The senior detective asked me, a brand new, just promoted detective, to be his lookout while he committed a burglary.
Call him Sam. He poked his head in my office one day and said, “Hey, Pat, let’s go for a ride. I need your help with something.”
On the way to the Water Street Cottages, he explained that two girls living in one of the cottages were forging checks and he needed samples of their handwriting. The girls were at work. Sam was going to sneak around to the back of their cottage where there was a window, but where he would be shielded from view by a fence. He needed me to stand lookout nearby and warn him by walkie-talkie if anybody was coming.
I was shocked. I asked if he had a search warrant. He did not. I objected that what he was planning was not only illegal, but even if he found something, he could not use it in court. He said it was the only way to get what he needed. Being young (this occurred almost fifty years ago) and still wet behind the ears as a cop, I agreed to do as he asked, but with strong reservations.
Sam was in the girls’ apartment for about fifteen minutes and came out empty handed. I told him I had been thinking about it while I was waiting for him, and I had a better idea. I knew the manager at the cottages, a crusty old lady who drank whisky from a water glass all day long and carried a .38 in the pocket of the bathrobe she habitually wore. I stopped by just to visit with her on a regular basis. She was a fountain of information and was always eager to rid her cottages of criminals, even though it was mostly the dregs of society who lived there.
I would ask her to rearrange the garbage cans that sat around the grounds of the cottages, so that there would be one in front of the girls’ cottage and one in front of each cottage on either side of there. That way, hypothetically, the only trash left in the can in front of the girls’ cottage would be theirs. Sam could slip by and retrieve their garbage bag on pick up day before the trash truck came by.
Sam liked the idea, so I set it up for him. He never talked to me about his case again that I can recall, and he certainly never asked me to be his lookout again.
My early years as a small-town cop were eye opening. My lieutenant occasionally lied in affidavits to get search warrants. Some of the cops, if they found a school or restaurant open, would help themselves to the food in the kitchen refrigerators. One of the cops would even go into the convenience store that let the deep night shift have coffee and snacks for free, but he would load up grocery bags with stuff to take home to the family.
I left that department a few years later and went to one in a larger city where such behavior was not tolerated and where the Chief demanded the utmost in professionalism and ethics. I would like to think that police work has been ridded of petty thieves and cops who break the rules “for a greater good.”
But I’m pretty sure it isn’t so.