thought, "Motherfuckers need to stop disregarding those traffic control devices. They need to start respecting the no turns on reds."
But other nights I would watch people turn right on red all night at those signs and not do anything.
That's what sucks about policing, it is so arbitrary sometimes, even if you try to be fair most of the time.
I would sit stop signs some nights and write people tickets for stop signs.
One day I was riding my bike on bike patrol and I was so awkward. They first put me on bike patrol, one of the first things that happened was I ran into a telephone pole. It had probably been 10 plus years since I had ridden a bike and they just threw me on a bike with hardly any training.
I ran into a telephone pole and I just literally learned on the job in uniform.
You catch your damn pants on the bike and get them caught in there.
One day, I saw other officers like hopping up curves and stuff. I tried to hop up a big ass curb, like six or eight inches high straight up. I ran smack, bam!
I ran smack into the curb and by some miracle, I did not hit my balls or hurt myself. My ass flew straight off the bike. I landed on both feet and my balls were hanging like right and the bar went left. By some miracle, I did not hurt myself bad. The bike just stopped too. As soon as I hit the curb, the bike just stopped and I flew straight off of it.
"Damn, Jerry. Your career sucks. No wonder you're not a police officer."
I've got a few stories.
If you needed to go hands-on, I used to love that. Most of the hands-on we did was for trespassing and it was homeless people who would try to hang out on campus.
A lot of the students, a lot of the parents and a lot of the faculty, hated having homeless people on campus. We would get lots of calls about what we would say a suspicious person.
When you trespass someone that's saying, "Look, please don't come around here anymore."
The problem with a campus like USC is, that's a huge place to trespass someone. Looking back on it, I can see, especially if you are homeless around a huge college campus, that it's not very clear what is on campus and what is not.
I didn't give a shit about that at the time though. I was on the side of anyone who complained about someone homeless.
"I'm coming there to kick their ass out."
I remembered I hated all the homeless people on campus when I was a student and I said, "I've got the chance to do something about this. I'm going to clear every homeless person off of campus that I can find."
One call, we got a guy that there was a suspicious person in the bookstore that was stealing books. We went in, and there was a guy out front with a backpack and you would often get a description.
A typical one would be a "Bravo - Mike," which is the letters for a black man who may be like 40 years old, maybe about five feet six inches or so, and he would have a green book bag, red pants or whatever.
You would get a description like that.
So we went to the store and we found this guy who appeared to be in the bookstore trying to shoplift, and the call said that he had taken a few books and put them in his bag.
We asked him to take a look at his bag and I don't remember even what he said. I guess he already had a trespass notice or something for campus. We gave him his ID so he had been trespassed.
Therefore, I had the ability to arrest him for being in the bookstore even though he had been told not to be in the bookstore.
I said, "Okay, sir. You're under arrest. Please place your hands behind your back."
He said, "Well, let's just talk about this for a minute."
If I ever told you that you were under arrest and you did not do immediately what I told you, my thought was, "I'm clear to hit first right here and if someone's going to get hit, I'd rather be the one that hits first because you got that element of surprise, that sneak attack. If you're going to get into a physical altercation, I'm trying to win. I'm not trying to be on the losing end of a physical altercation."
So this guy started trying to negotiate. He started trying to debate with me as to whether he was under arrest.
I was right there, I got myself in position and said, "Sir, will you please place your hands behind your back?"
He said, "No, no, no. You guys are getting this all wrong."
So, I grabbed one hand and I kneed him in the back. He flexed back, I grabbed his shoulders, I stuffed his face and I threw my whole body on top of him. I stuffed him in the mulch right in front of the Russell House, right in front of a bunch of students and potentially parents and faculty walking by.
I felt so proud of myself for doing that. I was talking to people about that. I would be off duty and say, "Yeah, I stuffed this motherfucker's face in the mulch right in front of everybody on campus."
I used to feel so good about that, and then we searched his backpack and we found a couple of liters of Absolut Vodka that the sergeant had us pour down the drain.
I was sitting there thinking, "This is the biggest bullshit. Why can't I just take that home? There is still a seal on it. He probably shoplifted it. He didn't have a receipt for it or anything. There's perfectly good vodka here. Why can't we just take this home with us?"
