Anyway, the drink’s gone down. So, next of all, I see Richard “Flatley”, also not saying a word. And I knew the head-butt was coming.
Then I walked over and I put my hand on Patrick’s chest. Richard’s face would have been smashed. I said. “It’s all right, he’s not the real man!”
Richard said, “Joe, you cut that fine!”
KIMBERLY WOOD (USA)
Female US Police Officer
Introducing … Kimberly Wood
ORIGINALLY OF IRISH decent, Kimberly Wood is the only female featured in this book. Her inclusion is not because she is nasty, violent or a criminal or because she is a world-class martial artist or boxer, but because she does one of the toughest jobs in the US – she is a policewoman.
Wood was born in 1960 on the east side of St Paul, Minnesota. Her father Frank Wood was a military police officer in the army and served in Korea. He then went on to a career in the prison service and was one of the only people in the state at the time to go from being a standard correctional officer to the highest position of commissioner of corrections. Wood’s father was a big influence in her life and career, and from a very early age she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps in some way and serve her country as he did, either as a cop or as a correctional officer. She ended up doing both.
In 1979 she joined the US Army Reserves and served six years as a reservist. She received a commendation and was honourably discharged after her contract ended. Wood then decided to follow her father and so she worked for the Sheriff’s Department as a police dispatcher while studying for law enforcement qualifications. After completing her training and passing, in 1995 she was hired by her first police department. Wood has since worked for five police departments covering city, rural and suburban areas, and was the first female police officer in two of those departments. In 2003 she became Deputy Chief Police Officer at the City of Milaca Police Department. After eight years as a policewoman she then decided to enter the prison service as a corrections officer and from 2004 to 2009 worked at the St Cloud Prison with some of the worst prisoners in the system. Wood is currently Mayor of Bock, Minnesota, the town in which she now lives and works.
This is her own story of her time as a policewoman on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, one of the toughest reservations in the US.
BEYOND THE BADGE; LIFE ON THE BEAT
By Kimberly Wood
I used to drive a patrol car in Cass Lake, which is on the Leech Lake Reservation near Bemidji. The Leech Lake Indian Reservation contains 864,158 acres, including parts of Beltrami, Cass, Hubbard and Itasca Counties, and is located in north-central Minnesota, USA. As of the 2000 census, the reservation had a population of 10,205, making it the largest Indian reservation in the state by number of residents and the second-largest (to the White Earth Indian Reservation) in terms of land area. The original, much smaller Leech Lake Indian Reservation was established in 1855 and then, under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the present “Greater” Leech Lake Indian Reservation was formed by the merger with three other smaller neighbouring reservations. Cass Lake itself is a glacially formed lake of approximately 25 square miles and the town of Cass Lake sits near the southwestern side of the lake and is approximately 90 per cent Native American.
I love the Native American culture, and have learned much from Native Americans and their way of life, and indeed continue to do so. To be intimately involved with the Native American community is extremely rare for a white person (and even more so for a white female) yet I have had that privilege, and I was given that opportunity by being a police officer. The community has generally been really helpful and I have asked lots of questions along the way. People know that the police officers care and we do make a difference; that’s one of the many reasons for me being a female Irish cop on the reservation, as we really can help people in difficult situations, be there for them when they are in crisis, protect them, get assistance or find the resources to help them.
Our job is like no other. We wear a bullet-proof vest every day to work and, although we don’t talk about it, when we leave for work we know we just might not come home at the end of the day. We work days, nights, weekends and holidays. We go to court on our days off. We work long hours and frequently – if a call has come in late in the shift – long after our shift ends (so much for the dinner, school conference or anything else that was planned after work). We have administrative tasks that have to be completed and we have classes to take, and forty-eight post credits have to be done within three years for our annual licence renewal.
Many of us generally work a rotating shift, never having the same days off. Our schedule is normally twelve-hour shifts, working day-shifts half of the month and night-shifts the other half. Many of us have pagers and cell phones, and being paged or called at home on our day off is not uncommon. Our profession is about as far from a nine-to-five, Monday through Friday job as you could possible get. Needless to say, our time off is precious and because of all of this – and more – cops need the support, love and understanding of our friends and family; most of us get that most of the time; some, well, not much at all.
I work hand-in-hand with Leech Lake Tribal Police, based on 115 Sixth Street NW, Cass Lake, which currently has a patrol division consisting of fifteen patrol officers and four patrol sergeants, and Cass County Sheriff’s Department based in Walker, Minnesota. We back each other up on calls and we frequently interact with each other, passing along valuable information – sometimes while sharing a cup of coffee – and I am grateful to have worked with some of the finest officers in the state. As police officers we work closely with other departments and people, too; fire department and ambulance personnel, doctors and nurses, security guards, social workers, judges, lawyers, city council members, the mayor, business owners and many others.
