March 26
Very busy last night, with the crew ending up with five or six reports.
The big call came about 0330 or so. Ted, Bi-Bob and myself are sitting in the EDR enjoying 482 and watching some thrilling show on the History Channel about the building of ice highways (or something like that) in the Northwest Territories when Jo(s)e gets on the radio and says there’s a guy in the E-Core presenting a gun to a hooker.
All four of us, including White Sox Metzger who was in the EDR sitting at another table doing some reading, are off. We get there and some of the guys have a young Mexican guy wrestled to the ground and he’s pissed at us because he’s done nothing wrong, of course. They don’t really need me, so I do crowd control, itself no small task because this is right in the middle of a busy area.
Before heading back to 482 I radioed JK, Boy Dispatcher to see if he needed any help, but he said no, he was all right. This wasn’t a surprise because once you dispatch officers to the scene there isn’t all that much to do except watch what happens and coordinate everyone.
A good example of this happened while John was on 482, when we had simultaneous incidents that would have, on their own, required us to go Code 30. First, I get a call from a guest.
– Security, Gaylon.
– Yeah, you gotta get up here. Some woman is crying next door. She’s saying I don’t want to do this.
I get the room number and get on the horn. Unfortunately, we don’t have a free Henry unit. White Sox Metzger was on his 10-10 and OMP and Michaels were on separate calls. This is a minor detail, though:
– Control, Henry 1 and Henry 2, 22 your last assignment; Henry 3, break away from your 10-10. 85 to 24-311, possible 417. All units, let’s go Code 30.”
Right then Jeremy, who is OT at Eddie – 1, gets on the horn and announces there’s a fight going on across from the employee parking lot, near the Lance Burton Theater. I’m trying to pull up the appropriate camera and by the time I do the fight has moved and I am not familiar enough with the system to know immediately what camera to go to. In fact, I never do get to see what went down.
The outside units take command of this, doing a splendid job without interference from me. In fact, all I’m doing is saying 10-4 a lot, which is good because I am busy with what is going on in the hotel, which after some time turns out to be code four, according to Michaels.
We are still so short-handed it isn’t even funny. There were a couple of instances where we simply did not have an available officer. The worst stretch came right after I came back from lunch, just after 0400. Fred, FTO Terry and Spike were at 482, two officers were on validators, and there were officers at the podium and Eddie – 2. This left one officer, Bi-Bob, available, but even he was busy taking money from some tables to the cage, so pit one could set up for a slot tournament.
88Dick had actually called me a couple of hours earlier and instructed me to find two officers for this evolution. I said yes, sir and checked the schedule and saw we would only be able to produce two officers if we hired and trained one in the next ten minutes. I told 88Dick this and he told me to ‘make it happen’, but Dick is a good supervisor, and, after thinking it over, realized that was not a very productive order and said he’d take care of it.
There really weren’t many options; I mean, you can’t shit 10-8 officers. We could’ve put the guy at Eddie – 2 on it, but 88Dick did not want to leave a fixed post unmanned. And then, recall, we had the guy with the gun in custody and there were two or three officers tied up with that and there was an hour or so period where we had no one to respond to calls. We even had to tell the slot techs, who are pretty nice guys, to come back later because we had no one to do their escort.
Then at 0630 I’m sitting there BSing with Regalado, day shift David 1, when we get a call from a guest in the hotel who says a black girl just took $700 from him.
The guy got lucky. Regalado is really good at what he does and was able to work the cameras and find the girl and Ted and Spencer stopped her outside and eventually, all three Henry units were out there, too. The guy came and ID’d her, she denied knowing him, he said he wanted to press charges and we were about to hook her up when she gave him back his money.
White Sox Metzger got the Joe Friday Award for the night. About 0500 he calls me and reports there is someone sleeping in a dumpster on North Drive. He says the dumpster is filled with mattresses and that one of them is moving and he even sees some luggage and he’s convinced someone is sleeping in there.
All right. I work the cameras and find the dumpster and there is a mattress is sticking out, but the wind is blowing harder than a whore with the fleet in and I suspect it’s the wind that’s moving the mattress, not a bum looking for a place to crash but I dutifully send Eric the Monster and Jeffrey and they say there’s nobody in there and make some snide remarks to/about White Sox Metzger.