Tales From the Laurel Police Department
Summer 2024
This continuing series is an uncomplicated string of personal war stories from my time at a small municipal police department between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., told without a lot of extravagant details; just the facts, ma’am. Other cops will appreciate the bare-bones setups of my individual anecdotes. But I do try to explain some of the procedures for the general public who has little understanding of why we do some of the things we do.
The men and women I worked with are the finest you will find in any police agency anywhere. Some have since retired or moved on to other agencies, and some are still there fighting the good fight. Hopefully, this bit of sucking up will make up for any inconsistencies in my memory of the events in which some of these great guys made an appearance. They will no doubt recognize their own first names and possibly the fictitious names of some of our less-than-law-abiding customers.
So grab yourself a cup of java or crack open a beer and get comfortable. You’re in a room full of cops talking shop. And the attitudes, sometimes smart-ass, sometimes despairing, that go with it. In our town, on my shift, this was policing in the last decades of the 20th century.
Back before “diversity” was a thing, we knew we had a variety of ethnic groups represented in the town. That’s not a bad thing at all in my mind but around dinner time in some of the apartment projects the cooking smells could either make your mouth water or your eyes water. I had a “gas leak” call once that turned out to be curry. HAZMAT is in the eye, er nose, of the beholder.
This one has no “guy” to speak of but it’s a good example of ethnic diversity. One day I was poking around behind the Safeway on Bowie Road along the B&O Railroad tracks and came upon an interesting find. Now, to give you the broader picture, on the far side of the train tracks is Steward Manor apartments, a frequent source of all manner of cooking odors. The tracks were within walking distance of both the apartment project and ran along the back of the Safeway store. The narrow space between the store and railroad embankment was only about 12-15 feet wide and a couple hundred feet along the back of the building. There are no doors or windows on the back wall and no reason for anyone to go back there so anyone with some creativity could put the space to some kind of use with no one knowing, least of all the management of Safeway.
So for some reason, I was snooping along the tracks and discovered a rice and water plant garden the whole length of the building. The topography there was slightly downhill toward Bowie Road and the garden was beautifully terraced and separated into different flooded levels for each crop. There was rice, watercress, I think water chestnuts, and things I didn’t recognize, all fed by a steady trickle of water tapped into a pipe on the back of the Safeway building. I’m sure Safeway uses a lot of water anyway, but their bill must have been enormous as each terrace overflowed into the next. It was actually an amazing little water farm.
I told the store manager and I don’t know what they did about it but a few months later I checked on it and the garden was gone. All dried up and overgrown. You have to admire the ingenuity.
There are always routine make-busy details that we have to perform with a smile. This is the greatest job in the world so it’s worth a groan once in a while. The day shift had a few downsides that I’ve described in the past and one of them is during business hours. Each bank in the city had a little clipboard in certain locations where the beat officer would stop by and record daily “bank checks.” You’d call out on the radio, “Charlie-3, I’ll be 10-6 (busy) on bank checks.” You don’t say which bank you’re at: anyone with a scanner could hear us and know that bank won’t see another cruiser for a while. So, you stop at each bank and walk right in and sign the log.
The problem is, luck works both ways and you could be lucky 99.999% of the time. Then the odds go against you, and you walk right in on a bank robbery. Oh sure, your response time on the call is zero—perfect stats. But the bad guy(s) are already jumpy and have guns drawn and we’ve all seen the movie. And, oh sure, it could happen anywhere, not just banks, but why add risk to an already risky job? I had a friend on Metro PD DC, Officer Bob, who walked into a sandwich shop for lunch and got shot in the face. He survived but just by luck. Super guy, bad odds. LVFD guy, too. You know who I mean.
So, the department brass finally wised up and discontinued bank checks. Maybe there came to be too many banks in town to offer the PR time to all of them. Maybe the decision was made by a chief who came up through the ranks and had done too many bank checks. Progress is good. I’d rather respond to a bank robbery than walk in on one.
False alarms are a fact of police life. I could probably count on one hand the number of burglar alarms where I arrived to find an actual burglary. Maybe two hands. But you have to go on every one because there’s always that chance. So, it’s the middle of the night and I get an alarm call at Arundel Furniture Warehouse at 608 Lafayette Ave. It’s a big building but only a few entrances so I figure it’ll be a quick walk-around, shake the doors, and clear.
Nope. I yank on a single exit door on the south side and it comes right open. Nothing wakes you up faster than pulling a door at night that’s supposed to be locked and it opens up to pitch blackness inside. I forget who my backup was but we go in and split up so we can clear the building quicker. We need to be quick because the interior siren is an ear-splitting, brain-damaging piercing wail that actually hurts.
So, we’re walking through the open warehouse area and there is 4-tiered shelving in about four or five rows of stored goods of all kinds. Most of it is wrapped or boxed and there’s no telling what it is. But as I come down the aisle there’s one item recessed in its storage space that wakes me up even more.
