A Night on the Beat:

Tough Streets, Mean Hours
in Richmond's Iron Triangle

MEMO from RICHMOND -- I met Taz the drug dog at the beginning of my ride along, which began at 5pm in the parking lot of the Richmond Police Station on 27th Street. Toward the end of the night I realized the cop I had been shadowing all evening was something a canine, too.

Taz was a medium-sized cross-breed with a dark coat and a passion for finding crack cocaine tucked in the cheap siding of abandoned houses. The cop was a 280 pound young white man from Moraga with a passion for traveling and, on this night, proving to a 24 year old graduate student how tough he could be.

Call him "Friday." His nine years on the force showed. He said he no longer cared about doling out minor traffic citations or bothering with the scrawny crack head perched upon a white fire hydrant at the corner of 4th and McDonald. He only cared to deal with the big wigs the troublemakers, not the guys he knew would be back on the street in no time.

We set off to cover his beat -- Richmond's seedy Iron Triangle -- and within a few minutes came across a police officer consorting with a driver on one of the worst intersections in town.

"What the hell is this?" Friday muttered, swinging the car to the side of the road and cutting the ignition. "Stay in the car until I know what this is."

He slid out and slammed the door. Then he turned and called out over his shoulder through the open window: "This is a really, really bad area."

It was nearly 6pm, pitch black already. Three other cop cars were parked nearby. Voices whooped in the shadowy park to my right; a heroin park, Friday told me later. Old people partying. In front of the "99 cent Bargain Mart" on the corner a drug dealer's secondhand man stood watch in a gray sweatshirt and baggy jeans. Friday motioned for me to get out of the car and I did so, crossing the street but staying half a block behind him.

"You'll never find anything on him," Taz's boss, a cop named Donna Forman who had just arrived on the scene, told me. "You could search him day and night and he'll always be clean."

A moment later the man crossed the street and walked right past us.

"Making money tonight?" Forman asked.

"Not while you're here," he responded flatly, pausing for a moment. "When you leave, then I'll be making some."

Forman slowly shook her head of Farah Faucet-like feathered blond hair, suppressing a tired smile.

Next thing I knew we were off to a street known as a hiding place for crack dealers to stash their goods. Forman and Taz met us there and I got my first dose of a drug-sniffing dog at work. Friday actually spotted the first baggie of crack, shoved down a tube attached to a utility pole. We pointed Taz in that direction and he was off like a banshee, scraping and throwing himself on that pole like there were million dollar bills in it.

Forman pulled out the baggie, tossed Taz his toy (which is what he thought he'd been looking for) and praised him.

Then he was off on another search, this time tearing up the flimsy siding alongside an abandoned house and leading us to a much larger bag. Inside this baggie were about 20 of the teeniest zip-lock bags I've ever seen, each with a $10-20 rock inside. I'd never seen crack before. It looked just like the small yellowish sponges artists use in water color painting. Forman said the drug dealers have been dividing their stash more lately so that the cops don't score so big when they track it down.

I asked Forman if she ever had the urge to leave a little something behind for the dealers -- a note saying "gotcha!" or something to that effect. She said that for a while she'd leave "K9 Officer" business cards in place of the recovered drugs. Then she found out that Taz had a price on his head and she quickly halted that practice.

It was pretty creepy hunting around the houses on that street for drugs. Every time a car drove by I assumed would-be drug buyers were inside, and imagined them armed with sawed-off shotguns. While Forman and her dog hunted (and I and another ride along guy trailed timidly behind through the weeds, broken glass and grime) two officers including Friday stood watch on the street so that the drug dealers couldn't run back and stealthily grab their stash.

The street seemed deserted to me but Friday said the dealers have people posted blocks away looking out for the police and thus have plenty of time to scatter. Tactics as rudimentary as a walkie-talkie-toting grade school kid on a dirt bike, he said, are surprisingly effective.

After about an hour we drove off. Friday pointed to a ranch home trimmed with neatly dangling white Christmas lights: "A big drug dealer house."

My Spanish skills came in handy at the next stop, though I learned officially it could mean trouble if Friday relied on me to interpret. Yet he had no choice -- he spoke just a few phrases in Spanish and couldn't understand it at all. I was glad to be of some use, though a few minutes into my conversation with the Latino man who had called 911, a one-armed bilingual prostitute appeared on the scene. She appeared to be about 19 years-old, had a mane of blond hair, and wore tight child-sized jeans, and gold braided sandals.

We'd been called to the man's property to remove a car that was parked in the wrong driveway. He was the landlord. The car appeared to be stolen, a totally gutted 92 Honda with a shattered back window and airbags blown out all over the front seats. A pair of red high heels lay on the floor of the driver's side.

The girl, whom Friday had encountered before, said it was her car. Someone had given it to her; hell, she said, she'd even lived in it for a while. Friday typed in the plate; it hadn't been reported stolen. After a half hour discussion that eventually included 10 people from the apartment building the situation was resolved. A good thing, said Friday. Towing a car takes at least an hour.

The $45 million Microsoft Windows-based computer system the department installed in June appeared to serve several functions. The most important, obviously, is the officers' ability to immediately get details about a particular call as they're heading there. It also shows where all 14 or so officers are at any given moment, so that if an officer needs help he or she knows who can most likely provide it.

Then there's the officer's ability to type in a license plate number to find out if a car has been stolen, has expired registration, etc. But I'd bet the cops think the instant messaging function enabled by the new computers is the best thing about them. Friday instant messaged throughout the night -- not obsessively so, but still. He told me a 22-year old dispatcher is dating one of his colleagues -- something he shared with another cop on the streets that night. The instant messages remain catalogued unless an officer erases them. Because cops in Richmond share cars, Friday said sometimes he gets in the car and discovers a whole laundry list of instant-messaged gossip on the computer. Our tax dollars at work.

