After graduating from Rollins College in 1979, I returned to my home state of Massachusetts with the expectation of quickly getting a job on a local police force. Actually securing one turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.
Since Massachusetts was (and continues to be) a civil service state, all applicants for public service jobs have to take an exam. I scored in the ninety-ninth percentile, whereupon I was placed on a waiting list. Although I had a high score, there were two things working against me. First, military veterans who applied for public service jobs were given preference. Since it was ’79 and the Vietnam War had ended four years earlier, there were a large number of vets who wanted to get into law enforcement—all of who were placed ahead of me on the list.
Second, the city of Boston had recently enacted a consent decree, which determined that for every Caucasian hired for a city job, they had to hire a minority applicant.
* * *
I stuck around Massachusetts for a while, doing odd jobs, and hoping to get called. After a year, I started looking for police work in other states.
It was during this time that I met my future wife, Sam, who was working her way through college as a bartender in Boston. After a year of me trying and failing miserably, she finally agreed to go out with me. For our first date, she didn’t show up and later claimed she had “forgotten.” I think she also mentioned the word “stalking” once or twice.
Most guys would have given up. But I persisted, and once we started dating, we quickly fell deeply in love with one another. Then, I was offered a job with a police department in Florida.
I was torn—excited to get started in police work, but unhappy to leave the woman I was planning to marry. Soon after I arrived in Florida, I ran into two other complications. One, I had a problem with my retina that had gone undetected and needed to be corrected with medication. And, two, unexpected family problems made it necessary that I live closer to Boston.
I was starting to wonder if I’d ever become a cop. Determined to be with Sam and land a police job, I kept searching and finally found one with the Burlington, Vermont, PD and received my badge on September 23, 1983.
Three months later, Sam and I were married in a small family wedding in Lynnfield, Massachusetts. With no money or time for a honeymoon, we moved into a tiny apartment in downtown Burlington. Sam found a job bartending and I started probationary field training with the Burlington PD.
Burlington in the early 1980s was a city in transition with an energetic young socialist mayor named Bernie Sanders. Sandwiched between the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain, Vermont’s capital had once been the third largest lumber port in the nation. In the early twentieth century, it transitioned into a fuel depot for oil and gas shipped throughout New England. When I arrived in ’83, the lakefront was badly polluted, the rail lines and oil storage facilities unused and rusting, and the city of fifty thousand was in decline.
In many ways, Burlington reminded me a lot of Haverhill and its population was a similar mix of blue-collar workers, the elderly, young professionals, and college students. The city’s two largest employers were General Electric and the University of Vermont.
Sam and I were poor, but happy. While we were dating she told me she had a medical condition that made it impossible for her to have children. Six months after we moved to Burlington, Sam found out she was pregnant. We were ecstatic.
Meanwhile, I was a probationary rookie learning the ropes of being a cop. First thing I realized was that the dynamics of police interaction with the public is complicated. It’s not like being a fireman, who is applauded when he or she arrives to rescue people, and save property. As a cop 80–90 percent of your contact with people is negative. You’re called when someone has been assaulted, robbed, raped, or killed.
Because Burlington was predominantly a blue-collar town, we faced a constant stream of drunken-and-disorderlies, sexual assaults, stabbings, and incidents of domestic violence. On a daily basis, I was dealing with abused children, violent criminals, and the mentally disturbed, and dealing with things that most people in society never had to face.
My Field Training Officers (FTOs) taught me the critical requirement of a successful career in law enforcement—a sense of humor. Both of them had me laughing my ass off at the strange and crazy shit we saw every day.
Where they differed was in their approach to police work. My first FTO was a tough New Yorker, who locked everyone up and sorted out their stories later. The second, Hugh Edwards, aka “the Chaplain,” had been an Army chaplain in Vietnam. His way of dealing with people was firm but compassionate. I adopted his methodology.
