When I was a patrol sergeant at Plano Police Department, I came up with a novel way to motivate my officers and give them each a little reward once a month. When an officer did something particularly noteworthy during the week, I would let him check out an unmarked vehicle and watch a liquor store on a Friday or Saturday night to catch minors buying booze, then file the paperwork to suspend the store’s liquor license.
The department had a Pontiac Trans Am seized in a narcotics deal and invariably, that was the car the lucky officer would pick on his night to play undercover surveillance cop. There were any number of small liquor stores in the strip shopping centers where you could set up halfway across the parking lot and watch through binoculars. I don’t think any of my officers ever came up dry when they got a chance to work the liquor stores.
I remember one time when I came in on my day off to play the game myself. Instead of the Trans Am, I picked the beat up old panel van. We had several sets of magnetic signs to stick on the side to pose as an electrician’s van, a plumber’s van, or one or two other businesses. I think I was using the electrician’s signs on the van the night in question.
A car pulled up in front of the liquor store I was watching about 10:00 PM. Three girls got out and went into the store, then came back out a few minutes later with a couple of bags and got into their car. Unbelievably, they pulled across the parking lot and parked in the spot directly next to me.
It was a hot night and I had the windows open on the van. I leaned back and pressed myself into the seat to try and make myself invisible. Their car windows were down, too, and I could hear their conversation crystal clear. The driver turned on the dome light and they began pulling the beer cans out of the twelve-packs and wrapping the cans with clinging plastic labels that said “Caca Cola.” They were laughing about the clever way of outsmarting cops. On casual inspection, the cans looked everything in the world like Coke cans.
From the girls’ conversation, I learned that the clerk knew they were underaged and he kept a stash of the “Caca Cola” labels under the counter for occasions when minors came in to buy beer.
As soon as the girls had started to drive off, I radioed one of my officers in the district. He stopped the car about six blocks away and shocked the hell out of them by knowing exactly what they had in the car and how they had got it. He ticketed each of them for minor in possession. In spite of the fact that some of them feigned ignorance of the beer, I had clearly seen the whole group go into the store and heard them laughing about it less than ten feet from where I sat watching them put on the fake labels.
We drew a healthy license suspension on the store for knowingly selling to minors that night and enabling them to disguise the beer cans. I don’t think the girls ever learned how the officer who stopped them had known what they were up to.
