Barbarella Sweeps the Beats with the Highway Patrol
pg.3

She reached over and pressed a blue button located at the top right of two rows of colorful squares set in a black box on the dashboard where the car stereo usually is. Our front lights came on, but the biker did not slow down -- Jenny was right, this guy couldn't see us at all. Then she pressed a red button. The sharp, high-pitched "WOO, WOO!" of the siren finally hipped the driver to the situation, and he pulled off onto the shoulder.

I waited in the patrol car while Jenny spoke to the bikers. The car smelled of leather and vinyl, clean but for the faint odor of exhaust wafting through my window. If it weren't for the metal cage in back and all the tech-geek equipment up front, I'd have thought the Crown Vic was a rental car, devoid as it was of personal effects. The traffic stop seemed to take forever, and I found the temptation to push all those seductive buttons excruciating. Red, blue, yellow, green! I somehow managed to keep my fingers to myself until Jenny got back in the car and said she needed to find a restroom. Officers need to pee too! I was ecstatic, especially since she seemed to know all of the cleanest bathrooms in town. We made a pit stop and resumed our patrol.

Jenny wrote three speeding tickets that morning, and each person had the same excuse: "I'm late for work."

"They're so focused on being late for work," she said, "they're already distracted, then add driving too fast and you have a dangerous condition. They're just not paying attention."

I brought up the popular belief that cops have quotas to fill, but Jenny assured me they do not. If officers are on the road driving their beat, chances are they will catch someone doing something wrong. "It's like dealing with a kid -- how long do you let them get away with something before you follow through?" She told me about one particularly difficult woman who refused to sign her ticket, arguing with three officers who had to threaten her with jail before she finally gave in.

Jenny does not enjoy writing tickets. She understands that people make mistakes, that we're all human, but it's her job to ensure that the laws of the road are obeyed. "This is not a job where you make friends," she said with resignation. "We rarely get thanked for what we do."

Danger on the Highway

Waiting for a tow truck to collect an unregistered car abandoned just north of the border, we received a call from the dispatcher telling us we were needed to help clear an accident on the 805. The dispatcher then reported a second collision at the same location -- a patrol car had been hit -- and we hurried to the scene once the tow truck had finally arrived.

"The dispatcher is your lifeline," Jenny said on the way. "If you're out on something like a traffic stop and it goes bad, your dispatcher is the only person who can get someone to you." I'd discover that for myself a few hours later.

The entire city of San Diego is served by only one dispatcher at any given time. One person handles all calls to 911 made from a cell phone (it is assumed that mobile callers are on the road -- 911 calls made from landlines are tracked and routed to the local police department), and that same person is responsible for managing all the communication among the officers on patrol. "One? Only one?" I kept asking in disbelief. Apparently they're hiring. "We need more bodies," she said. "We can use all the help we can get."

We pulled over north of the E Street exit on the 805 South. Jenny said I could step outside, but she warned me to stand as far off the shoulder as possible. Two women stood chatting on the dirt next to a light pole. On the shoulder were two slightly dented cars, innocuous-looking white and blue sedans that I assumed belonged to the ladies. A white sports car was in front of the first two (I could just make out the dark hair of a man sitting in the driver's seat), and last in line was a patrol car whose left side was so bashed in that it clearly wouldn't be going anywhere for a while.

Apparently there had been a minor collision involving the two women, and when the officer arrived he parked behind them. He was leaning on the hood of his car filling out a TCR (traffic collision report) when he heard a skid and then felt the impact in his hands as another vehicle slammed into his patrol car. The officer could have been seriously injured or killed. Earlier Jenny had confessed to me that "I am more afraid of getting run over or hit by a car than I am of getting in a physical altercation or getting shot at."

Fortunately no one was badly injured, but I asked Jenny how she handles the gore when a really bad accident occurs. She never gets queasy at the scene, she said: "You have a job to do, and you have to get that done." Though bloodshed seems "surreal," officers are much too busy trying to clear the road and transport the injured to a hospital to ponder the cruel whims of fate.

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