He taught me to be proactive and always be on the lookout for “bad guys” with outstanding arrest warrants, and to stop suspicious-looking cars. As we patrolled the downtown streets, the Chaplain would turn to me and ask, “Who’s the guy in the plaid pants? Who’s that guy drinking beer on the corner?”
Some days at the end of my shift my neck was tired from swiveling so much. The Chaplain would say, “The trick is to sniff out trouble before it happens.”
His touch was deft. If we pulled up to a street corner where a group of questionable characters were hanging out, he’d roll down his window, and say, “We’re watching you, gentlemen. Behave.”
Then, he’d wink at one of them and ask, “Hey, Bobby, how’s your mom doing? Next time you visit her in the hospital give her my best.”
At the time Burlington was experiencing an epidemic of smashed windows and radios stolen from cars. My own Golf VW had been victimized, so I knew how it felt. We were aware that a particular gang was responsible for a lot of the break-ins and included a kid named Barry Glenn.
If we saw him outside his neighborhood, we figured there was a 98 percent chance he was committing a crime. So we’d bumper-lock him, which meant following him in our patrol car at five miles per hour, or getting out and walking beside him.
Sample conversation:
“Hey, Barry, you lost?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“That’s no way to talk to a friend who is offering you a ride home.”
“Yeah, right.… Feels more like you’re threatening me.”
“No, Barry why would you say that? We’re offering to take you into custody now for something you’re going to do later.”
“Very funny.”
We would ride his ass until he got so frustrated he went home.
After four months, I was assigned to a patrol car by myself. I quickly learned that the way to earn the respect of your fellow officers was to get to police distress calls in a hurry and call for backup only when absolutely needed.
The Chaplain had told me, “Don’t be one of those cops who sits in the station talking shit. You shouldn’t be in there for more than five minutes. Put on your uniform and get to work. There’s no crime going on in the station house.”
First thing I did was learn the city inside out. It was important to know how to quickly get into a particular area, and the best way to exit in an emergency. If I was patrolling six blocks of a high-crime sector downtown, I had to memorize every store, house, and apartment building.
I quickly realized that no matter how hard I worked, I was merely sticking my finger in the dike of crime. We averaged twenty to twenty-five calls for a ten-hour shift. If I answered a domestic call, I might be two sentences into writing a report when I’d get another call and have to rush off. If my calls backed up, my bosses would get on my ass.
I saw both horrible things and people at their finest. The biggest challenge was keeping up with the paperwork. It soon became obvious that given the pace and the physical nature of some aspects of the job, police work was a young man’s game. No way I wanted to be an out-of-shape fifty-year-old officer climbing a fence chasing a suspect.
We did ten-hour shifts in fours and threes. That meant four days of ten hours each to make up a forty-hour workweek, and three days off. Most of us spent some of those three days off working special details to earn overtime, either directing traffic or looking for drunk drivers.
Our son Russell was born in February 1985, a healthy, cherubic boy who immediately became the center of our lives. Months before, shortly into a night shift, I had received a medical assist call from a nice residential neighborhood. Code 3 meant hurry to the scene with lights and siren. Code 1 was normal patrol. Since the dispatcher hadn’t communicated a code, I drove to the scene at a leisurely pace.
On a medical assist, the fire department usually responded first, and we’d show up later. As I entered the neighborhood, I heard a call go out to the fire department. This time the dispatcher called it a Code 3. So I flipped on the siren and hit the gas, and arrived before the fire department and EMTs.
When I pulled up to the house, I saw that the front door was open and there was a woman standing in it screaming and waving her arms in distress.
I hurried up to her and asked, “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
“My … oh my God.… Help! My … my baby…! Oh, God.…” She was so upset, she was choking on the words.
I tried to get her to calm down, and tell me what was wrong, but she remained hysterical so I decided to search the house on my own.
The woman offered no resistance. What I saw when I entered was a nice starter home with everything in order.
“My baby!” the woman screamed behind me.