Admittedly, Leech Lake Reservation does have a high crime rate for assault and domestic disturbances, as well as having stabbings, shootings, vehicle pursuits, burglary and the rest, and at the time of writing this there are eighty-four inmates currently being held in the Cass County Sheriff’s Office for crimes ranging from parole violation and speeding to first-degree murder. However, I should say that even though my community has a high crime rate, readers shouldn’t jump to an immediate conclusion about the typical kind of citizen living on the reservation – most residents are just like me, trying to make a living and trying to enjoy a decent life. As police officers, what we don’t like to see is newspapers and the media depicting the Native American community in a purely negative light. There are, of course, negative elements in any community but there is also so much good going on in this community in which I am so proud to serve. The public needs to hear about this, too, but sadly rarely ever does.
In most cases my fellow city officers and I work alone, but we do on occasion work in pairs when we have extra officers on duty and, of course, we back each other up whenever we are called out to a situation, of which there are many …
Late one night my partner and I responded to an alleged domestic situation. The lights were out at the home where the abuse was allegedly taking place and so we walked around the back to see if any lights were on there. From out of the darkness an intoxicated Native American man from a nearby home came running out of his back door and opened fire with a .22.
“Police, put down the gun,” my partner and I yelled. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and in that split second I thought what in the hell am I doing this job for? And then, as he hesitated slightly, I thought to myself that I was going to have to kill this man. The man then quickly raised the gun up in the air and I began commands to him, instructing him to put the weapon down on the picnic table while getting closer, aiming my gun at his centre mass. The man placed the gun on a picnic table next to him then we converged on him, handcuffed him and took him into custody. And then to our surprise his wife came out and was visibly very upset and completely unable to understand why we were taking her husband to jail!
&
nbsp; On another occasion, with my partners and possessing warrants, I was searching a home for a suspect. We had not found him yet and I went down to search the basement area of the home. The basement was very bare, with no furniture and, as I looked around, I saw an unlit furnace with a little cast iron door. The door was only about eleven inches by fourteen so I thought, “Oh, what the heck,” and whipped open the little door to take a look. The first thing I saw was a section of human arm; the suspect was contorted inside the furnace. “I’m getting out, I’m getting out,” he yelped after I opened the door. The jail workers got their share of laughs that day as the guy was literally completely covered from head to foot in soot. I believe one of the jailers has yet to get the stained soot off his shirt patch.
Our job is bitter-sweet. One minute you can be taking an assault report; the next minute you’re going to a fight in progress, shots fired. You can go from something inconsequential to something intense in seconds. And that’s how our shifts usually go. We have moments of joy, laughter, sadness, hope and despair as well as high intensity and danger almost every single day we work the streets. Sometimes we see people at their best but usually when we are called out we see people at their worst: angry, violent, depressed, lonely, drunk or high, and at times defenceless and often at their most vulnerable. Being a cop is a mixed bag filled with the good, the bad and the ugly. You see things that other people don’t see on a daily basis and some things that others will never see in their lifetime. However, not everyone can go to work where 99 per cent of the time they love their job and I am grateful for that. I am grateful that we are all different because I know there are some things I just wouldn’t want to do for a living, just as there are some people that could never imagine being a cop, and I love being a cop.
One evening we were working a busy shift when the hospital reported a call from a man who had large gaping wounds to his leg, apparently from a pit bull dog. A little later, the same dog also viciously attacked a woman who ended up receiving more than 300 stitches. We got the identity of the owner as a “Mr Jones” and went to his home to speak to him and to arrest him on warrants. As we drew up outside his residence we saw he was standing on the top of the front steps, with two dogs chained around the steps. As my partner reached out to place “Mr Jones” under arrest, Jones shouted “Get ’em, Oscar”, and from around the corner came another big black pit bull baring its teeth and looking for flesh;our flesh. As he charged towards us, my partner and I both managed to get control of the dog with mace spray and then arrested the man. The dogs were later removed from the residence by specialist dog handlers.
On another occasion on routine patrol, I stopped a vehicle with no front or back licence plates or no temporary licence sticker. When I stopped the vehicle one of the passengers bailed out and ran inside a nearby grocery store. Inside the vehicle I found a fourteen-year-old driving and his dad, who was in the back seat. The vehicle smelled of marijuana. While I was running the information with Dispatch, I could see a lot of movement inside the vehicle and could see the man in the back bending down and also reaching in the front seat. The man’s license was cancelled and he was on probation. I had the boy come back to my vehicle, where I asked him, “Is there a gun in the car?”
“No,” he stated.
Then I asked, “Any other weapons in the car?”
“Yes,” he stated. “An axe under the front seat, a pipe next to the front seat.”
I searched the vehicle and found the axe and the other weapon and asked the dad why he had the axe in the vehicle. He said, “You can’t trust anyone; a man’s gotta be able to defend himself.”
My partner then showed up to assist me and he quickly told me that he had previously revoked the plates on this vehicle. In the end, I arrested the dad for violating his probation.
On another occasion, my partner was transporting a man to detox. Just prior to searching him, the man pulled an axe out of the sleeve of his trench coat, commenting, “Well, I don’t think they will let me have this at detox, so you better take it.” It seems to me that the weapon of choice lately on the reservation must be an axe! Perhaps people are comparing axes: I have this kind of axe, what kind do you have? My axe is shiny, and I sharpen mine more often than you!
