The burglar sped from the scene with the city police in hot pursuit. The sheriff’s deputies set up a roadblock at the city limits. They let the burglar through, then blocked the road and stopped the pursuit.
Frank, the burglar, was known to every cop in Kerrville in the early 1970s. One night, a patrolman spotted his old pickup in a wealthy suburb. Suspecting that he was doing a burglary, the three officers on duty that night surreptitiously surrounded the block where the truck was parked.
Soon, Frank was spotted running out from between houses with an armload of loot. As he threw it into the back of his truck, the officers moved in. But Frank made it into his truck and the chase was on.
The sheriff’s dispatcher alerted the deputies on duty in the county. From the direction the chase was proceeding, they deduced the farm road Frank would take out of town and set up a roadblock at the city limits. They let Frank speed by, then pulled a couple of sheriff’s vehicles across the road, bumper to bumper, to block the city cops from the pursuit.
“Doc” had previously been a city cop, but he was so incompetent that the chief had demoted him to foot patrol in the downtown area. Doc’s last job with the city police had been to walk the two or three blocks of downtown and write tickets for expired parking meter violations.
Meanwhile, the sheriff had become immensely unpopular. Doc got the backing of a couple of political bigwigs to run against the sheriff and, sure enough, Doc got elected. Being the petty man he was, he vowed retribution for the insult of being demoted to meter maid.
All of the law enforcement officers in the area – city, county, state, and federal – drank coffee every morning at the Del Norte Cafe. Some of us developed good working relationships across the jurisdiction lines, but the official policy of the two departments remained adversarial. So when Doc heard the radio traffic on his home scanner that night, he phoned his dispatcher and ordered the roadblock.
At the same time, the Texas DPS dispatcher heard the radio traffic from both agencies and recognized what was going on. He dispatched the available Highway Patrol units to the intersection of Interstate 10 and the farm road on which the chase was taking place. When Frank hit the interstate, he had a couple of Highway Patrol units waiting. His old truck was no match for the new Highway Patrol cars.
Nonetheless, Frank was not going to surrender easily. The pursuit ran almost to San Antonio before Frank finally wrecked out. He was seriously injured and ended up in the hospital in serious condition. His truck, of course, was totaled and the stuff he had stolen was destroyed in the wreck.
I’ve worked in jurisdictions where neighboring agencies all worked together as one big happy family and others where they were neighboring strangers. But never again have I seen the enmity that existed between the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office and the Kerrville Police Department in the early 1970s.