We Are the Cops by Michael Matthews Read Free Book Online Page A

really good meat. There’s no fat in it. It’s good-for-you meat.
    But my partner had his flashlight on, so I was actually concentrating on what I was doin’. Normally I’d just do it in darkness and do it by feel.
    But I’m no redneck. A hillbilly is a redneck that graduated high school. And I graduated high school.
    ****
    Midnights are always a good time to play jokes on each other, like putting pepper spray on the toilet seats, so when someone takes a dump they get their ass on fire.
    People have also been known to take a little nap on the night shift. That’s usually when the jokes start. We had a guy that fell asleep on the midnight shift; he’s out, he’s drooling.
    One of our local residents came to the station and rang the bell. I opened it up and said, ‘What’s up?
    ‘That cop is sleeping in front of the station again!’
    Now, a friend of mine is a heavy equipment operator and he’s got a ten-wheel dump truck. So I called him and asked, ‘Are you up right now? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee, I need you for something.’
    He got his truck and we inched it up as quietly as possible. He got within ten feet of this cop’s cruiser.
    I said, ‘Okay, when I tell you to, I want you to turn the bright lights on and get on the air horn.’
    So he puts the high beams on and pulls the air horn - UUURRGGGHHHHHHH!
    All I see is this cop waking up, eyes the size of dinner plates and he’s going at the steering wheel trying to turn the car, thinking he fell asleep at the wheel and he’s about to die! Hahahahahahahaha!
    ****
    After twenty-two years on the force I can only think of about three guys – cops – that were beaters and bullies. But I’m sure there’re many, many more.
    In my twenty-two years I’ve hit three people in handcuffs – in twenty-two years. The first one was as a rookie. I was working ‘graveyard’ on my own and everything’s a fight. You’re working graveyard, you’re in Vegas and just north of here was my neighbourhood – it was Paradise and Flamingo. There were titty bars and there were redneck bars and everything was a fight, which was fun; so I went through uniforms like mad because you’re always rolling around on the ground.
    Well, back to my first guy, punching him in handcuffs: I’ve got a guy and I’m taking him to jail and this is before we had cages, so he’s sitting on the passenger side. I opened the back door – because when you get to the jail you have to take your gun, weapons and all your other crap off and drop them in the back of your car – I’d opened up the back door to put my gun and stuff in and as I leaned inside, this guy’s sitting in the front seat – on the passenger side – and he just leaned back from the front seat and spat right in my face. It was less than a second after that that I went BANG! – I just drove his head right straight back, down into the seat. Then I put my stuff back in my holsters, closed the car door, went back around, got into the car and drove him to the frigging hospital. That was the end of that. It was that simple. I didn’t sit there and hammer on him for ten minutes, I didn’t call him names, I didn’t kick him; it was just ‘spit’, ‘smack’ and off we go to stitch you up.
    ****
    Where else are they going to give you a gun, a badge, a fast car and tell you to go play with ten of your best friends every night?

3
K-9
    D riving down the interstate, the cop sitting next to me was fairly quiet. He was expecting a ‘ride-along’ but he wasn’t expecting to tell his life story to the English guy holding the small, slightly sinister looking, digital recorder. In between dealing with a traffic accident, reporting a hit-and-run against a garden fence and looking for a missing ten-year-old child (whose mother suggested we locked him up when we found him, which we did), I did my best to assure the officer that everything was above board and that he could speak to me openly and in confidence. Even so, he remained