Variety, the Spice of the Job: Thoughts and Experiences from 31 Years of California Police Work

By David W. Donovan

In this book, David Donovan presents examples of the many types of assignments that local "beat cops" handle. From death investigations to missing persons, from traffic collisions to dealing with the mentally ill, Donovan supplies a sampler of cops interaction with the public. From the odd to the humorous, from police mistakes to police brilliances, the book presents the sights, sounds, and actions of police-citizen interactions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524600686

David W. Donovan

Retired police officer David Donovan chronicles the high points and low points of being a street cop in Oakland, Piedmont, and Pleasanton (California). At one time or another he worked every beat in each city, from the safest areas to the more dangerous, from the flatlands to the hills. He met victims and witnesses. He chased criminals, and caught his share of them.

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© 2016 David W. Donovan. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  03/31/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0069-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0070-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0068-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number:  2016905210

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Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Author’s Notes

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

DEDICATION

To my daughter Beth, who always wanted to hear her

dad’s stories

INTRODUCTION

Studies have shown that in recent decades Americans could expect to be employed in five or more different jobs/careers during their lifetimes. There must be any number of reasons to apply for a given job; the most common is probably a need for income and a means to earn money for food, shelter, clothing, et cetera. In my case, with college graduation approaching, and with the recognition that I no longer wanted to continue studying for the priesthood, I needed some sort of job to earn my way in the world. (My father’s chiding, when I misbehaved during my teen years, occasionally resurfaced in my brain: The world doesn’t owe you a living, with the emphasis on owe). But what job was I trained to do? Who would hire a guy with a degree in the humanities and experience in nothing? It was clear that I needed training for whatever job I took.

For some reason I was aware that police officers (usually) were trained in police academies prior to working with the public. (I later learned that in some places officers learned the job while on the job, or learned while working with an experienced partner; others worked for a brief time as an officer prior to entering a police academy.) Maybe I had become aware of police academy training from watching police drama TV shows like Dragnet and Adam-12. (A few years on the job led me to conclude that Barney Miller was the closest to depicting some aspects of typical police work.) Anyway, I knew I could expect to be trained prior to working independently as a police officer (still called a policeman in 1969, as women officers would not be hired for a couple of years thereafter). And the job looked interesting; at least it did on television. So, six months prior to college graduation I applied to the Oakland Police Department in Oakland, California. After taking a written test and a physical agility test, and after being interviewed by a psychiatrist and by a panel of actual police officers, I was notified to report to the Oakland City Hall on June 2, 1969, for swearing-in as an officer. Five days after college graduation I was in possession of a badge, but no uniform on which to pin it.

Though several decades have passed, I still remember the toughest question during the interview by the police panel. Captain Charles Hansen, a burly ex-Marine of World War II vintage, described a situation in which an agitator was stirring up a crowd at 9th & Broadway. What, Officer Donovan, are you going to do? Well, Humanities degree notwithstanding, I could do the arithmetic and determined that one officer is not equal to one unruly crowd. So I said that I would use my police radio (seen in use on Adam-12) to call for assistance from additional officers.

Your radio doesn’t work.

In that case I would go to a pay phone to call in to the police department for help. (I had not seen police call-boxes on Adam-12, but later used them extensively in my career.)

Hansen squinted at me and dryly communicated that there were no pay phones in that area. This guy wants to kill me, I thought. Is that the right answer, to give your life for the citizens of Oakland simply because there were no pay phones at 9th and Broadway? Will I be denied the job because I did not give a macho answer?

Oh, well; here goes: I am not a masochist. I would walk away until I could find, or telephone, a few officers to help me disperse the rowdy crowd. I guess that answer was sufficient, as I passed the interview. I was employed for over twenty-one years by the Oakland Police Department, and then the Pleasanton and Piedmont Police Departments.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

While the following stories and vignettes are true, some of the names of those involved have been changed. (Refer to Dragnet for an explanation.) I have used Zamboni, Polk, and McGillicuddy as pseudonyms, simply because I like the sound of those names.

I was a participant/observer in ninety-eight percent of the experiences related in this book. A few were told to me by others.

