Of course I didn't want anyone to get shot, but an obnoxious drunkard or even a huge drug bust would have been nice.
Instead, in my first ride-along with the Tampa Police Department, I listened to two officers lecture a 15-year-old on completing his chores. It was a hard case: The kid did not know when to shut up, and he had a way of exasperating the officers as much as his parents. But it was not the situation I thought I'd witness on a Friday night in District Two, which contains some of the toughest neighborhoods in the city.
I feel strangely tense — the same feeling I get when a police car pulls up behind me in traffic — as I sit in the lobby at District Two headquarters. I'm waiting for Britt C. Martinez, the police officer who will take me on a several-hour-long ride through Tampa, south of Busch Boulevard.
The lobby is a sparse white room, its walls decorated with a dozen children's pictures chronicling a T.P.D. visit to a local elementary school. All the drawings carry the telltale signs of first-grade art skills: blocky figures, exaggerated features, completely out-of-whack size ratio. But one thing stands out: All of the police officers are smiling.
Officer Martinez arrives. A 30-year-old Wyoming native — 5'5", slim, with large brown eyes — she appears amazingly young to be an 11-year veteran of law enforcement. She leads me to her squad car.
"Wow, it feels so good to be on the other side of the cage," I say after settling into the passenger seat.
She gives me a look.
"Just kidding," I add.
Martinez is just finishing up a report from her last call: A man had been parked in front of the Department of Motor Vehicles office on Hillsborough Avenue for three days. An employee had finally noticed his presence and called T.P.D. to report a suspicious person. Martinez responded, checked on the man — who suffers from depression — and sent him home.
Before pulling off on our first call, Martinez instructs me on the rules of the ride-along: Always stay behind her; stay by the car if there is a foot chase; and do not get out of the car during a traffic stop.
Then she says: "If we had shotguns in the cars, I'd show you how to use it, but we don't."
Damn.
"But if I'm lying on the ground unconscious, feel free to use my gun," she adds.
As the sun starts to set, we respond to a domestic violence call on Mohawk Avenue. An officer is already at the scene and has calmed down the scuffling father and son. Apparently, the son has been on the computer all day, chatting with friends on Myspace, and the dad asked the boy to help him with the yard work. At that point, communications failed and the shaggy-haired son ended up in a chokehold.
The officers spend the next hour lecturing the kid on the finer points of "listening to Dad." Every time an officer makes a comment, the teen whines his innocence. And every time the teen defends himself, the dad demands his son stay quiet. It is absolutely painful to watch.
Our second call brings us to the Old Seminole Heights neighborhood where another 15-year-old has disobeyed her parents. But this teen decided to run away.
Friday nights are prime runaway nights, Martinez says.
Outside, the mother, grandmother and grandfather sit on lawn chairs and worry about the child running around on the dark streets of Tampa.
"She's only 15," the grandfather tells me. "Who knows what could happen to her? Some guy could pick her up and be outside the state by now."
Martinez takes her time getting as much information as she can. Running away is not a crime, and the most she can do is return the child home when she is found.
The grandmother asks Martinez how she should discipline the teen. She says there are no easy answers: Corporal punishment is an option, but probably wouldn't work with a 15-year-old. And you can't tie her to the bed, she adds. Martinez writes down a few details and files the missing persons report.
It's break time.
District Two's breakroom looks like any other corporate lunchroom. Bright fluorescent light showers two tables surrounded by hard plastic chairs. There is an out-of-order soda machine and a microwave. The fridge is full of officers' lunches and cold drinks. Martinez heats up the pasta and chili she brought from home and glances at the television between bites.
"I never wanted to be a street cop," she admits.
Chronicling her transition from clothing store clerk to armed law enforcer, she tells me that at first she wanted to be a lawyer. Then, after her father was arrested for low-level drug trafficking in New Mexico, she aspired to be an agent for the DEA, or possibly FBI.
She joined an internship program in Albuquerque that put her through all the rigorous training to be a street cop, but she still aspired to something federal.
Then her father was arrested again.
"The second time he did it," she says, "it was like a direct insult to me."
She signed up for the police academy and joined the Albuquerque Police Department. That was 11 years ago. Martinez brings up the story to make a point: Sometimes police officers come from the same dysfunctional environments as those they patrol.
"Sometimes community people think because we wear this uniform, we live in a perfect world," she says. "That's not always the case."
Back on the road, we respond to a robbery call near Tampa's southeast limits. A grizzled man in a white T-shirt and jeans stands outside his home talking to another pair of police officers. He is slurring his words and making wild gestures with his hands while explaining what happened: A man riding a child's bicycle robbed him on N. 40th Street. Even after the drunken victim gave the man $7, he wasn't satisfied. So the man on the bike knocked him to the ground and took his wallet.
"I done gave you my money," the victim says he told the man. "Why are you hitting me?"
Martinez asks the man why he waited to call police until he got home.
"I didn't have any money," he responds.
Martinez shakes her head and informs him coins are not needed to dial 911 at a payphone.
After jotting down some more details, we head off in search of the robber. All we have is a vague description — African-American male, 18-24, wearing a white T-shirt and blue jean shorts. Martinez shines her spotlight down the dark neighborhood streets along N. 40th Street, but we figure the suspect is long gone.
"Things like this, more than likely, don't get solved," she says.
As Martinez nears the end of her shift, we head toward Raymond James Stadium so she can park and file her reports for the night. The stadium lies at the edge of the Sulphur Springs neighborhood, a poverty-stricken area that has experienced a rash of arsons in the last few months. It is Martinez's worst area to patrol.
"But it's not because of the area," she says. "It's the mosquitoes."
As we roll through Sulphur Springs, the teenagers in the street give us a wary look. I think back to the children's pictures in the police lobby. I ask her why people's perceptions of police officers change as they get older.
"They don't see us as a person," she answers. "They see us as a police officer, a pig, the po-po."
We pull into the stadium alongside three other squad cars. Martinez flips open her laptop and starts entering in her reports. "Ah, report-writing," she sighs. "The most boring part of our job."
"It's been a day of bratty kids and missing people," Martinez says as she brings me back to District Two headquarters.
She apologizes for the anti-climactic nature of the ride-along. If only I'd been around last week, she says, when they found the dead body.
Despite the lack of arrests and dead bodies, the night gives me new insight into another role police officers seem to play in the neighborhoods of District Two: Parent figure.
Albeit, a parent with a gun.
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2006.