To say this week was busy is an understatement. As it is, I don't earn any overtime in the current setting of the department I work for. This is definitely a job you do because you want to do it. Not a job you do for the money. No one ever truly became rich from policing itself. This will be a long entry for an extremely long week that I'll break down into several parts. These little stories will be in no particular order from the events as how they happened:
I was on my way back to the precinct from my beat because I had run out of traffic citations and needed to sign out another book. I'm driving on the highway with only one other car near me (in this case right in front of me) when all of a sudden I start smelling burning marijuana come right through my car. I look up at the car in front me and notice both males are smoking something. Through my excellent detective skills and deductive reasoning-they can only be smoking one thing. I put my lights on and pull them over as both of them toss out what they're smoking and proceed to light up cigarettes (as if I didn't notice). I call for another unit and approach the vehicle.
As I'm talking to the driver, I can clearly tell he's been smoking marijuana. The driver and passenger are both extremely nervous. I tell them what I saw and ask if there was any more marijuana in the car. They both stated there wasn't and you could clearly tell they were telling the truth. I asked the driver if he knew he could get a DUI from driving under the effects of marijuana and he was stunned and became increasingly more worried. I asked him how long he had been smoking today after telling him I wasn't going to be taking him to jail but was more concerned with if he had the ability to drive safely. After feeling confident since he told me he had just lit up the joint which had cost him he last bit of money since he had to toss it out, I sent him on his way with a lesson about impaired driving. This driver easily could have been impaired if had continued to smoke. People don't realize that marijuana can still have the same effects on reaction time as alcohol can which makes it increasingly dangerous to drive high.
While driving on my beat around the mall, a call came in for a kidnapping. The remarks stated an uncle was calling in that his niece had been kidnapped by a couple of males a few days ago but that no report was made (first question mark moment). The call went on to say that the uncle was shopping at the mall and saw his niece and wanted to get the police involved but that the uncle was waiting across the street from the mall at a laundromat (second question mark moment: If it was my niece I would have stayed near her to let police know where she is). Being a possible kidnapping, the call is a pretty important matter. I got to the laundromat pretty timely after I received the call but the uncle was nowhere to be seen. I had the dispatcher call the male back but it went to voicemail. A second callback had the uncle state it was a false alarm and the girl was not his niece. Wasted call but sometimes that's just how it goes out here.
I received a call from a leasing manager at an apartment complex on my beat in reference to some drug activity from a resident. When I get there the manager called me into her office and told me they discovered scales, bags of drugs, guns, and tons of money in an apartment and she wanted me to go in and seize it all. While I would have loved to have done that I would have been violating the rights of the resident. I told her if she wanted to go in an take the drugs to seize on a violation of the lease that was on her but I recommended the alternative of letting our Crime Suppression Unit know about the apartment and letting them conduct their own investigation or with narcotics doing so. Ultimately she listened to the voice of reason and I gave her the contact information to supply the unit with the tip. As much as I would like to just "go and get the bad guy", everyone has rights as well and I can't just violate that.
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