White Collar Criminal

     I was parked at the ambulance base when the dispatcher’s voice came over the radio, breaking the silence of what had been a remarkably slow Sunday shift. “For the violent family trouble, male choking the female, son is punching the father trying to intervene, sister is the caller, she is staying on the line.” We were in the middle of a blizzard, and the air had been remarkably quiet, even for a Sunday evening. Checking the address as I acknowledged the call I realized I was only a few minutes away, even allowing for the snow covered roads. My backup car chimed in, advising dispatch that he was quite a ways out. I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline and tension, exacerbated by the fact that I would almost certainly be solo for at least a portion of the call. Domestic violence calls are well known for their potential for risk, and this one was being dispatched as an in progress fight, but in those days it was considered bad form to wait for backup on almost any call, and anything but an immediate response was out of the question. 

     Minutes later I arrived at the house, a spacious suburban home in an upscale new housing tract. I parked down the street as I had been trained to do years before and waded through knee high drifts up to the house, cautiously looking through the windows as I approached. Standing to the side of the door frame, I listened for a moment. Hearing nothing, I rang the bell and waited. Seconds later a young woman about 19 years old  answered the door, excitedly waving me inside. “Where is he,” I asked, glancing around the interior. “Upstairs in his office,” she replied, looking nervously toward the stairs. “He went up there when I called 911.” After being assured that there were no firearms in the house, I walked through the foyer to the kitchen where I saw a middle aged woman weeping quietly at the table. Beside her was a teenaged boy, also crying. Glancing at the woman’s neck I saw the bright red handprints. In a rasping voice she recounted the argument with her husband, her hands unconsciously traveling to her throat as she described him choking her as he held her against the front door. The violence contained in her narrative seemed incongruous with the tidy, stylish home, but I knew better than to make any assumptions. The quiet, manicured facade of suburban America hides a multitude of sins. After she finished recounting the night’s events, her son asked in a halting voice if he was going to be in trouble for hitting his father. I told him not to worry, then headed for the stairs, no longer content to wait for another car. 

     Reaching the second floor, I saw him sitting in a leather chair facing the doorway of his well appointed office. He was a large man in his late forties, over six feet tall and heavyset, his face flushed from drinking. He was well dressed in a white button down shirt and khaki pants, his feet in leather boat shoes. Surrounding him were the trappings of an upper middle class life; golf trophies, fishing gear, smiling family photos. Various awards from a large, well known local corporation adorned the walls alongside diplomas from a prestigious college. I winced for a moment thinking of my own small city home and community college degree. He looked at me and sneered “get out of my house,” his words thick with whiskey. Stepping into the room, I decided that my best option was aggression. I quickly moved towards him and said in a loud voice, “Get up and turn around, you’re under arrest.” Without moving to get up, he began to stutter out a response which I cut off with “get up or your going to get hurt.” Glaring at me, he rose unsteadily from his chair, a man obviously unaccustomed to being told what to do. I spun him around quickly, pushing him into a wall and handcuffing him before he could consider any other course of action. Like many abusive men I had arrested, he was unaccustomed to dealing with opponents capable of defending themselves, and seemed unsure and off balance in the face of my aggression. After calling dispatch to report that the suspect was in custody, I walked him downstairs and out the front door into the cold night air, his family watching in stunned silence from the kitchen doorway. As I exited the house my backup officer arrived, his car caked in snow. Apologizing profusely for the delay, he volunteered to secure my prisoner in his car while I completed my report inside. After placing the man in his back seat, I returned to the house to get the necessary paperwork signed by the victim and her two children. 

     As I reentered the kitchen I noticed all three staring at me as if I had two heads. “What’s wrong,” I asked, looking around at the three of them and setting my clipboard down on the table. “The cops have been here at least ten times, and nobody has ever done anything,” the man’s daughter stammered. “You just walked in and arrested him.” My face reddened with embarrassment at my coworkers negligence. Having grown up in a similarly turbulent home environment, I knew well the fear and shame that accompany the violence that happens behind closed doors, and I never missed an opportunity to intervene in these situations. I never understood the reluctance on the part of some of my fellow officers to simply do their job when an arrest was warranted. After complimenting the man’s son for his courage in defending his mother, I apologized to the three of them for the past failures of my department and went about the business of completing the arrest and preparing my prisoner for arraignment.

     Later, after a judge had set bail and remanded him to jail, I began our slow trip downtown on the snow covered streets. On the way to lockup, my prisoner began asking me what booking would be like, and if he would be in a big cell with a lot of other people like he had seen on television. He was clearly frightened, and it gave me no small amount of joy to see this abusive bully reduced to a fearful little man on the verge of tears. As we entered booking, he begged me to tell the deputies that he had fought with me, in the apparent hope that he would gain some status with the other inmates and thus be saved from whatever fate television had taught him was in store. Telling him to shut his mouth, I continued into the booking area. 

     As we came through the door, now in full view of the holding cells packed with the weekend’s city arrestees awaiting Monday morning arraignment, our noses were assaulted by the unmistakable aroma of a big city jail, a mix of unwashed bodies, Pine Sol, and urine, combined with the stink of fear. Inmates stood 20 deep in the holding cells, catcalling and laughing as we walked by. “What he in here for, embezzlement?””Put white boy in with us, we won’t hurt him.” I felt his body tense up and he suddenly shouted “get the fuck off of me, pig,” as he halfheartedly shoved me sideways with his body. Amused by his rather pathetic performance, I laughed and pushed him forward, forgetting for the moment that the deputies in booking, bored on a slow winter night, were unaware of his plan. No less than six of them, all large men intimately familiar with violence, poured over the counter in a waterfall of blue uniforms and ran to us, roughly snatching my prisoner from me before I could say a word and dragging him to “the alley,” a row of single cells at the rear of the booking area where recalcitrant prisoners were brought to be unceremoniously strip searched. Wordlessly, I handed my arrest paperwork over to the booking deputy and made my way back to my car, his aggrieved shouts growing fainter as the heavy door closed behind me. Feeling slightly guilty at how pleased I was with how things had turned out, I returned to my district to finish my shift.

I never saw him again after that night, but I did see his wife. It was summertime, about six months later, and I had been called to return to the home for another domestic report. As I walked up the driveway, she met me in the garage, smiling broadly and waving as she recognized me. I asked with some concern if he had been abusing her again. “Oh no,” she laughed. “We’re getting a divorce, today he was arguing with me about money. He hasn’t laid a hand on me or the kids since you came here that night. I don’t know what you guys did to him, but whatever it was, it scared him pretty bad.” I completed a report for her to document the verbal argument and went on my way, her grateful thank you’s echoing in my head. Police don’t often get to see the positive impact our interventions can have on the people we serve, and this call stayed with me. I’ve often reflected on that night, that family, and how the small things that we do, both good and bad, can change the lives of others in ways we simply cannot imagine.