Early in my career, I remember several of the older guys telling me to, “work smarter, not harder.” I used to think that was just code the old lazy bastards in the department used to try to get the rest of us to slow down. Turns out, that’s not always true.
I mean, sometimes it is. But not always.
I was working a day shift as a patrol officer back around 1997, when an incident during a traffic stop gave me a new appreciation for the expression.
We had a new officer working on our shift at that time. For the sake of brevity, let’s just refer to him as Officer Newguy. That morning during briefing, the sergeant on the shift told us that our Field Training Officer (FTO) was off sick and Newguy had no one to ride with. I was not an FTO, but I was the senior officer working the shift that day, so the sergeant said the trainee was going to ride with me.
I told the sergeant I would be happy to take the trainee. I said, “I can use the extra five percent FTO training pay. Thanks, Sarge.”
The sergeant stared at me for a long moment, then asked, “What?”
“Well, if I’m going to be working as a training officer, I just assumed I would also get paid as a training officer. Seems fair.”
The sergeant just stared at me some more.
“I’m not getting paid, am I?” I said.
“You’re not getting paid,” the sergeant agreed.
That was how the day started. That was the working harder part. The working smarter part came later.
A couple of hours into the shift, Officer Newguy was driving our patrol car and he asked if he could make a traffic stop. The car in front of us had a brake light out and he wanted to stop it and talk to the driver. I told him to go ahead.
The officer turned on the overhead lights and stopped the offending vehicle.
The driver of the car was a kid, about seventeen years old. He explained he was driving his mom’s car and didn’t know the brake light didn’t work. He apologized and handed us his driver’s license and vehicle registration. He was unable to find any insurance paperwork in the glovebox and told us so.
Newguy and I returned to our car and I had him call dispatch on the radio and check the kid’s driver’s license information. We discovered the license was suspended because the driver had recently gotten into an accident and he did not have any car insurance. This wasn’t a huge deal, but it was still technically a misdemeanor crime for the kid to be driving a car without a valid license.
Officer Newguy went back to talk to the kid. He had the driver step out of his car, then told him that his license had been suspended.
Before the sentence was completely out of the officer’s mouth, the kid was running down the street looking like a blond version of Forest Gump with the bullies running after him. Newguy took off after the kid like a dog takes off after a squirrel.
I tried to tell Newguy not to chase the kid, but they were both already too far away to hear me. The last I saw of Newguy was a blue uniform climbing over a fence into someone’s backyard.
I got a second glimpse of him when he popped up just long enough to hop another fence, but I knew they were too far away for me to ever hope to catch up with them.
Foot pursuits can be dangerous. The driver was just a kid, but you never know when someone is carrying a weapon. Besides, just jumping fences can cause an injury. I was about to use the radio to tell Officer Newguy to stop and come back to the patrol car, but Newguy beat me to it.
“One in custody,” he announced on the air.
“Bring him back to the patrol car,” I responded, then waited for Newguy to return with his prize.
After Newguy placed the handcuffed kid in the back of our car, he looked at me with a huge smile on his face. He was sweaty, muddy, and had a brand-new hole in his shirt from a nail sticking out of one of the fences he climbed.
“I got him! I caught him trying to get inside a house about a block away from here.”
I held up the kid’s driver’s license, which I had been holding during the entire foot pursuit. “Was he trying to get into this house?” I asked, pointing at the address printed on the front of the license.
The smile on Newguy’s face disappeared. “Uh … yeah.”
“We stopped this kid a block away from his house. Where else was he going to run to? You know, we could have just walked over there and knocked on the door after he took off. Or even better, tow his car and call his mom. Her information is on the registration.”
Newguy was not happy. He was even less happy when I told him to write the kid a ticket and let him go.
“He’s not going to jail?” Newguy asked me, incredulous.
“It’s a traffic misdemeanor. We’re not wasting everybody’s time driving him to the jail.”
“But he ran!”
“And you were silly enough to go running after him. That doesn’t change anything.”
I patted Newguy on the shoulder, and for the first time in my career I got to utter those words of wisdom to someone else. “Use your head, rookie. You have to work smarter, not harder.”
And I know exactly what Newguy was thinking at that moment when I said it.
“You lazy bastard.”
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