We did not get to take it home with us, but he did go to jail for
trespassing.
Another day, there was a call of a suspicious man hanging out in front of, I think it was wherever they do art up on the north side of campus.
There was a suspicious man hanging out in front of campus.
This dude was sitting there eating straight out of a can. This was a big tall guy too. He was a rough-looking white guy with maybe a beard. He was sitting right out in front eating. It looked like he was eating with kind of like a table knife out of a can of food and he was totally uncooperative.
He would not provide an ID and he was not interested in shit.
I thought, "All right, this guy has a knife. Even though it's probably not sharp, it can potentially stab."
I called my friend over, the dude I was telling you about working the football game together. We were hard. We were hard together.
You can interpret it like you want.
He came over. He came right up. He whipped the baton out as soon as he walked over and came up looking really hard. This guy stood up just to try to confront us and my friend kicked the shit out of him in the back of the leg.
Then, as soon as he kicked him in the back of the leg, the guy's balance came off, I hopped on the left side and he hopped on the right side, and we stuffed his face down into the concrete.
All of this guy just smacked right on the sidewalk. He went down hard too. I don't know how, but he must have been tough from living on the street. If I had fallen like that I would probably have broken something.
This guy took a hard fall with both of us on top of him, and didn't even complain about it. He didn't even hardly have any bruises to show over it.
It turned out, he had been trespassed from campus, we arrested him and took him to jail. He had a bunch of vanilla extract in his pockets and was drunk, which I didn't understand at the time.
Now, as an alcoholic, I realize that vanilla extract has a lot of alcohol in it and if you just go in and shoplift a little bit, you can get yourself drunk off the vanilla extract at the grocery store.
Apparently, that's what he had done. He had gotten drunk off the vanilla extract at the grocery store and I believe he had shoplifted the vanilla extract and the can of food. He was eating and instead of coming at him with some love and tolerance, my friend and I, we came out with some ass beating and he went off to jail then.
Another day, there was a guy walking across campus and I will need to rewind for a little bit.
A few months, maybe a month or so before this, I was out at the bar one night at the Flying Saucer. There was what at the time I would call a bum trying to park cars and hustle people in the parking lot.
Being big bad Po-Po, I hopped out of my car and I told this guy, "Get the fuck out of this parking lot right now. You don't belong here. You're hustling people. Get the fuck out of here right now."
This guy started trying to talk back, but he hauled ass too, as he saw I was not playing. He walked right out of the parking lot.
After three beers, I went back out to check and see if he was there.
I thought, "I bet that dumb son of a bitch came back to the parking lot."
Sure enough, he was back in the parking lot hustling and I went to get him again, except this time I got my gun because he had put his hand in his pocket before, and I needed my gun.
I said, "You dumb motherfucker. I told you once. You are going to fucking get it if I see you again."
So, he got out of the parking lot.
Fast forward a month later, and I see old dude walking through a campus parking lot.
Now, I realize this is trifling on my part because it was just a campus parking lot. There was no way for him to really say that it was University property.
It was 5:30 too and our usual Code of Conduct, informally but very clearly communicated that you don't arrest people for dumb shit around shift change because this would involve extra paperwork, people potentially getting off work late, which was either overtime or comp time that they needed to get off.
If you want to commit a crime, a great time to do it is shift change. Most police departments do not want to arrest someone right around shift change.
Only the hardest officers with a hair up their ass, and for the most grievous offenses, of course, will usually get into something like that.
So, it was 5:30.
We got an hour till shift change and it took at least an hour to take somebody to jail.
My friend got a call, the same one I told the drinking story where we
went out to the bar and the strip club, and he got the free sex from the stripper.
He came out on a call.
He was fairly new, so I came out here to help out. I recognized the dude.
I said, "There you are motherfucker. I told you I was going to get your ass. You're on my campus. You’re fucking going to jail today."
I added, "I know you're trespassed from this campus."
Sure enough, he had trespassed from the campus and we found he had got a little tiny knife on him too, which was what he was putting his hand in his pocket for, while he was out at the bar with me that night.
I looked at him.
I don't think he remembered me, but I remembered him.
I said, "You dumb motherfucker. I told you I was going to get your ass. I got you now."
The sergeant got pissed because from his point of view, this was a bullshit arrest.
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