Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [27]
On my first day on patrol in Hollywood, my new partner and I pulled over a car after observing it swerving in traffic. The driver, a fifty-year-old black man, danced through his sobriety test, and it was my inclination to let him go. But my partner wanted to take him in and have him screened by a drug recognition expert (DRE) at the station because he really thought the guy was on something illegal. Personally, I believed my partner was intoxicated on his own authority.
It’s true that a police officer can stop anybody for virtually anything. I tried to do so for the reasons I’d been taught, such as for drivers running stoplights or exceeding the speed limit. But I wasn’t the guy to write tickets if I believed I was staring into the eyes of a good person who’d made a mistake. He’d lose money or his car insurance would go up, and that didn’t seem fair to me. I’d say, “Slow down” or “Watch the stop signs,” and let the person off with the warning.
When you take someone into custody, it’s even worse. You’re having his car towed and impounded. I didn’t do that to someone for just anything.
But demonstrating letter of the law versus spirit of the law at its best, my partner insisted we take this man in. At the station, though the man passed all drug tests and the expert couldn’t determine if he was really on anything more than a prescription drug, my partner still pushed to book him.
“If you’re going to book him,” I said, “keep my name off the report.”
It was another sobering day for me. I hadn’t gotten into this line of work to screw with people. I wanted to go after the bad guys, and this guy wasn’t one of them. I drove home that night disenchanted and disappointed, thinking it might be time to get another job.
My second day in Hollywood couldn’t have gone more differently. I was assigned to work with a great officer named Jimmy Barlow, a six-feet-two, 140-pound black guy we all called J-Bone.
While we were driving about midnight, we noticed two guys cruising along with their lights off, a definite red flag. We were in the process of pulling them over when the car took off. We went into pursuit. After about a minute into the high-speed chase, the car suddenly screeched to the side of the road and one man jumped out with something in his hands.
On impulse, I jumped out and started chasing him as he hopped over a nearby fence, tossed something underneath another car, and scaled a second fence. I didn’t know the neighborhood at all and it was pitch black, but I could track him because of the two blinking red lights on the backs of his sneakers. Note to would-be criminals: functionality always outweighs fashion.
Meanwhile, Jimmy was in pursuit of the driver, who’d peeled out.
Behind a run-down apartment building, I caught up to my suspect, cuffed him, and dragged him back to where he’d tossed his package. By now, a few other police units had arrived on the scene.
When I opened the parcel, I found about eleven pounds of fifty-dollar rocks of cocaine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Miles away, I’d learn, the other suspect crashed his car into a tree, and Jimmy apprehended him. The car was full of guns.
I’d made my first serious bust in Hollywood Division, and it couldn’t have gone any better if it’d been written for Law & Order.
This is what I’m talking about, I thought. It was quite a bit of loot for a young police officer to find during his first arrest in a new division, and I felt really good about it. I didn’t even mind filling out all the paperwork, which included the traffic accident, a foot pursuit, and use of force.
My morning watch sergeant, Chuck Wampler, wanted to write me up for a commendation. It was the first time I interacted with this hardworking second-generation officer. He had a lazy eye and didn’t look at anything directly, but he was one of the straightest shooters you could ever meet. I would work with Sgt. Wampler