Real Life vs. Grand Theft Auto:
A Night with a Rookie in Richmond

MEMO from RICHMOND -- Grand Theft Auto 3 is a relatively recent video game for most home platforms, meaning you can enjoy it from a Lay-z-Boy at home or on the floor of your empty bachelor pad. It's the third installment (they're up to four now) in a violent series that has attracted heavy criticism from parents, politicians and gun control advocates.

The game indeed is basically a pixelated crime spree. The characters are more animated than either of the previous editions, taking advantage of the new Playstation 2 and XBOX technology. If you choose, you can make your guy run around the city carjacking innocent drivers, speeding over pedestrians, shooting innocent bystanders, burning them alive with a flamethrower, and blowing stuff up with grenades, molotov cocktails and a bazooka.

It's anarchy really -- what some might call a real stress reliever. When you get too crazy the cops come, and if you're particularly riotous, they come in droves -- swooping down the streets, hitting you head on, trying to run you over, bucking at you as soon as you leave a demolished vehicle and try to steal another. These cops will kill their own mother to get you.

It's a fair chance that most young cops would slobber over themselves for one chance at this in real life. Unfortunately for them, and most anti-video game violence crusaders, live ain't the same as it is on TV. Can you imagine filling out the report for the maniac who went wild in the streets setting everything he could on fire, blasting cops with M-16s and bombing police cars and S.W.A.T. teams from rooftops? Not to mention blowing up the police chopper with the bazooka. Houseloads, mountain size stack of paperwork. These rookies would be at a deskjob for the next five years.

Still, there has to be some balance to the job. Officer Maurice Canelo of the Richmond Police Department is one of these rookies. He's been on the job since June 2002 so he's young and doesn't have much experience under his belt yet. He's tall, edging on barrel chested, and fresh faced as if the street bullshit hasn't worked its way into the lines on his face yet. He has one of those thin cop mustaches. He keeps notes on pieces of paper and refers to them while writing citations, shaking down suspected drug dealers or working on reports for hit-and-run accidents (of which we had two on a recent night, when I rode along with him on a shift). He makes copies of all his reports to check them later and frequently asks questions via Motorola Textmessenger over his on-board computer. It's good to know there's someone out there trying to do the job right, but he hates the paperwork.

In the early evening, Canelo and five other Richmond officers sat in an empty, rundown parking lot on Marina and MacDonald. "This is where we go when we're gonna go play," Canelo says, using police vernacular for fast, coordinated strikes on known drug corners. Business is hot these days, he says, with crack and cocaine. Heroin and marijuana fall in third, with meth running a very distant fourth. The officers stand around in a huddle and the K-9 cop quarterbacks the strike, making sure everyone knows the plan. The lead officer will creep up these stairs overlooking the corner. Two cruisers will speed around the corner and grab anyone who doesn't run. Canelo will be fourth followed by the K-9 cop and the Belgian Shepard named Taz. Canelo will be backup, parked by an empty lot where the dealers like to stash their drugs, but at least 100 yards from the bust.

Still it's an adventure just getting over to the neighborhood. The cops shoot out of the parking lot like hornets out of the hive, stomping the gas and mashing the brake around corners. There's no fast heel-toe action here, for they tear around the neighborhood streets in line, breaking off at certain intersections and meeting back up at others. It's really fascinating to watch, and well executed--almost like fighter planes on military exercises, like a play unfolding in a football game

In a lot of ways the game mentality is accurate, Canelo says. They often run into the same characters hanging out on the same corners, and the supply of drugs is seemingly endless, he says. "It's like an ongoing saga," he says. "We'll make a bust one night and get a good amount of product, and then a few days later and they've got more."

The dealers are clever, Canelo says. They know they can't get arrested if they don't get caught with drugs on them, so they stash it in this empty lot and pick it up when they make a sale. Canelo is the anchor, another euphemism I suspect, for rookie, and has the dubious honor of guarding this field.