The highlight of my night was not searching alleyways for a woman in a trench coat who'd reportedly just fired a gun, but a high-speed chase. We got word that a car was doing donuts on a popular drag-racing strip, Cutting Avenue, so Friday set the lights flashing and we sped to the scene. There the smell of burnt rubber singed the air as a car spun round and round. When the driver spotted us he peeled off -- speeding in excess of 100 mph the wrong way down a two lane, one-way street.

There were only a handful of cars on the street and they pulled out of the way as the car raced by. We chased after the guy on the right side and at a red light he switched over to our side of the street without so much as a milliseconds hesitation. Friday paused at each intersection, thus slowing us down enough to lose the crazy driver. Yet we were never going slow -- he estimated speeds of 105-110 mph. It was very cool yet terrifying at the same time. Afterwards I told him the thing that annoyed me the most about losing this guy was that he must have loved the adrenaline rush of being chased by the cops. Surely beats a mere drag race or donut-drill anyway. Friday agreed, then said "did you see that he was on the wrong side of the road, driving into traffic?"

I told him yes and he said if he'd reported that fact over the radio the chase would have been called off immediately. Way too risky. Yet clearly Friday wanted it.

He got lots of instant messages from other cops then -- some of them jealous that they hadn't gotten there first, others asking why he didn't catch the guy.

Our last stop of the night was the one that made me think Friday was an ass. Up until then I'd actually been thinking that he was a decent guy. He'd served in the military during Desert Storm, and while he kept making comments about how all the "Mexicans" still live by the rules of Mexico and not by the laws of the U.S. and other generalizations that made me a bit uncomfortabl, I thought he was okay. We'd been to some of the same countries on our world travels -- Vietnam, Thailand -- and seemed to have a lot in common. I actually liked the guy. He seemed to have a good sense of humor and a decent grasp on reality. Then for some reason he decided he'd try to impress me.

It was nearing midnight and we'd driven by a woman on the street some time earlier. She'd given us a very obvious glare. Now we saw her again, shouting something to a car that had paused to stop by the side of McDonald Avenue. "I'm going to check this ho out," said Friday (or something very much approximating that, using the w word.) Why he even bothered to stop and question this woman, I had no idea, especially considering his desire to deal only with the "bigwigs."

We pulled up alongside the woman. She was African American, 5' 8"; a very large woman poured into a pair of dark jeans and a red sweatshirt. Her short crinkly blond hair was pulled back into a little ponytail. She was listening to a Discman, bobbing her head.

"What are you doing?" Friday called out.

"I'm just waiting for the bus," she said mildly.

"Who were those people in that car?" he asked.
"Just my friends -- a friend and her husband who I hadn't seen in a long time."

Friday got out of the car and told me to do the same. He proceeded to bombard her with questions, treating her like she'd already committed a crime. Perhaps the 36-year old, heavyset woman was a prostitute, but she didn't look it. She gave her address as The Freeway Motel in El Cerrito, where she said she'd been living for nine months. She was very defensive and unthreatening. She said she was waiting for the bus and pointed to her husband halfway down the block at the bus stop. She called him over at Friday's behest. Friday told her not to say a word, then asked her husband the same questions he'd asked her. Her husband's answers were identical to hers.

Friday radioed their names to the station to do a background check. Turned out there was a warrant out for her arrest dating back to June. Something to do with "threats," was all he could tell her as he handcuffed her. Her husband stood by with absolutely no reaction. She told him to go home and watch the kids. Friday pulled something out of her front pocket -- condoms.

"What do you need condoms for if you're married?" he taunted her.

"It's none of your goddamn business," she said, growing more and more defiant.

Later, as we pulled up to the station, he again brought up the condoms, hinting
that it proved she was prostituting.

"Having condoms is no crime!" She said, "I already got nine kids. Don't want any more."

"Why not make it ten?" Friday said. "You know welfare will pay you for it."

"This is all bullshit!" she declared, her eyes spitting.

Friday and the woman continued to bicker for the next half hour as she was processed at the station. It was horrifying to watch. She asked when she'd get to make a phone call and Friday would not give her a straight answer. She didn't want to sit down while she was processed so her handcuffs were linked to a bar in a tiny room the size of a port-o-potty.

Another officer walking by asked her name and she said she didn't want to go into it. He then asked her another question or two and then walked off shaking his head and laughing, which pissed her off even more.

"It ain't funny!" she said.

The station was dead quiet but for the buzz of fluorescent lights overhead. After looking at her rap sheet -- four verbal threat misdemeanors, nothing more -- Friday directed her upstairs to the jail.

"You've been here before," he told her. "You know where to go."

As she sat in the holding cell Friday filled out a form. I asked him a few questions about the situation and she became testy, overhearing me, saying that it was against the law for him to tell me anything. He pretty much told her to shut up. I felt bad -- this woman had no idea who I was. No one we'd encountered that night did.

It was rather strange and I could understand why she was annoyed by my presence. I also couldn't believe that a woman in her situation would talk to a cop the way she was. Yet I was equally jarred by the things Friday was saying. At one point he mouthed "go to hell" at me and rolled his eyes, his back to her. I was disgusted.

After she was behind bars -- to be transported to county jail in Martinez in a day or two as all people arrested on warrants are -- I called it a night.

It was 12:30am and I'd seen enough for now.
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