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.
"Oh, thank God, Jerry. You're going to give us some actual policing stories here."
Yes.
Now we will get into some of the real police stories from USCPD. Fifteen chapters in and you are finally getting some real policing stories. You are welcome.
Let's just do these in the order I remember them. Let's go.
One night, I was driving down the street at four in the morning in my USCPD patrol car. I was going eastbound on Blossom Street and I was about to make a right south onto Assembly.
A dude did the red light like a stop sign turning left from Assembly onto
Blossom and just kind of flew through it.
I said, "All right. Let's go. Let's do a traffic stop."
I did a quick U-turn and it probably was a mistake to do it so fast because I guess he saw I had a USCPD car. I went to get behind him and threw the blue lights on.
Now, while almost everyone I had ever done this with stopped the car, this dude sped up.
I said, "Oh, shit."
Here's what I said.
I said something like this. I don't remember my call sign. I was "Tango" at Mental Health. I might have been like "Bravo 402" or something at USCPD.
So, how about this?
"Bravo 402, I am…"
What the hell the traffic stop was? 1048?
I don't remember what the hell the traffic stop was.
I was doing a traffic stop and I was trying to read the license plate out. I said something like "Black Lexus license plate -- 10-0."
All of a sudden, I just fucking screamed "10-0," which meant "Chase"
because this dude was speeding up.
As soon as he saw me throwing the blue lights on, he floored it. I said, "All right, motherfucker."
I floored it and I was keeping up with this car really easy although he got ahead when he first floored it, but I floored and I was catching up to him.
He slid around the turn right, going right from Blossom Street up on Huger Street.
He slid into that shit and I was going right behind him. He got a little distance, but I floored it. I was right on his ass, right when I yelled "10-0,"
and he was going full pedal to the metal, gas to the floor.
He went left on to Gervais. I went left onto Gervais and my sergeant said to stop, to let him go.
I was so mad.
I said, "No, this the first good shit I'm going to get into. You got to be shitting me."
My adrenaline was rushing so fast and the sergeant told me to let him go.
I said, "What? This motherfucker sped up and drove away, and we're going to let him go? This is total bullshit. This is hypocrisy. That's bullshit. You got to be kidding me."
Sergeant said, "Well, that was going off campus. We don't need to be getting into that stuff. That's off campus. He's way off campus by this point."
I said, "That's fucking bullshit. This guy just gets to put on blue lights and drive away."
He said, "You didn't have control of that situation. Did you hear how you were on the radio?"
I said, "Yeah. It was the first time I had a chance for a car chase. I was a little excited."
He said, "No, no. Banfield, we don't need to be chasing cars here tonight."
I felt like, "Lame motherfucker. Why even bother trying to pull anyone over? Everyone should just know this. USCPD, you can just drive the fuck off."
Now, I'm not recommending to do that.
I'm not saying to get stupid and just drive off if you think it's USCPD
pulling you over.
I'm not saying to do that.
But on this particular night for this dude, it worked and I had some resentment for a while like, "This guy got away from me. This guy actually just drove off."
I'm assuming it was a guy. I guess it could have been a woman or it could have been a little girl for all I know.
Who knows?
I hope they have got a good story.
They are probably saying to their friends, "Yeah man. We were downtown and it was like 4 a.m. I saw this USCPD officer, I turned left on a red and he started pulling me over. I was like, fuck you pig. I floored that shit and he quit. He didn't even want to fuck with me. He quit."
He might feel like, "That little campus Po, he didn't even want to fuck with me. He quit chasing me. I got away from that dumb cop."
That's probably what he is saying.
I would love to shake the dude's hand today and say, "Yeah, I ran from you fool."
I would be like, "Oh, nice. I would have run from me too."
It was 2008 to 2009 while I was at USCPD, and one of the things that drove me crazy, there was this huge budget panic and recession, and all
this ridiculous financial fear.
We are in an abundant universe with an infinite God, infinite space, galaxies, and we are in a recession.
Okay.
There are billions, trillions of dollars out there, but somehow our money is scarce, jobs are scarce.
It's just a story people are telling. It's not real.
Anyway, at the university, they made it real.
You got a certain number of miles every night. If you were on bike patrol you only got like 10 miles, you could drive for a whole night, which is limited when you are a police officer and you are trying to do some proper patrol and security checks.
First, when we got on night shift, we would go around and get the keys.
We would get the keys to the whole university campus. We could unlock almost any door on campus and go in almost any building.
Officers had the keys to almost everything on campus, and looking back, the university trusted people with far more than they realized. With how unstable I was on my crazy nights, that level of trust scares me now.
I thought, "Man, they trust me with everything. They don't know this shit is crazy."
Thank God, I'm a safe person today.
That's why I used to think, "Man, you can't trust me with the keys to
everything like this. I'm crazy."
I'm grateful today that I'm here with this story to tell instead of a different one.
So, I got the keys first thing on shift, all of us did. We would go around and do some security checks. We locked up all the doors on campus and once we did that, then we would be free to patrol most of the rest of the night and respond to calls.
Now, they would give us, if you were on bike patrol and you were lucky enough to get a car and not just a fucking bicycle, you would get a patrol car and they would allow you to drive 10 miles.
