Discretion And The Death Of A Trash Panda

Animal Control Officers are like air fresheners or stiff breezes, they’re never around when you need them.

Over the years it seems that the average person solves less and less of their own problems and relies more and more on calling the police. For everything. Although 911 was a great idea it has become a two-edged sword because the meaning of the word emergency all depends on who you ask. We drive around with that easy to remember three digit number on all our cruisers just begging people to call in the dumbest things.

Emergency!

Here are just a few examples of 911 calls that I have personally taken while working overtime in Dispatch:

• There’s a car in my condo parking lot playing loud music
• My neighbor is blowing leaves onto my property
• I locked my keys in my car and it’s parked in my own driveway
• What time do we have to move our cars for the snow emergency?
• They made my coffee wrong and won’t give me a refund
• My roommate took my drugs and won’t give them back
• I locked myself in the bathroom and I can’t get out

And just to clarify, none of these are emergencies. I remember telling the guy who locked his keys in his car that 911 is for emergencies and to please call on the business line. His response: Well, it’s an emergency to me! See what I mean? Totally relative. It seems to me — and I say this with all due respect — that the people of America are getting dumber by the minute.

Squeaky Wheels

Small towns have their own flavor of politics which, much like idiotic 911 calls, generate calls for service that just never should have been. Many of which manage to come in right before the end of shift. It’s the squeaky wheel in small towns that get the oil.

One day while working the day shift I had 15 minutes to go before it was time to bring it in and I was dispatched to a 911 call for a “possibly” rabid raccoon. Of course, Animal Control was nowhere to be found. The caller was concerned for primarily two reasons. One, the raccoon was out during daylight so therefore it must be rabid. And two, it was near an elementary school so children were in grave imminent danger. Obviously.

The caller never said anything about the trash panda foaming at the mouth or actively ripping peoples’ faces off, so I figured it was more likely than not that the ring-tailed critter was just having trouble sleeping and was totally harmless. So, I did what any respectable dayshift patrolman would do and put my blinders on before driving over to check the area for this alleged menace to society.

Good News and Bad News

I drove through the area and lo and behold, I accidentally spotted the dang thing with its head sticking out from underneath a shed. The raccoon was lying on its back gnawing on the bottom edge of someone’s shed. That was the bad news.

The good news was that it was not foaming at the mouth nor did it come after me and try to rip my face off. What did I do, you ask. I made a judgment call and used the three most important letters in the vocabulary of any police officer nearing the end of their shift: G.O.A.

Second Call

To totally rationalize my decision and to avoid admitting to being a big fat liar, the raccoon had disappeared into the shadows beneath the shed and I could no longer see him, so for all intents and purposes, he was gone on arrival. He was gone and so was I. Minutes later I docked my cruiser at the station and headed for the locker room. All’s well that ends well.

It wasn’t until the following day that I found out what had happened with Mr. Raccoon and to the officer who responded back to the school for a second call. Let’s just say it didn’t go well for either of them.

Amazingly, the raccoon reappeared after school let out while the playground was full of happy children. Someone spotted it — I don’t know if it was the same person or not — and called it in. The second shift officer responded right out of the gates, forgetting to wear his blinders, and located the little trash thief within eyesight of the chain link fence bordering the playground. Needless to say the obvious police presence attracted the attention of numerous youngsters. The officer then made the decision that the raccoon was dangerous and in order to save the children he decided to smoke it right then and there next to the playground thereby traumatizing several elementary school students and promptly had a formal complaint on his hands.

Chain Reaction

Discretion is a powerful thing. In fact, I would argue that, as police officers, our only real power comes from our discretion. We make an untold number of decisions per day, and none of those decisions are made in a vacuum. Each one has consequences — both good and bad, great and small — that affect other decisions and other outcomes in any given chain of events.

The truth is that we don’t have crystal balls and cannot predict the future, we can only make our best judgements based on the information we have or don’t have at the time. Sometimes we can be tired, lazy, or annoyed, which may or may not influence the decision we ultimately make. In this case, I was probably influenced by all three. Without a window into the Multiverse there’s no way for me to know all the possible outcomes had I chosen to do something different. But in hindsight, I should have handled it differently and just dealt with the problem and not left it for someone else. If I had done that I would have saved a lot of people of lot of trouble.

The important thing to remember is not only that discretion is powerful, but that it also has consequences. What we do or don’t do affects other people and other outcomes. We have to take ownership of our part and not blame those who came before us or who will come after us.

__________________________

• Are you in the habit of leaving problems for someone else?
• Do you make decisions in a vacuum?
• Have you been left to clean up someone else’s mess?
• Do you let short term emotions influence long term decisions?

__________________________

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