Al Steiner: Greenies

Lisa, working hard to maintain her composure, faced the crowd with a blank expression on her face. "I hate this fucking job," she mumbled to herself for perhaps that tenth time that shift, the hundredth time that week. While it was true that response times to the ghetto addresses and public housing buildings were considerably longer than they were in the areas where employed people lived, this was not due to any apathy on the part of the cops. When a call appeared on their screen, they went to it. It was the same with the other patrol units. The simple fact was that the ghettos were just not staffed adequately enough even though they were the busiest districts in the city by far. Eight out of every ten calls to the police department originated in one of the ghettos. But did the ghettos contain eighty percent more cops? Not even close. The ghetto was staffed with no more units than any other section of the city, except of course for Garden Grove and other areas like it. By contrast, the areas where the elite lived enjoyed the highest per capita ratio of cops to citizens. As the drunken African descendant had so delicately pointed out, there were foot patrol teams on damn near every corner. It was, without question, a serious misallocation of resources that was based upon money and social inequality. But was any of this Lisa's fault? Was it Brian's, or any of the other rank and file cops'? Was it the fault of those high seniority cops that worked in Garden Grove? No. But the inhabitants of the ghetto, who were perpetually plagued by violent street gangs, drug dealers, and poor response times when they needed help, perceived that this problem was because of the line cops. After all, the line cops were the only cops they ever saw. They could not take their complaints or frustrations to the city council or the department brass. So they blamed the most visible members of the organization and in the most angry and sometimes physical ways.

Lisa and Brian were both experienced enough in the realities of their job to know that trying to explain any of this to the crowd pushing in at them would be useless. They did not want to hear explanations or excuses. They wanted to vent. The best the two partners could hope for was that the crowd would stick to verbalizations to achieve their venting and not resort to physical stress relief. Things would get real ugly in a real hurry if that happened.

"'Get yourself assigned to downtown', the lieutenant told me," Brian was muttering to himself, although his words were easily picked up and transmitted to Lisa through the tactical radio link they shared. "'It's a lot mellower than Covington Heights, ' he says. 'The Agricorp building is downtown. Nothing bad could happen near the Agricorp Building, could it?'"

"And why the fuck ain't you helpin' those people now?" a Caucasian near the front of the crowd demanded of them. "First you wait a fuckin' hour to show up and then, after you beat up on the people doin' it, you just fuckin' stand there! Them people's hurt!"

"We have the dip-hoes on the way," Lisa intoned mechanically, thinking to herself that the Caucasian, who was about her age, though looked ten years older, was going to be the first one she zapped if push came to shove. He had the biggest mouth. "They'll take care of them and get them to the hospital."

"Yeah right," the man said in disgust, taking another step forward. "And they'll sit there in the fuckin' hall whilst the doctors treats people that have jobs first! They'll let 'em die out there in the hall whilst they take care of people with stubbed toes that have insurance!"

"Yeah," agreed several members of the crowd. "You tell 'em, man!"

Neither of the cops bothered to dispute this point. Both knew it was true, had seen it happen just that way more than once. "That's not my department," Lisa told him, putting her hand on her holstered tanner. "But I do need you to step back out of the crime scene!"

"Or what?" he demanded. "You gonna zap me too? You gonna send me to jail? Fuckin' do it why don't you? I'll eat better and live better if'n I's in jail!"

"Goddamn right!" added the Hispanic who had spoken earlier. "Them motherfuckers in the jail get private rooms, room service, and better pot. They even get them premium Internet channels! They live like them pricks in the Garden. What kinda fuckin' punishment be that?"

"Step back, now !" Lisa said, raising her voice and locking eyes with the Caucasian. She gripped the handle of her tanner and pulled it upward a little.

The man spat on the ground at her feet, barely missing her boot with a yellow wad of phlegm, but that remained the extent of his defiance of her authority. At last he stepped backwards. The crowd took a step back with him. Lisa and Brian both let a small sigh of nervous relief escape their lips. Though the crowd continued to shout insults and accusations, they kept their distance. In the world of modern law enforcement, that was perhaps the best that could be hoped for.

The first of the two-person emergency medical teams from the Department of Public Health and Safety arrived a moment later. They were dressed almost identically to the two police, lacking only the combat goggles and the weapons belts. The design on their blue helmets and on their bulletproof armor was a little different — it featured a star of life instead of a police oval — but except for that they were virtually indistinguishable from their law enforcement counterparts. Lisa and Brian watched as they wheeled in a stretcher upon which blue bags of equipment were resting. As soon as the medics came through the rickety front door they paused, eyeing the obviously hostile crowd nervously. The ghetto class often verbally and physically abused the dip-hoes as well, and for much the same reasons; misallocation of scarce resources and widespread abuse by other aspects of the medical system.

"It's okay, guys," Lisa called to them before they could slink away. "It's safe. C'mon over."

Plainly trepidatious, they nevertheless approached and went to work. They pronounced the first of the victims, the one with the exposed brain matter, officially dead. The second victim, the one that had been beaten with the arm of the chair, they paralyzed with a stasis drug and then installed an artificial breathing mechanism. By the time they were done doing that the second team had entered the building and gone to work on the woman that had been choked. As they performed their duties the crowd stayed at a reasonably safe distance, only shouting the occasional accusation about how if they'd been employed people they'd be getting better treatment.

"Fuckin vermin," Brian said softly into his throat microphone as he kept a wary eye on the crowd.

Lisa, who was watching the two suspects on the ground (they were stirring around and shouting insults of their own now) heard him but did not respond. Though most cops, like most employed people in general, disliked the welfare class immensely; Brian's hatred of them was unique in its fury. Six years before, his pregnant wife had been raped and killed by a group of welfare class thugs as she got off of the public transit train in the notoriously dangerous Helvetia Lowlands section of the city. Mandy Haggerty had been twenty-eight years old at the time and working as a fifth grade teacher in one of the public schools of the Helvetia district. She had dedicated her life to teaching the welfare class children and had been quite good at it. But some of the welfare class youths in the neighborhood, emboldened by a combination of Fruity and dust, had spotted her one morning on her way to work and that had been the death of her. Brian had long since gotten over the grief of her loss but his flaming hatred of the vermin, as the derogatory term for those of the welfare class went, had never so much as flickered in its intensity. Lisa, who had yet to marry and produce her one legally allowed offspring, knew that she could not fathom the depth of his feelings. But at the same time she knew that working among the very people he hated so much ten hours a day, four days a week, was poisoning his mind.