Behind the Badge
The other night I was sitting in my patrol car in the parking lot of the police department when a call went out over the radio about a family disturbance involving a woman with a whip.
I said, “I gotta see this,” and headed toward the call.
I arrived in the area and saw a woman with long hair running southbound across the street. I drove up and told her to stop. She stopped and started screaming at the top of her lungs. She wasn’t mad at me. She just had major issues. She had wild and unkempt hair and a heavy metal t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. For a moment I thought I was sent back to the 1980s like Marty McFly in “Back to the Future.”
I told her to sit down on the curb and I noticed a USB cable in her hand. I looked at the cable and wondered how that could have been mistaken for a whip.
“That’s it?”
It was like going to the ice cream parlor on a hot summer day and finding out the building had just burned down.
The woman was eventually arrested and I went to another call a little disappointed there was no whip.
That’s not something you see every day unless it’s an Indiana Jones movie.
Later, I spoke to the handling officer and told him about USB cable.
“Oh, there was a whip,” he replied.
“There was?” I asked.
“It was a horse whip,” he said.
Well, that certainly made the story interesting again. I guess the ice cream parlor hadn’t burned down after all.
I still don’t know why they had the whip in the house, but let’s just give a head nod and leave it at that.
You just never know how a call is going to whip into shape.
Editor’s Note: John Roman is a traffic officer for an Orange County police agency who writes a blog, Badge 415 (www.badge415.wordpress.com). His posts focus on the human side of police work and safety tips. Roman, a cop for more than 20 years, has handled more than 5,000 accidents as a collision investigator. BehindTheBadgeOC.com shares some of his columns.