While the stories are grouped due to similar content, short observations/experiences are interspersed at random, just because…Yes, just because.

Welcome to a slice of police work, 1969-2000.

CHAPTER ONE

Newspapers and television stations faithfully report instances and statistics of homicides, shootings, and other violent acts in a given area, and imply that the area is good or bad, safe or unsafe based on those violent episodes. But other crimes can be a better barometer of the safety of a city or county; especially theft crimes, and burglaries in particular. A resident may live in a city with a high rate of shootings, but not be injured if most of the violence occurs in areas that the resident does not frequent. But burglaries are generally not contained within one section of town, though some areas will have higher rates of burglary than others. Virtually all areas of town are accessible to a burglar with a car.

On a warm Oakland afternoon my partner Rick Reid and I were dispatched to a burglary in progress assignment in East Oakland. We arrived fairly quickly at a single family home on 106th Avenue, finding the resident standing on the front porch, armed with a gun. Also on the porch, but not standing, was a burglar; he had been shot by the homeowner.

The resident said that he owned a bar nearby and had left his home to retrieve part of the bar’s earnings for that day. When he returned home shortly thereafter, he found his front door open. He could hear voices inside, though no one should have been inside. When he yelled a warning to whoever was in his home, two young men ran outside via the front door, ran past the bar owner, and ran out of sight. Then a third burglar emerged from the home, flashing a knife in front of him and yelling, Get out of my way or I’ll kill you. The response was a single gunshot to the torso, and down went the burglar.

Almost immediately after our arrival the burglar addressed the homeowner, You shot me and now I’m going to die.

The shooter responded, Coming at me that way, you deserve to die. And in the next moment the burglar died.

In the beautiful, rolling and, sometimes, steep hills of Piedmont, California there lived a flim-flam man; that is, a man who earned his money by defrauding people and businesses. One day PPD Sergeant Frank McNally served an out-of-state arrest warrant on the man at his home, and took him to jail.

Well, some of his fellow flim-flam buddies heard about the arrest and—surprise!—went to his home to empty it. After the thieving friends had been there a while, two housekeepers arrived at the home to perform their weekly house cleaning. The presence of the housekeepers caused the thieves to flee from the house and drive away. The housekeepers called the police.

Just prior to the housekeepers’ call, another call came in to the police department reporting a robbery of a citizen; it had just occurred in the flatlands of Grand Avenue, near the border with Oakland. The watch commander and a reserve officer proceeded to the scene of the robbery, while I was directed to the burglarized home where the housekeepers were waiting.

At the home in the hills the housekeepers told me that they had found the door to the attached garage open when they arrived, and people inside. Those people ran out and drove away. The resident was not home. After I confirmed that no one was inside the house, I asked the cleaning ladies for a description of the suspects and their car. At that moment one of the women exclaimed, There they are, pointing to the nearest intersection, where a car was slowly passing by.

I went into the open garage, punched the button on the automatic door closer panel, ducked under the door as it closed, and jumped into my patrol car. While speeding toward the area where the suspects were last seen, I broadcast a description of the suspects’ car. I knew that the other officers were not in the immediate area, and I was aware that the suspects had about a minute head start on me; the chance of catching them seemed low.

To my surprise, within a few blocks I found the car, traveling at the speed limit. Though the housecleaners had described more than two suspects, there were only two people in the car when I activated my car’s red lights. The car stopped immediately. I talked with the two occupants, who told me that they had permission to be in the house on the hill. (And they had fled from the housekeepers because…?) They said that the renter of the house was a friend of theirs, and that he had telephoned them from jail, asking them to remove his property for safekeeping.

While their story seemed unlikely to be true, they did know the name of the renter, and they somehow did know he was in jail. Since cell phones were nonexistent at that time (for cops or the public), I decided to go the police department (HQ) to telephone the renter at the jail. When I told the suspects that they were under detention, but not under arrest, they agreed to follow me in their car to the police building to straighten out the situation. Their composure and the non-evasive manner in which they had been driving led me to believe there was a possibility that they might be telling the truth.

