Swiss Army Cops

Cops who work midnights are like Swiss Army knives — multipurpose, versatile, and according to some results of a recent Google search: often dull, useless in combat, and sometimes equipped with a fish scaler. To be clear, the Google search was about the knife, not the cops. I’ve never seen a cop with a fish scaler, at least on duty.

Just Us

The simple reason midnight officers are the multi-tool of the department is that there are no other resources or divisions to rely on. It’s just us. Everyone’s asleep and no one answers the phone. We have to figure stuff out and handle it. Unlike the cushy Day Shift who has 17 different supervisors to interject themselves into a situation just to make one decision and various divisions to draw from, on midnights, it’s just us, and we get stuff done.

I’m a firm believer that most situations can be resolved with a little common sense, the right tools, and adequate caffeination. Among the calls that are a bane to our existence are animal complaints. And since Animal Control Officers are never around when you need them, and let’s be honest, no one knows what they actually do, we have to get creative. To illustrate this point in a very average way, here are three of my more memorable midnight experiences.

City Critters

Like I’ve said before, animal calls can be a real pain and ACOs are never around, but they are still problems that need solving. I’ve found that when I worked in a smaller town, the most common animal complaints were the big three: barking dogs, wayward farm animals, and deer with bad timing. But when I got to the city, that changed.

In the city, barking dogs turned to biting dogs, mainly because pit bulls were standard-issue in the inner city, and the owners were — and I say this with all due respect — massive losers. And then there were bats. I don’t think I ever went to a single bat call in my first department, but in the city, we got them all the time. Then there are opossums. Opossums like trash, inner city people like throwing trash in the alley, therefore opossums like alleys. It’s a match made in Heaven. And finally, there are the more exotic or unusual kind of pets like snakes, lizards, turtles, and reptiles of various persuasions, with the occasional random mammal thrown in.

A Swing And A Miss

When it came to bats, I had an unbelievable batting average (see what I did there?). Give me a broom and a Walmart shopping bag and I was unstoppable. I got so good, in fact, that when the call came in over the air I would play the 1960’s theme song from the Batman TV show on my phone, hold it up to the mic, let it play a few bars, and then answer Dispatch. This blatant display of hubris was basically the same thing as Babe Ruth pointing to the sky and calling his next home run. Okay, so it’s not even close to that, but it was funny.

I was batting a thousand until one night I went to a bat call that came in from several college girls who roomed together on the third floor of an early-1900’s apartment building. There was a bat flying around in their apartment and they were freaking out. These girls needed saving and I was the guy who was going to do it. Cue the Batman theme song.

However, it was not meant to be and my batting average took a hit (that was yet another pun if you missed it). I can neither confirm nor deny that after searching the apartment and finding an enormous Hillary Clinton campaign poster on the wall and five copies of her book prominently displayed on a bookshelf, I was unable to locate the bat. It just vanished.

Playing Possum

Dogs, like cats, will sometimes kill something and drag it home. Except on special occasions when that something isn’t really dead, it’s just playing.

On this particular occasion a man’s dog had gotten into a fight with an opossum in the alley. And if there’s anything I know about city ‘possums, it’s that they fight dirty. But it wasn’t the fight the prompted the call, it was that the dog had, believing he had been victorious, carried his trophy into the house and into his bed. Or more specifically, into his owner’s bed where he also sleeps. So now this man had a thought-to-be-dead-but-actually-alive-and-quite-angry opossum in his bed.

After one step into that man’s bedroom and one look at the hissing marsupial with it’s roughly 3,000 teeth, I figured I was going to need some different tools. I called Dispatch and requested the ACO van, fully stocked with everything I would need to wrangle all manner of animals — or in this case, stocked with one noose-on-a-pole thing that had seen better days. It was basically a pool skimmer with a little wire loop on the end.

With the tool of victory in hand I re-entered the man’s bedroom and approached the beast. It had rolled over onto its back, curled its head and tail together, and had its mouth gaping open with teeth glistening in the light of my flashlight. I slipped the wire noose over the hissing opossum, cinched it up, and carried the creature suspended from the end of the pole into the alley from whence it came. I quietly backed away, never losing sight of it, and chocked it up as another battle won.

One important thing I learned from that experience was that there are no theme songs for opossums, and that’s a travesty.

Something In The Ceiling

I walked up the rickety exterior staircase to the third floor balcony held together by a few remaining nails and the grace of God. The staircase sloped heavily to one side leading me to believe it had been constructed before the invention of both the level and the plumb line. When my field of view crested the last few stairs I looked to my left at the apartment door and saw what looked like a Rube Goldberg machine that had been constructed by a third-grader. Several mismatched dining chairs, a wood plank, and various accoutrements made up a sort of off-ramp that lead downward from the stained ceiling tiles above the kitchen.

The terrified family had barricaded themselves in the adjoining room while the “man of the house” had spent apparently a lot of time and mental energy constructing this … whatever it was. All anyone could tell me was that there was something in the ceiling and this had been their plan to get it out: build a plank of dubious reliability and hope whatever it was just decided to walk on down the ramp thing and close the door behind it on its way out.

The Space Between

I don’t know how long the charade had gone on before I got there, but I was straight out of roll call, pending calls were stacked, and I didn’t have time to wait for the international creature of mystery to find its way out on its own. It was time to get stuff done because that’s what heroes do.

After unstacking the chair pyramid and setting the plank aside, I stood on the one chair that appeared load-bearing and took a peek up in the space between the ceiling tiles and patchwork of strapping and horsehair plaster. By the light of my flashlight I could see through the dust and cobwebs across the top of the entire apartment, from end to end and side to side. It was one big open space until it abruptly ended at the extreme edges where it stopped at the brick and mortar of the building. And there in the distance, reflected in the beam of my light, was a pair of beady, red little eyes looking back at me.

Kevin

It didn’t take long for me to recognize what it was since it was the spitting image of my nephew’s pet ferret named Kevin. I called out to the furry little slinky and made some those kissing noises that science has taught us is the universal call to animals of all types. Kevin (I’ll just call him Kevin) made his way over to me in a matter of seconds, because, science. I picked him up, put him in a kennel, and brought him to ferret jail at the animal shelter where I snapped a booking photo of my first arrest of the night before saying goodbye.

I came, saw, and conquered the call in less time than it takes an Animal Control Officer to tie their shoes. That’s what midnight officers do and that’s why they’re the Swiss Army knives of law enforcement — minus the fish scaler.

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