Let me tell you how far 10 miles go.
10 miles go up and down campus like twice.
So, if you get a call, you need to drive to somewhere that's probably a couple of miles and you would have to go back to the station to do paperwork, and that's another mile or two.
By 1 a.m. you have done damn near nothing and you are at almost 10 miles. You are looking at having a sergeant up your ass for having gone over the miles.
If you went over the mileage, the punishment was to stick you on bike patrol and if you consistently went over the mileage, you could even get disciplined for disobeying orders.
If you were on proper patrol, not having just a bicycle or a car with a bike rack, you would get something like 20 to 40 miles, and you had to respond to all the far-out calls too.
So, if you got a call to the football stadium for a burglary alarm that was
5 or 10 miles you needed to eat. That might be a little exaggeration, but it used up a significant percentage of your miles to go to that, and you needed to do a security check every night.
Therefore, just your security checks alone might be 5 or 10 miles. How are you going to police all night with hardly any miles to drive?
One of the only ways you could get extra miles was taking someone to jail.
There was at least one night, I just took someone to jail so I could go to
Burger King.
I'm not proud of it, but that's the truth.
There was a bum, I say "a bum" because that's how I used to talk, but I would say today that there was a man who was trying to sleep somewhere.
There was a man trying to sleep on campus who had been trespassed. I came up on him and I was sitting there thinking, "Man, if I arrest this guy I don't have to take any calls for the next hour, or hour and a half."
At the time I had this thing, I felt like, "Fucking bums on campus. I'm going to get all these bastards. We're not going to have any bums."
I remember when I was a student, I hated running into bums on campus.
Again, this is how I used to talk and think, so I'm using the same language like, "Fucking bums on campus."
I used to get scared of them asking me for money.
I said, "I'm the Po-Po now. I'm arresting all these motherfuckers on campus. You will not trespass while I'm on duty."
The dude was trying to sleep at like one in the morning, and I said, "He's got trespassed? Yep. All right. You're coming to fucking jail. Let's go. Get in the car."
At the same time I was thinking, "I can go get some Burger King on the way back from jail. This will be nice. Then, you'll get those extra miles when you get out of jail."
So, I arrested this guy, took him down to jail and I stopped at Burger King on the way back. I got my Burger King, which was nice.
I eat whole plant vegan today, which is funny, you know, thinking about
Burger King now.
I got my Burger King, and that was one of the ways you could get some extra miles.
I loved trying to do DUIs because I realized I might actually be able to save someone's life if I made a DUI arrest.
I know.
I realize the hypocrisy with my drunk ass driving all over town, but I had something in my head that God was looking out for me and I could get away with it, which I guess, looking back is true, but nevertheless.
I was out to arrest people for drunk driving as much as I could.
I'm grateful USCPD even sent me to get certified, so that I could do the entire drunk driving arrest all by myself including the Breathalyzer.
In South Carolina, you needed to get certified to do the Breathalyzer
exam and you had to do it at the jail, which meant a DUI arrest was difficult.
You needed to be certain they were going to blow over the legal limit
before you took them to the jail because they had probably realistically an hour between when you arrested them and when they actually would do the Breathalyzer, which means their blood alcohol could dip significantly .01 or .02 during that time.
If you arrested someone that was .1 or .09, like barely over the limit, they could actually be under the limit by the time you arrested them.
Considering my blood alcohol arrests for the people who blew, there was a dude that blew .22, there was another one that was like .16 or .18.
Everyone I arrested that blew was way over the limit.
If I was not certain you were over the limit, I would let you get a ride home with someone. If you passed the field sobriety tests reasonably well, you could get a ride home with someone or have a different friend who did better on the field sobriety to drive home.
On the nights where you would get a car and you had the really limited mileage, a lot of officers were encouraged to just sit in parking garages and respond to calls.
Yes, I see what an obscene waste to have a certified police officer sitting in a parking garage trying not to see anything happen.
I did that on plenty of nights, but a lot of other nights, I also actually got out there.
There were some officers who just pretty much tried to stay out of anything proactive. They only were officers that would respond to calls. They would almost never proactively go out there and find something. I was usually proactively going out and finding something unless I was talking to my parents or some girl on the phone, listening to music or reading a book.
Most of the time I was out there proactively policing or I would go meet up with officers and bullshit sometimes, but I loved getting out there and getting into the action. USCPD was the first place I felt I got to be a proper police officer because I got a gun, a badge, a patrol car and a ticket book. I could actually go out and make proper arrests.
After being at the Department of Mental Health where that was not something I was able to do on a daily basis, I made use of it at USCPD.
The sergeants encouraged us to minimize our miles and they were not happy generally when we were out there proactively policing. We would get disparaging remarks about how many miles we went. I got lots of threats about getting stuck on bike patrol when I would be out there trying to proactively police.
This is one of the things that changes with the command structure. I've heard that since I left USCPD, the command structure has changed, the atmosphere has changed, and they do a lot of proactive policing.
At the time I was there, it was "park your car in a garage and wait for a call" kind of department, which a lot of people got so bored with and wanted to get into the action. They would quit and go to the city or the county, and take less money to go have some consistent action.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.