I got it. I was searching for a baby. I poked my head in a room toward the rear of the house and saw two cribs. There were infants in both of them of the same approximate age. One was moving around and acting like a normal baby. The second, who appeared to be a twin, lay still and was a shade of purple I’d never seen before.
My first thought was: Oh, shit.…
I reached down to find a pulse and the infant’s skin felt like cold porcelain. A shiver went up my spine. I’d been a cop for less than two years at this point, and had never been on a call like this. The fire department and EMTs still hadn’t arrived.
What do I do now?
As the mother appeared in the doorway behind me, screaming about trying to contact her husband at work, I scooped up the stricken infant in my hand. I remembered from the basic medical training I had learned at the police academy that when you do CPR on an infant you can’t breathe in too hard or you risk bursting their delicate lungs.
So I started breathing into the baby’s little mouth in gentle puffs. The mother continued to scream uncontrollably. It seemed as if the baby was responding, but I wasn’t sure.
A hundred thoughts careened through my head as I puffed into the infant’s mouth again. Then I remembered that there was a hospital emergency room four miles away. The medical personnel there would be better equipped to deal with the situation than me.
I ran past the mother with the baby in my arms and said, “I’m taking him to the hospital. Fletcher Allen, ma’am. I’ll get back to you later.”
She offered no resistance. I climbed behind the wheel with the baby in one hand, fired up the engine and siren with the other, and took off like a rocket. It was raining cats and dogs outside and the streets were slick. I said to myself, Don’t get into an accident and kill us both.
As I steered through wet suburban streets, I tried massaging the infant’s heart with my thumb. They were the longest four miles of my life.
Finally, I pulled to the curb and ran with the baby into the ER. Breathless, I handed him to a nurse. From the expression on her face and those of the other two hospital technicians standing with her, I could tell that the baby was lost.
Still clinging to the last vestiges of hope, I followed them down a corridor as they ran with it to an examination room. As I watched them massage the baby’s heart, the enormity of what I was doing for a living hit me. Here was this wonderful family. It had been a normal night when they put their baby down to sleep. Then the unthinkable happened, and they were forced to rely on someone like me.
Somewhere amid the melee and shifting emotions, the mother and father arrived at the hospital, the infant was declared dead, and I had to inform them. My hands shook the whole time and I had to hold back the tears. The official cause of death was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
After a few hours’ sleep, I returned to work. The first thing my supervisor said when he saw me was, “Where’s your paperwork on the medical assist call last night? You didn’t submit a report.”
As I typed it up, I relived every second of the experience—the mother’s screams, the baby’s ice-cold skin, the disappointment I had felt in not saving the baby.
I was in my midtwenties and a relative kid. Nobody counseled me or talked to me about the incident or the impact it had on me. It was part of the job, and taught me two things: One, always be prepared to the max, particularly when it comes to providing emergency medical assistance. And, two, life is precious!
For many years, the family who lost the baby sent me a Christmas card. Every time I opened one and saw a picture of the wife and husband with their son, along with their names and the name of the son who died, my heart broke again.
Less than a year after that incident, I’d become an FTO, too. Looking at the new recruits assigned to me, I’d think: That was me a little while ago. Remember how scared and unsure you were, and how you couldn’t really appreciate the responsibilities that come with the job?
I tried to be both firm and sympathetic. Not like one FTO I knew who threw a trainee out of his car in a McDonald’s parking lot and shouted, “You’ll never be a cop, so go fill out an application,” and then drove off.
I had mostly good trainees and a few who struggled. Winter of ’85, I was training a kid named Morgan, who fell into the latter category. Guys at the precinct house constantly busted his balls about his name. “Hey, Morgan, how come you got a name that goes both ways. You trying to tell us something?”
He was earnest and kind with a master’s degree in criminology. When we went on calls together, I talked to him about the importance of establishing control. I explained that as kids we’re taught to be polite to strangers, but police work required something called “command presence.”