There’s a life-size, full color, dinosaur of some kind about 10 feet long, just standing in this floor-level shelf. Not a T-Rex but something on all fours. I missed Dino ID in the academy. Teeth bared, green scales, glassy eyes, totally realistic. Yes-sir. Wide awake.
They say hearing loss is cumulative. I grew up with rock and roll in the 60s and 70s so there’s that. But I can still hear that alarm siren. And I don’t like dinosaurs anymore.
Enforcing traffic laws is probably the most visible image of police work. I’ve talked about stats before and there are as many levels of interest in traffic enforcement as there are officers on the department. At one end of the spectrum are guys who view it as their number one reason to breathe. From the time they go 10-8 (in service) on the radio to the time they end their shift they have their traffic detector on high sensitivity. Calls for service, robberies, burglaries, domestics, are things that just get in the way of that next ticket.
I know of one guy who would open his traffic law book, the Maryland Transportation Article, close his eyes and open it to a random page and point his finger. Whatever section he landed on would be his quarry for the night. Good idea but some of them are real hard to find.
Then there are guys who would probably have to get rammed by another vehicle to get riled enough to open the book and write a ticket. I’m more in the middle somewhere: I did get rammed but someone else wrote the ticket. Black Friday, 2000. Northbound Rt. 1 and Laurel Ave. But that’s not the point of this one.
The department brass once put out a challenge to have the squads compete for seatbelt enforcement statistics. Whoever wrote the most tickets or written warnings for seatbelt violations won the coveted Participation Trophy and eternal thanks of the Patrol Division lieutenant. The onus was on the squad sergeants to motivate their people to produce paper and, given the spectrum of interest in traffic enforcement described above, that could be tough.
But my Screamin’ E-Men rose to the occasion. I like life outside-the-box, so I suggested to my guys that since warning tickets counted equally with citations, if we all got creative, we’d walk away with this. Now, a written warning is similar to the Maryland State Traffic Citation and Summons in that it holds nearly the same fields of information but without actual charging language. It doesn’t even require the driver’s signature. The warning is valid with even the most basic information: a vehicle make, color, and tag number plus the date, time, and location, as well as a shorthand notation of the violation.
I told my squad to pick a spot in their beat, any 4-way stop sign will do, park nearby and stand near the intersection to watch people coming to a stop, which of course they will with a policeman standing right there. Then you can see if they’re wearing their seatbelt and if not, motion to them to put it on. Wave and have a nice day. Keep a scratch paper log of the “basic warning info” and fill out the written warnings later and turn them in at the end-of-shift.
Easiest stats we ever produced. The traffic guys were in heaven. The traffic-as-a-nuisance guys got it out of the way to get back to “real police work.” My spot was 4th & Montgomery. “Hey, put your seatbelt on.” I’d make a cross-chest motion simulating the belt. They’d understand and click-click. We were turning in whole books of warnings. Won the contest, too.
We had a guy one day, tractor-trailer truck driver, who made the turn from Gorman Avenue onto Washington Blvd and, I guess, cut it too sharply and ripped open one of the saddle tanks on his rig. We got the call as a fuel spill and, wow, that was an understatement. When we got there, he was laying under the tank trying to stuff rags into the gash in the tank but without success. Fuel was running out in the street and mostly down the gutter toward Crow’s Branch creek. Public Works came and put sand on the road to prevent accidents and the fire department came as a HAZMAT call and put absorbents down. It was a real mess. Eventually it got cleaned up, but the road was down to one or two lanes for a while.
The guy was in poor shape, too, by then. He had been working on it for a while before we got the call and he was totally soaked in fuel. We took him to the police station and gave him a pair of coveralls to put on. His clothes were soaked with diesel fuel and had to be thrown away.
Diesel is very slippery on the road and other drivers probably thought it was just water. We were really lucky there were no accidents. Or flipped cigarettes, but at least it wasn’t gasoline. There had been a lot of traffic rolling through the fuel judging by the amount tracked all the way down to the Bowie Road intersection. When you pick up that radio mic you just never know what’s coming.
Not every police report ends with the initial description of the basic events. When there’s a probability of additional supplementary reports the typical closing line of the report narrative is, “Investigation to continue.” I hope these anecdotes haven’t offended too many readers of this venture from The Laurel History Boys. And hopefully there will be more to come. Thanks for your time.
Investigation to continue...
Rick McGill grew up in Laurel and worked at the Laurel Police Department from 1977 to 2001. He authored two history books: Brass Buttons & Gun Leather, A History of the Laurel Police Department (soon to be in its 4th printing), and History of the North Tract, An Anne Arundel Time Capsule. In 2001 he retired to Montana and worked as a military security contractor for Blackwater Worldwide making 12 deployments to Iraq and Pakistan from 2004 to 2010. He is now a Reserve Deputy Sheriff in Montana.
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