The bust only yields a small amount of marijuana and a lot of neighborhood scorn. The residents must be getting used to it by now. When they see a line of police cars flying through their neighborhood they must know there's a bust about to happen. And for me to see it as they see it, it's sad to think about kids growing up in neighborhoods like this, when drugs, guns and cops are normal everyday things.

And for the cops too, Canelo says. "We see a lot of the same faces, kids from 12-13 years old to people in their late 30s," he says. One officer, he says, remembers a 12-year-old kid he arrested over a decade ago. The once cherubic dealer is dead now, Canelo says. He swallowed several grams of rock cocaine while running from the cops.

Cops are some of the worst drivers on the streets. They plow through intersections and roll through stop signs on overdrive. Covering a beat is hard on these cars; they're driven into the ground and into premature old age by the cops who whip them like three legged mules.

The rest of the night is slow, so painfully slow, for both of us. There are two hit and run accidents we follow up on. Coincidentally they both involve an abandoned van hitting a parked vehicle. It's a pain in the ass for Canelo, he makes no bones about it. Without a driver, it's a lot more paperwork for him. First he has to search out the owner of the abandoned vehicle, then fill out a report for a 20002 CVC, code for hit and run. Then he has to fill out another form for the tow truck. Then he has to wait for the tow truck to mosey on by so he can leave and go back to the station to drop off the report.

It takes up a lot of time. "This is gonna suck," he says as we roll up to the second accident. "I hate traffic man, that is one thing i just don't like." It doesn't comfort Canelo that over the radio we hear some of his fellow officers hunting thieves stealing electical equipment in the darkness near the Chevron Plant. "That should have been us," he says with a sigh. Instead we're in the middle of a neighborhood, with neither of the vehicle's owners in sight and neighbors refusing to answer the door on a cold East Bay night.

Canelo still lives in Richmond, which is unusual he says. It's usually not recommended for cops to live in the same city where they work, he says. "I'm still pretty new here though, not everybody knows who I am," he says. " But once they do I'm gonna have to move."

It's a problem since familiarity breeds content in the neighborhood, especially when it's just outside the Iron Triangle where Canelo lives. He gets worried when he sees a call pending near his house, wonders when people are going to start noticing that he lives next door. He doesn't want any anonymous house calls or vandalism that could come as retribution for doing his job. That's why most officers live outside the city where they work and commute in.

The language barrier is another problem, Canelo says. There aren't many officers besides himself who speak Spanish, which is disturbing since a lot of their calls come from areas with a high demographic of non-English speakers. Even fewer speak any Asian languages. When I mention that cops should at least take a basic class in Spanish he says it's probably easier for the people to learn English than for the cops to learn Spanish, which I don't quite agree with.

Canelo takes his lunch break late, two hours before his shift is over. A midnight meal at Denny's doesn't sound all that appetizing, plus I was a little short, which is always embarrassing when people want to go out to eat, so I called it a night. The last call had been a domestic disturbance, which Canelo says are usually the worst. The grandmother of a medicated and highly upset young woman called the police after the woman basically "wouldn't shut up," she said. The woman's mother said she'd been crying and screaming for at least 30 minutes, and they couldn't figure out what the problem was. The woman sobered up fast when Canelo and another officer came into the room, enough to kick them out of the house. The officers spoke in the soothing tones of a therapist or an empathetic listener, but left her with her family without any resolution.

They didn't mind, they were hungry. I didn't mind much either, I just tried to respect the house and ignore the woman's wailing, which I have to say was really annoying. I felt bad for Canelo, the rookie cop relegated to the boring jobs, paying his dues as it were. I wanted something exciting to happen, not so much for me, but for him to have something cool to do. It was a quiet night for him, all over the radio there were 211s (armed robbery) and drunken revelers, but he had to keep filling out those forms for tow trucks and abandoned vans. I thought I'd try to vicariously keep his night interesting and play GTA3 when I got home but I forgot and fell asleep.