For example, if you got a call to respond to a disturbance at a drunk’s house and walked in and saw he had a beer in his hand, you didn’t say, “Sir, please put that beer away so we can talk.” Instead, you delivered something blunter and more direct like, “Put that beer bottle away before I knock it out of your fucking hand. Then tell me calmly what the hell is going on.”
I said to Morgan, “When you walk into someone’s house you’ve got to establish control in your own way.”
“Yeah, I got it,” he responded.
One night, two months into his training, we were nearing the end of our shift, when we got a call. “Disturbance on the fifth floor, 282 Buell.”
Lots of cops go temporarily deaf at the end of their shifts. But I wasn’t like that. Once we went over our ten-hour shift time, we started earning overtime. So what was the hurry?
The building in question was so close to the police station that you could actually see it from there. It had no elevator, so Morgan and I hoofed it to the fifth floor of the six-story building and knocked on the door. “Police. Let us in!”
We heard a lot of noise inside, but no one answered.
In police work, you only go into a house if you have no choice, because bad things can happen once you’re inside. Optimally, you want the occupants to exit and talk to you in the hallway.
Back in the ’80s, we carried PR-24 batons, which are L-shaped with a butt-like handle that becomes an extension of your arm. I banged on the door with the butt of the PR-24 for a full three minutes before someone turned down the music inside. Thirty seconds later a college-age woman answered the door. It looked like she’d been crying, but showed no signs of physical abuse.
I said, “Ma’am, we got a call about a disturbance.”
As I spoke I looked past her to see if there was a threat behind her, and spotted a guy at the end of the apartment pacing back and forth.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My boyfriend and I got into an argument,” she answered casting her eyes to the floor.
“Well, you’re going to have to keep it down. Is that your boyfriend back there?” I asked, pointing inside.
“Yeah.”
I knew from experience that I had to be careful. Women in these situations often turned on the police and defended their boyfriends. That’s why it was standard practice to respond to domestic calls with two officers.
I turned to Morgan and said, “You keep talking to her, while I go inside and check on him.”
The second I crossed the threshold I felt the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck. It was a sixth sense that I was still learning to trust.
I stopped a few feet into the apartment and said, “Hey, buddy, the police are here. Can you come out and talk to me?”
“Sure,” he responded politely.
There were a couple of beer bottles on the floor, but no signs of violence. Vermont state law at the time stated that if there was any sign of assault, we had to arrest at least one of the parties.
In this case they both seemed cooperative. The guy was in his midtwenties, wore a T-shirt and jeans, and seemed hopped up on something. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or high.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“We had an argument.”
My job at that point was to de-escalate the situation by remaining calm.
“Look,” I said, “we’ve got to figure this out. So step outside with me, so we can talk.”
“About what, sir?” he asked.
In domestic arguments, we had to ascertain who was legally entitled to reside in the house or apartment. If the lease was in his name alone, the girlfriend would have to leave, even if she had been the victim.
I said, “First, I have to establish whose apartment this is.”
We were still standing facing one another a few feet inside the apartment. I was wearing a thick leather jacket over my uniform.
“It’s my apartment,” he responded, “but she stays here. I think she signed the lease.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yes, I know, sir, but it’s my apartment. Maybe her name is on the lease. I’m not sure.”
As a policeman confronting a suspect I always had to assume there might be a confrontation at some point and size up how I would handle it. If the guy was a bodybuilder or a massive four hundred pounds, I had to be ready to draw my gun or hit him with my baton. This kid wasn’t exactly skinny, but he wasn’t muscular either. He appeared wiry and fit.
I said, “Follow me. Let’s move outside.”
I got him to follow me to the entrance. To my left was a door that led to an outside walkway area with plastic chairs. Meanwhile, Morgan moved with the woman farther inside.
From near the front door, I asked the boyfriend again, “Whose name is on the lease?”
“Mine is,” he answered.
“So is mine,” she shouted from inside.
Now the boyfriend got agitated and he and the girlfriend started arguing back and forth about who was legally entitled to be there.