They did in fact follow me to the police building. There I telephoned the Oakland Jail. (Piedmont has no jail; it had a contract with the City of Oakland that allowed PPD to house its arrestees in the Oakland Jail.) I explained to the jailer why I needed to talk to one of the inmates, the Piedmont renter. The jailer said that the renter could not be brought to the phone because the entire jail was under a lock down. (In all my years bringing prisoners to that jail I had never encountered a lock down; and never since then.) The jailer told me to call back. I did call back several times in the next two hours, each time being informed of the continuing lock down.

Meanwhile, one of the suspects received a page on his pager. I asked if that was one of the other guys who had been with him at the renter’s house. He said it was. He gave me the fellow’s name and phone number, and I called him. When he answered, I told him who I was, explained that his friends were at the police department, and asked him to come to the department to help keep his friends out of jail. To my amazement, he said he and a fourth suspect would be at the department shortly. And they were.

Before I was able to talk to the jailed renter, I was occupied taking eight lengthy written statements from the four suspects. Why not four statements, one per suspect? Because the initial statements, when compared to each other, did not make sense. It turns out that each suspect had described his activities at different points in time during the same day. They had made several trips to the house in the hills, had filled two of their own vehicles with their friend’s property multiple times, and had stolen the renter’s car, also filled with property from the house.

When the renter was finally allowed to talk to me from the Oakland Jail, I told him about the removal of his property from his home, and that his friends said he had asked them to remove the property. He interrupted me, I didn’t tell them anything. TAKE THOSE *******s TO JAIL. And so I did.

But why had these criminals acted so coolly and been so cooperative with me? Why had they not sped away to parts unknown, as a typical burglar would do? Because they had earned their money as fast-talking flim-flamming con artists like their Piedmont friend. They all had great confidence that they could outsmart and outtalk a dumb policeman. They miscalculated, and misjudged me.

From the start of my afternoon shift until I finished processing the suspects, inventorying the property in their cars and towing their cars from in front of the police building, I had spent 21 hours on the job. I then went home for a long nap.

Now the bad news: While the arrests were lawful and appropriate, the deputy district attorney who received the case for prosecution declined prosecution of the four con men. The official reason given was that the victim, the renter, was by then in jail in Colorado, unable to testify in support of his own case. I suspect that a better reason for not prosecuting the four suspects was that the victim was as big a criminal as his friends, would have made a problematic witness in court, and, based on his prior criminal behavior, deserved to be victimized.

It’s always a plus when you have a witness to a stealthy crime like burglary. On a slow morning in 1985 a woman called OPD to report that a burglary of her home had just occurred. The house was near 13th Avenue. I was assigned to cover the officer on whose beat the crime had occurred, Officer Jim Pedersen. The homeowner introduced us to a neighbor who not only had seen the suspect climb out of a window of the victim’s home, but also recognized him as a juvenile who lived half a block away. She pointed out the house where the suspect lived.

Pedersen and I went to the house; actually we went to the sidewalk in front of the house, as there was a tall chain-ink fence across the entire front of the property. Though there was a gate, it was locked with a heavy chain and a massive padlock. Since we could not reach the front door, we called out to whoever was inside the house. Soon a woman, the mother of the young burglar, came outside and spoke with us from behind the fence.

Pedersen explained to her that her son had been identified as the person who had burglarized one of her neighbors’ homes a short time earlier and asked her to bring the boy to us. She refused. She then proceeded to tell us how the United States Constitution prohibited us from trespassing on her property. She had her rights, by golly!

The ever-calm Pederson removed a small notebook from the pocket near his badge, opened the notebook, removed a pen from the same pocket and poised to write. He asked me, Officer Donovan, how long have you been working as a policeman? I said fifteen years. He wrote 15 in the notebook. Commenting that he had been a policeman for about the same length of time, he wrote another 15 in the notebook. He then slowly added the two figures. So, lady, you have thirty years of police work telling you that we have the legal authority to enter your property to arrest your son. She still refused to open the gate.

Listen closely, said the mild-mannered Pedersen. I am going to call for a tow truck and have this fine fence pulled down. And then we are going to go inside and arrest your kid.