On still another occasion, before sipping my coffee at the start of the day shift, I received a call about an intoxicated man assaulting people on the street with a baseball bat. When I arrived at the scene I saw three female victims, one with an apparent broken arm. My partners and I looked around for the man, who had fled the scene, and located him running on the other side of the freeway, still with the baseball bat in his hand. When the suspect saw us he dropped the bat and continued to run. My partner got hold of him and we both brought him to the ground and handcuffed him.
As cops, we put our lives on the line each and every day.
It is not all pulse-racing stuff though and we do have some really funny times on the beat, too. I remember a lady called Suzie, a very large woman at about 350 plus pounds, who would regularly get drunk and lonely and then find some reason to call the cops. I was working with a rookie cop at the time and, knowing Suzie as I did, decided to let the rookie handle it. In he went, with me following close behind, to find Suzie naked with just a sheet wrapped around her and holding a litre bottle of cheap vodka that was almost empty. Holding up the sheet around her naked body, she looked at this young new rookie officer, dropped the sheet and said, “Bet you never seen a princess before.”
The rookie’s jaw dropped to the floor while I was trying not to laugh too much. She told the rookie how cute he was and begged him to stay. Suzie was just lonely and decided to call the boys in blue for a bit of company.
I am the first and only full-time licensed female police officer within my department and have also been the very first female police officer in another department too. When we, as female police officers, put on our uniform and gear-up to patrol our cities, town and local communities, we often face more than the challenges of just our daily patrol. We face obstacles that our male counterparts do not; discrimination and sexual harassment. You would like to think that we live in a progressive and open society yet still there are many female police officers in many areas in the US who have to take verbal and in some cases physical abuse each and every day. It could be from the person you are arresting who spits on you, or slaps, punches or kicks you, or fellow police officers making sexist remarks. Although we pride ourselves in not taking it personally and being professional, it happens and even some of the people on the reservation and in the community we serve can be extremely prejudiced or sexist towards me as a female police officer; some just will not accept me as a competent police officer because their generation never had female police officers.
Research consistently demonstrates that the negative attitude of male officers is the most significant problem reported by female officers and in multi-departmental studies it has been shown that as many as 68 per cent of the female officers report having experienced sexual harassment, discrimination, alienation or mistreatment. Departments under-utilize female officers by not promoting them, or putting them in what is historically known as a “women’s job” such as working with juveniles and in communications. A poll in Law and Order magazine once showed that only 9 per cent of male officers accepted females openly. I have to say, however, that there are some departments that do treat women police officers fairly and many of the people I work with are great partners who respect my professionalism and recognize that I do my job just like them. I have had many partners who are also friends and have never judged me by my gender, only by my capabilities. One of the best partners I had was when I did my field training prior to me being released on my own. He was a typical “Andy Sipowicz” type from “NYPD Blue”; a cigar-chomping Vietnam veteran who had been a cop for many years. Initially, he made it very clear he was not happy having to work with a female, but once he could see that I could do my job we actually became good working friends, and later I w
as invited to his wedding. That’s the way it should be for everyone, but unfortunately in many cases it’s not and this not only applies to female police officers, but also minority officers.
I will always remember being thanked by a woman in her eighties for investigating and eventually charging two people responsible for the burglary of her house while she was sleeping. Seeing her tears when I was able to give back some of her stolen items that had sentimental value was very heart-warming. It’s those kind of moments that make the job so rewarding.
Recently a Cass County sheriff’s deputy received a call about a man with a gun. I assisted him, as did a tribal officer. Earlier in the day the suspect was involved in a domestic situation and had fled the scene. He ran into a residence with the gun and was holed up in an attic space. We cleared the scene, cordoned off the area and warned the neighbours to stay away from this residence as we were now dealing with an armed suspect. An officer from the state Natural Resources Department and two state troopers came to help us. We also called the Emergency Response Team, but thankfully, before they arrived, we were able to talk the man into coming down from the attic. The stand-off was over and nobody was hurt, but it could have turned into something very different. When we searched the house, we found the gun in a pile of laundry; it turned out to be a fake that looked just like a .40 calibre Beretta.
With limited resources and manpower, we are occasionally put into circumstances and situations that other officers from larger agencies would be unlikely to have to face. Whether it’s a call to a street fight at 5 a.m., a felony burglary in progress, a vehicle pursuit, a bar fight, a domestic assault, stabbing, shooting or a “shots fired” call, ultimately I know I can count on the partners I have and, although we are sometimes from different departments or agencies and we don’t all wear the same uniform, we have the same mindset. In doing our jobs and handling critical calls, everyone works together for the common good and a positive outcome. Now, does this mean everyone likes each other and has the same opinions? Well, of course not but whatever our differences when it comes to protecting a fellow officer, everything is dropped and that officer is backed up and, for a while anyway, it doesn’t matter about differences of opinions; the police officers I work with would always put themselves in harm’s way to protect a fellow officer. We handle many calls alone that larger agencies would normally have two or three units respond to, so it is critical that we are able to rely on each other like we do. Our lives literally depend on each other; one of these officers could be the one who saves my life, or I could be called upon to save theirs. So I’m grateful to every one of my partners.
The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) Page 30
