High Times and Misdemeanors

Hello all you wonderful citizens,

Well, today I had a first on this job. After almost nine years as a Parking Control Officer, I was impounding a car today and I found drugs inside! Well, a drug. Well, a little pot. But still! Okay, here's what happened:

I was looking for a different car I had seen while tooling around whose tags looked like they were expired in 2010. So, I circled the block and came up a side street. Looky there! An SUV from, da da da dah! Texas. I always check the vehicles from Texas because they are notorious for not registering their cars in Texas or when they leave Texas (Now you know one of the reasons I'm rooting for the Cardinals in the World Series). Sure enough the reg was out of date from February of 2011. Oops. So, I called for the tow truck, he got there and he started hooking the car up. Now, the police have requested that we PCOs do a fairly thorough inventory of the vehicle we are impounding - outside and in. This is so no one can claim that the tow truck driver put a dent in the thing or that something was stolen from inside. The driver had almost finished when I figured that the vehicle owner was probably in one of the nearby houses and we should perhaps take the thing around the corner and finish up away from the house. Either the owner will appear or a neighbor will think they are helping by emerging, going over and knocking on the owner's door and warning them. This is a big pain to us, naturally.

So, we take the SUV around the corner to be away from prying eyes. We open it. Of course, it had an alarm. Great. What we didn't know was, the owner was in the very office building that we were parked in front of visiting his father. Oops. Now by this time I had looked inside the vehicle and found a small container of pot (which smelled pretty righteous - of course I've only been told that's how it smells) which had a medical marijuana label on it (Chuckle. Yeah, right). So, I had to do my duty and call for an officer to come and take the offending substance away. I did so and just then, the kid comes out and says, what are you guys doing? I mean, what does it LOOK like we're doing? He says, can't we talk about this, can't we do something about this, can't I take care of this now? All the while I'm thinking he really must be nervous about that grass in the center console. I tell him, no, I'm impounding the car. So he gets on his cell and calls his dad in the office building. His dad comes out and starts making gorilla faces and postures, you know, huffing and puffing and all that. Then, I kid you not, he climbs up onto the back of the tow truck just like King Kong and says he's not coming down and we'd better release the vehicle, blah blah, grunt grunt. I'm surprised he didn't start pounding his chest. He was trying to scare both of us but he was not succeeding. By this time, his kid (cut from the same simian cloth) had gone into the car, retrieved the pot and stuffed it down his pants. He takes off across the small side street where two of his buddies are, gives them the dope and they take off down the street.

Well, the cops arrive (and I do mean cops. Three squad cars and a motor officer - the Sarge) and I tell them the whole shot and they do what cops do best - they intimidate the shit out of people (not me, of course). They control the whole situation beautifully. I think they fined the kid for the pot (he admitted he had some in the car, the dummy) and they put the old man on notice to keep it together and let us (me and the tow truck driver) do our jobs. Then the Sarge (thanks, Sarge) says, are you guys done? We say yes and he says, then you can take off. And we do.

For the first time finding drugs in a vehicle (for me anyway. Some of my colleagues have before), the whole thing turned out to be a lot of fun. The only thing I haven't seen yet is a dead body in a car. I'm thinking that would be decidedly not as much fun.

Ten-Seven