What We Deal With

Coppers like stories. We like to tell stories, listen to them, one-up each other with em, etc. Every domestic, robbery, dope deal and homicide is a story in its own way. But when you try to relate them to someone who hasn't been through the same things, it loses something in the telling. Here's an example at an HBT incident just the other night:

• A man is in custody after barricading himself in an East Garfield Park apartment for nearly four hours Wednesday evening into early Thursday, Chicago police said.
  
  Police responded to a domestic disturbance in the 600 block of North Christiana Avenue about 9:40 p.m. Wednesday, according to a police spokeswoman.
  
  When officers arrived, the man ran from a second-floor apartment to a first-floor apartment and refused to come out, a law enforcement source said.

So rather than breach the door, gas the house, break windows, snipe the subject, the Chicago Police Department exercised restraint and talked the guy out. Well done.

You think the neighbors would be happy?

• One woman, who walked out of a home inside the blocked off area, got upset she could not walk back through the crime scene tape.
  
  The woman wore a Mickey Mouse hat as she yelled at someone over the phone. “I need my f---ing bus card. … I need to get to work in the morning,” she said. “I don’t give a f--- who brings it to me.”
  
  After a couple of minutes, a police officer walked over to the edge of the crime scene and threw the woman her bus card.

While we applaud her determination to get to an actual job, the Officers on scene probably had bigger concerns and larger issues with her wandering into and out of the line of fire. But if you tell someone who hasn't been around police work this story, they'll doubt every single word.