Adam Plantinga - 400 things cops know: street-smart lessons from a veteran patrolman

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

400 T HINGS C OPS K NOW

Every cop should read this book and so should anyone who wants an uncensored peek into the real world of street cops. Its wise and witty, fascinating and fun a lot of fun!

Joseph Wambaugh, bestselling author of The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, the Hollywood Station series, and numerous other crime novels

400 Things Cops Know is by turns funny, harrowing, insightful, chilling, and unrelentingly honest. Most books, the writer Richard Russo once said, aim for the head, the heart, the gut, or the funny-bone. The best books, he continued, go for all of them. This is one of those books.

from the foreword by C.J. Hribal

If you are considering a career in policing, read this book. Read it before you start the academy, read it after the academy, read it all through FTO and probation. Read it as you go through your career. Its that accurate. This book might very well save your life.

Pete Thoshinsky, retired police lieutenant and author of Blue in Black and White

A precise, concise, interesting, insightful, and necessary read for police officers and those contemplating police work, as well as those wanting to understand policing in society today. Once you begin to read this book you continue to want to hear more. Its well worth the readers time and money.

Michael G. Krzewinski, Ph.D., retired director of training, Milwaukee Police Department

400 T HINGS C OPS K NOW

Street-Smart Lessons
from a Veteran Patrolman

Adam Plantinga

Fresno, California

400 Things Cops Know

Copyright 2014 by Adam Plantinga. All rights reserved.

Published by Quill Driver Books

An imprint of Linden Publishing

2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721

(559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447

QuillDriverBooks.com

Quill Driver Books and Colophon are trademarks of
Linden Publishing, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-61035-247-5

135798642

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

Contents

To Jennifer

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my editors, family and friends, especially Mark, Andy, Angela, and Brent for your vital feedback on this book, and to Dean Tom Kennedy of Berry College, who got me started writing about police work in the first place.

Thanks to Quill Driver Books for taking a chance on me.

Thank you to the academy staffs of the Milwaukee and San Francisco Police Departments for teaching me the basics and beyond. And a tip of the hat to the officers Ive worked with, especially Willie Williams, Steve Pinchard, Ramon Lastrilla, Gilbert Gwinn, Rolf Mueller, Kevin Worrell, Al Ciudad, and Nico Discenza, all of whom kept me alive and highly entertained. If I know anything, its because I learned it from you guys.

Foreword

I am not a cop. And most likely neither are you. If youre at all like me, your experience of the police and police work comes mostly from TV shows, movies and maybe the occasional novel. My experience with the police might be slightly broader in that Ive also, for the past quarter-century, lived in a city neighborhood that is usually described as transitional. My neighborhood is on the edge of a ghetto, but its populated by peoplecity workers, single moms, gay couples, working-class folks and a smattering of professionals, all in the rainbow hue of colors humans usually come inwho like living in the city and having a lot more house than you can buy in the suburbs. We call the police regularly and trust that theyll help us, or at least try to.

Still, most of the time Ive no clue what their job entails, or what they do all day, or what the job looks like from their perspective. Like you, I only know I want them to show up pronto when theyre needed. And thats why 400 Things Cops Know is such a wonderful book. Adam Plantinga takes us behind the stereotypes and general notions we have about police work and gives us a richly detailed tour of what it is really like to be a copeverything from the tells a person gives off that they actually want to fight with a cop, to what its like to be pepper-sprayed, to how to kick in a door properly, to why, when you approach a car and an occupant of said car lifts his shoulders, you need to be warytheyre likely removing a gun from their waistband either to hide it under the seat or to use it.

This book is chock-full of insightful nuggets and details, like why cops write their blood type on their ballistic vests in large print, and why they dontno matter what youve seen in moviesstand in front of cars hurtling at them, blasting away. How you can lure an angry pit bull into a squad car using only Junior Mints, or what to do when faced with an underfed pit bull during a drug raid. How thugs walk versus how the rest of us do, and why, when you see the right-hand pocket of a suspects windbreaker swinging like a pendulum, you can be reasonably sure theres a gun in said pocket. Youll learn how easy it is to walk on a stolen vehicle rap, and why, when youre assigned to watch a prisoner at the hospital all shift, its likely youre in for eight hours of the prisoners scrotum on display. Youll learn about the turtle effect of shoplifters, and about ghost calls, which can haunt you, and that, while you never see Dirty Harry writing a police narrative, a big hunk of your day can be spent writing reports and filling out forms that come in various colors and with routing specifications that can make you feel like youre a bit player in Terry Gilliams Brazil.

400 Things Cops Know gives you more than what cops know; it gives you what cops feel. The befuddlement of having someone come up to you while youre making the perimeter for a bank robbery still in progress and their wondering if it would be okay if they just ducked inside for a minute to use the ATM. The rage of having a suspect, while youre arresting them, ask you to say hello to Officer X, the most recently murdered cop on your department, most likely a cop you know and have had to your house for dinner, and resisting the urge to take a swing at him, because he might have an accomplice nearby filming it so they can sue you later. The heart-wrenching, punch-in-the-gut feeling of dealing with victims of child pornography, wanting to go medieval on the perpetrator, and then going home to watch your own children sleep, and questioning the balance of good and evil in the world.

Full disclosure: some twenty years ago, Adam Plantinga was a student of mine at Marquette University. He wrote an amazing story back then called Untitled that wound up anthologized in Twenty-Five and Under: Fiction. I was impressed by the intensity of the writing, but also by its tendernessa story two-thirds Mad Max, one third Million Dollar Baby. Time and again in reading this book I was taken by how smart, how knowing, how tough, and also how tender the writing is. How human.

Ive taught writing for going on thirty years now, and 400 Things Cops Know does what great books always do: It takes you inside somebodys world so that it feels as real as your own. It renders the strange familiar and the familiar strange. (As a patrol cop, youre a generalist .You must be familiar with everything from how to treat a sucking chest wound to the various city ordinances governing horse-drawn carriages.) Told in a matter-of-fact style, 400 Things Cops Know is by turns funny, harrowing, insightful, chilling, and unrelentingly honest. Most books, the writer Richard Russo once said, aim for the head, the heart, the gut, or the funny-bone. The best books, he continued, go for all of them. This is one of those books.