"You're trying to have your salary spike this year to game the pension system, right?" my buddy told me. "Well, we're raiding a house where an informant says there's marijuana, and it's going to be awesome—we've got a $283,ooo military-grade armored SWAT truck and the kind of flash grenades that literally scared that one guy to death."
"Don't start without me," I told him. "I just have to stop by this pawn shop. It's run by some friends of mine from ATF. They paid this mentally disabled teenager $150 dollars to get a neck tattoo of a giant squid smoking a joint. Those guys are hilarious."
But when I got to the shop the guys weren't in any mood to joke around—something about having lost their guns again. That meant I had extra time to get to the raid. En route, I headed through a black and Latino neighborhood, and who did I see on the street? A teenage male who made what I would describe as a furtive movement.
So I threw him against a wall and frisked him. Then I realized I'd frisked the same kid a half-dozen times before. Never found anything. About 17 years old. Looked like he was mixed race. "What am I being arrested for?" he asked me. "For being a fucking mutt," I told him. "I am going to break your fuckin' arm off right now. Then I'm going to punch you in the face." I know stop-and-frisk is controversial, but it's like Ray Kelly said: "I go to communities of color. People want more." It meant a lot to us police officers when President Obama praised him.
By the time I arrived at the site of the raid it was after dark. Inside, there were the suspects, their kids, and the family dogs. We don't like to wait for suspects of nonviolent drug crimes to leave the house, or call on the phone and ask them to come out, or knock, because what if they flush the drugs we suspect them of having down the toilet? How would we ever win the War on Drugs if we let that happen?
So we go in with overwhelming force and firepower. Kick down the door and all that. Zealousness pays off, too. Just try to find me a free country where they arrest more people.
What happened at the raid?
No drugs found, but we did seize all the couple's cash anyway. Let them try to prove it's legit.
If memory serves, we shot some dogs to death on that raid too. I think it was two puppies, actually: One was 10 months old, and the other was three months old. Or wait. Was that the one where we killed a 9-year-old Labrador with its tail wagging? Shoot, actually, maybe it was the time that we tased and shot the Chihuahua? Man, these all blend together after a while. I know it wasn't the Akita we shot nine times. Or that Iraq War vet's rescue dog we killed. I don't think it was the the Jack Russell terrier or the golden retriever or that dog where the bullet also hit the 5-year-old. The point is that it was just a dog. It isn't like we arbitrarily pepper-sprayed a woman in the face, or shot an 80-year-old man as he lay in his own bed, or killed a mentally ill homeless guy by beating him to death.