I said to her, “We need to figure out who is supposed to be here, because the other one has got to go.”
The tension between them escalated. Meanwhile, the boyfriend and I still hadn’t exited the apartment.
I said to him, “You’re going to come out into the hallway with me, while my partner stays inside with her and we figure this out.”
I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his head. I knew he was hopped up on something. Maybe he took what I said to mean that even though it was his place, he was the one who was going to be kicked out.
All I know is that he took two steps toward the door, then screamed and sprung at me like a tiger on steroids. I hit him in the chest to try to stop him and felt his muscles flexing. Next thing I knew he had pushed me through the door that led to an outside walkway with a waist-high barrier on each end. Before I knew what was happening, the crazed boyfriend was going for my throat. I raised my hands to stop him.
Even though he had turned on me unexpectedly, I wasn’t really concerned at this point, nor did I feel like fighting at the end of my shift. I was basically holding the guy and waiting for Morgan to come to my aid and help me take him down. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, as soon as someone grabs a cop, his partner is at his side in seconds. Our lives depend on one another, so we have to have the other’s back.
But this case, Morgan remained in the apartment talking to the woman. He could see me and the boyfriend clearly, but didn’t move.
Realizing I was on my own, and had to deal with a guy who had gone berserk, I tried to kick the boyfriend’s legs out. Most people don’t see it coming and go down immediately. But when I kicked this kid’s legs, it felt like I was hitting an oak tree. His very taut muscles didn’t budge.
Now it was getting serious. As we grappled in the cold air on the walkway, the boyfriend seemed to be growing bigger and stronger. We were about the same height, but I was thicker in the shoulders and torso from lifting weights. Like the Incredible Hulk, the boyfriend screamed again, lifted me off my feet, and threw me like a rag doll toward the edge. The hip-high metal railing stopped me. Otherwise, I would have fallen five stories into a rubble-filled alley.
My brain screamed at that point, If you don’t do something now, you’re going to die!
The boyfriend started trying to lift me and throw me over the railing. He had his hand on my chin and was trying to use his legs as leverage. Morgan still wasn’t helping. Feeling a well of anger burst inside me, I waited for his legs to part, then rolled and kneed him in the balls as hard as I could.
The fight went out of him like air out of a punctured balloon, and he relaxed his grip. I immediately swung my body on top of him and cuffed the son of a bitch.
Now he was in agony and I was on my knees sucking wind. Looking up at the night sky, I kept telling myself I had a wife and kid at home and had just come within inches of losing my life. The maniac beneath me with his balls in his throat was so fucked up on God knows what, he probably would have gone over the ledge with me without even realizing what he was doing.
That’s police work. One minute you’re bored out of your skull, the next you’re fighting for your life.
Morgan finally showed up. He looked at me standing over the handcuffed kid and started stuttering, “I … I w-w-wasn’t sure … w-what was going on.”
I growled, “Shut up and stop talking.” Then I grabbed my radio and called for a second car. Guys at the station thought the message had been garbled because I almost never called for backup and had a partner with me. When I repeated that I needed help, they responded like the cavalry.
Later, when I walked back to the patrol car with the handcuffed boyfriend, I saw Morgan waiting in the passenger seat. “Look,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know—”
I interrupted him with two words. “You’re done.”
It was the end of the workweek. I decided to take the next three days off and sit in bed, where I replayed the incident over and over in my head, and thanked God I was still alive.
I never told my wife. A couple of months earlier, I’d been jumped while on duty by some drunks in a bar and beat up pretty badly. When I returned home from that fight bleeding with two badly swollen eyes and a separated shoulder, and I told Sam what happened, she’d gotten extremely upset. We agreed at that point that for the sake of our marriage, I would never discuss what happened at work.
I stayed true to that promise.
Four days later, when I returned to work, Morgan had already submitted his resignation. Nice kid, but he wasn’t suited for police work. Few people are.