George Higgins - A change of gravity

"It don't matter, really, does it, though, what it was. Because the overall effect's always the same. If you're drunk or operating under, you had a fight or something, or you're beating up the wife. Or you're breaking in a building. Or maybe you had drugs in your possession that you're selling someone, right? And you know you're not supposed to do that. But you're always on the lookout, aren'tcha, for the easy buck, and now it turns out, joke's on you, guy you're selling to's a cop, badge and everything. And he placed you under arrest. So here you are now; you've been arrested. Now you're going to the lock-up.

"Now at the present time if you would like to come down to the station as it is configured, the one on Lannan Street there, any night you care to come, although there'll generally be more to see on a weekend night as Mister Mernon can tell you, having been there setting bail a good many weekend nights for people we've arrested, Friday or a Saturday.

Unless it's one of those three-day holidays it seems like we're always getting now, at least one a month, in which case Sunday night as well we will have a lot of traffic usually, that is. And the first thing you will see down there, and I will show you this myself or have a sergeant escort you, because sometimes one of these guys that we've got arrested will decide, you know, because he's drunk, he'll decide he wants to fight.

"This is also very common. A big part of our job as law enforcement officers involves fighting with drunks. If you want to be a police officer, you have to face that. It's reality. And when we arrest a guy for that, he's quite often going to get unruly with us, and we have to subdue him there, show him what the Mace is like, blast of that stuff in the face, get his mind off fighting us. And what you will then see is that when the cruisers pull up at the back door of the station, right on Lannan Street, with everybody passing by, you will have both your pedestrian and your vehicular traffic there as well. And this is where my men have to come to discharge their passengers, and not only the officers of the police department but also the State Police if this happens to be one of their arrests that they have made and they are bringing him to us. Or her, could be a woman; we do have to arrest the women sometimes too, although nowhere near as many. To be secured in our lock-up until someone can come and get this man or woman out.

"And the very first thing that you will instantly observe in virtually every single case, and virtually without exception, is that every suspect who gets out, he's got his hands behind his back account of how he's cuffed and all, the first thing that he always does, and I don't care he's drunk or sober, or he's on some controlled substance and he's higher'n a kite, but the first thing he does before he does another thing is: He takes a look around. And we all know what he is thinkin', every single time, no matter who it is. He's thinkin': "How can I get out of here?" How can he escape?"

The chief always stressed the sibilance of the initial syllable of the verb, relentlessly telling officers who mispronounced the word that 'when people hear you sayin' ex-cape like there was an X in it, which there is not, and which you just did, they think you are stupid or else ignorant, which you do not want. So therefore don't let me hear you doing it around here."

"Now of course this makes no sense at all, no question about that.

Usually the charge that we have got against you, when we bring you in, well, the fact is that you may've gotten everybody good and mad at you, doing what you did, may've even hurt someone, but the fact is still that usually it's a fairly minor charge.

"Now when I say that I don't mean you think that it's minor, that it's a minor thing. That if it's operatin' under for example, so you stand to lose your license, sixty, ninety days, a year, whatever it may be; or this time you're gonna have to take that course they give you if you've been caught for doing this, and it's therefore gonna cost you.

You not only have to go to all those lecture-sessions that they have so there goes your evenings free and you are gonna have to sit now with a bunch ah drunks that you now belong with; which you don't like thinkin' either, but you haven't got no choice now; you have proved it, you belong and look at all those awful bloody pictures that they show. As many nights as that takes, and you're gonna have to pay for them, the cost of going to them, and that's no small amount, you find. Four, five hundred bucks I guess, is what they're getting for it now. You don't like that at all.

"And we don't blame you. But just the same, it isn't like this has to be the end of the whole world for you now. You're embarrassed, sure you are, and you ought to be, whatever it is you've done. But you're not the first one, done it. You're not gonna be the last. So what you want to do is take your medicine and learn from it, learn something from this bad event. Then put it all behind you and act like a normal person, and see that from now on you behave yourself so that you don't have no more trouble, which of course is what you want. That's what we all want, all of us, just to be left alone. And if you do like you're supposed to, chances are, that's how this will all turn out.

"But if you actually do it, if you actually try to escape, get away from the officers there that've gone to all the trouble of arresting you and don't think they like doin' that, all the paperwork that that entails, and the court appearances and everything like that; they're not gonna do this unless they think they have to but now they've done all that and brought you in, and now you're gonna try to escape7. Well now if you do that, you're gonna be in one big peck of… well, a lot of trouble, anyway, and I trust you all know what it is that I'm talkin' about here.

"Big trouble. Resistin' arrest. A and B on an officer. Attempted escape, and on and on. No jokes here now. These're all felonies, and we're not gonna show you any mercy. We're just gonna multiply charges up on you; cut you no slack; give you no breaks: that's what we're gonna do. Because you went and acted stupid, and you made us take a chance of where somebody could've gotten really hurt, and we hadda go and stop you, and this always involves risk. That we do not want to have to be taking. If it turns out that nobody got hurt bad, well then, everybody was lucky, that's all. It wasn't no fault of yours.

And so now we're gonna throw the book at you and you are goin' to jail.

You didn't want that to happen and we didn't want it to happen. Nobody wanted it to happen, but you went and did what you did, and we can't have you doing that, so now you go to jail.

"You see what I'm getting at here. What I'm telling you is that now that we have got the opportunity here to design this new facility to meet the needs that we have got in a growing, modern community police department here. "Cause that is what we've got now: a community that's growing, and it's getting bigger all the time, whether we like it or not. And with all the problems that all growing towns everywhere've all got these days, people movin' to the suburbs and it's only gonna just get worse, matter what we do because that's the way it is. And I don't care where you look, we've all got the same kind of problems.

We're all doin' our best, lookin' for some way to get out of them. And that's why we need to look very carefully at this thing that we're doin' here and make absolutely sure we know exactly what we're doin'.

And one thing I am tellin' you is that from my point of view as a professional law enforcement officer, lookin' at this thing here, one thing we absolutely positively have to build into this new police facility from the start is an internal reception area for receiving prisoners and any other people that we may be bringing in who're in custody. That we have found it necessary to take into custody, danger of harm to themselves or to others, whatever the reason may be. So that the cruiser car or the wagon, whatever it is there, it just arrives from the scene and what it does then is it pulls right in, right inside the building, and the door shuts, boom, down behind it, just like that." He clapped his hands once.