"Just Don't Shoot Me"

So Monday and Tuesday were pretty easy going days. Monday I had a trainee on his last day in the Zone before he moved on to his next rotation of field training. It was slow so we decided to do a little traffic. We were fishing and saw a car with a broken brake light. We stopped it and the trainee felt confident so I let him handle the stop on his own.

The driver ended up being a young black female. My trainee (who is also black) asked her for her driver's license. She went to reach for it and immediately said to him that she was only reaching for ID. My trainee laughed and shrugged it off but she continued to say "Just don't shoot me, I've seen all that happens on tv.". It's a real shame that that's the impression people have of encounters with us. My trainee just let the female know her light was out with a warning and we continued on with our uneventful day.


Tuesday saw me head to a major department store at the mall on my beat. Loss Prevention had detained a female employee for making fraudulent returns to pocket money. This employee was a supervisor and would take un-purchased clothes off the floor and use the UPC on them to return them as if they were purchased. She did this all the way back from June while Loss Prevention kept investigating to try and find where the losses were coming from. This employee racked up $2,728.87 in 5 months. They pressed charges for the theft and I asked her if she had ever been arrested before and she told me she had....for exactly the same thing. It's amazing she was hired with the previous arrest to work in retail. Even Loss Prevention was surprised by her past. The lady said her son was recently diagnosed with cancer and she had no other way to come up with the money for treatment which cost around $500-1,000 a month. The store was nice in the sense that even though she was going to lose her job, they were organizing support groups for her to try and help her through the medical crisis.