Just a minute, Officer. Inside the house went the woman, emerging shortly with the delinquent. After unlocking the gate, she surrendered her son to face his fate in the juvenile justice system. Mission accomplished; fence preserved.

There are times when the bad guys try to discourage the police who are chasing them by tossing the stolen goods as they flee. Every year or so there is a news story on television describing how bank robbers had thrown handfuls of currency out of the speeding getaway car. That tactic never causes the cops to stop chasing.

During a weekend afternoon in the late 1970s one of the citizens of North Oakland was the victim of a purse snatch. The culprit was a juvenile known to every cop in the district, a kid with a long rap sheet, who lived in a poorly maintained house close to the Berkeley border. Officers soon spotted the kid, still holding the pilfered purse. A foot pursuit covered several city blocks, in and out of backyards, and over at least one fence. The kid actually gained ground on the officers, to the point where he was no longer within their sight.

But the youngster may not have considered that the officers knew his name and, more importantly, where he lived. After losing sight of the young miscreant, we officers did not give up; we went to his home, approaching the house from the rear. We arrived in time to see the stolen purse hanging from the doorknob of the back door. And then, in slow motion, the door opened slightly, an adult hand picked up the purse, retracted it into the house and eased the door closed. Did the kid think that leaving the purse outside would cause us to call off the chase and return to the local coffee shop? If he did think that, he was wrong.

So, a knock on the door, a surrender, a recovery of the purse, and then a return to the coffee shop to write a report. And to add another entry to the kid’s rap sheet.

Here’s a flash: it’s easier to catch a thief if he is running toward you than away from you. On an overcast day in 1986 OPD Radio broadcast a foot chase on my beat. I was just leaving a residence where I had taken a report concerning an overnight theft, when another officer began chasing a strong-arm robbery suspect on my beat. Not only on my beat, but running toward my current location. I didn’t have long to wait: the robber, a man in his 20s, rounded the corner just west of me on Foothill Boulevard. He then sprinted diagonally into a parking lot, where I was waiting for him between two parked cars. He had been running for a few blocks before he came upon me but he apparently had just enough energy left in him to try to push past me to freedom.

Emulating one of my favorite Forty-niner linebackers, I lowered my shoulder, hit him low and wrapped up his legs. We flopped to the pavement, with the thief on the bottom and me on top. With a heavy sigh, this guy signaled that the chase was over.

Our district police services aide and evidence technician, Michelle Gribi, who had been keeping up with the foot chase in her police tech. van (later to be better known as a C.S.I. van) saw the tackle and complimented me on my ersatz NFL technique, adding to my satisfaction with the outcome of the foot chase.

Naturally, some situations—many situations—require the efforts of more than a single officer; and policing as a team can result in excellent, almost elegant, outcomes. Such was the case on a cloudless day in the late 1980s on Trestle Glen Road in Oakland, very close to the Piedmont city border. (In fact, Trestle Glen Road extends from Oakland into Piedmont.) An employee of Pacific Bell was at the top of a telephone pole on Trestle Glen, making repairs, when he heard someone screaming inside a house below him. Without dismounting from the pole, the telephone company employee tapped into the phone line he was working on to call the police. To him the screaming sounded like part of a domestic dispute; he described it as such to the OPD dispatcher, who sent Officer Ken Paulson and his trainee to that house.

When Paulson rang the doorbell at the house, he heard the sound of a screen door banging open at the rear. Someone had run out of the house, through the rear yard, and into an adjacent yard. After running to the rear, Paulson could not see anyone, but could hear the cracking of branches as someone moved through the heavily wooded yards nearby. Inside the house, he and his partner found a seriously injured teenager, a resident of the home. Paulson immediately broadcast that someone had committed a felony assault in the home and was fleeing through the adjacent backyards. There was no description of the attacker immediately available, as the teenager was not able to communicate at that time, and no one else had seen the suspect.

The dispatcher broadcast the location of the assault and the limited additional information. Every officer in the district, as well as the district sergeant, Bob Fenton, raced to the area. As I drove toward Trestle Glen from my beat, I broadcast the limited description I could provide from a robbery I had handled in the same area a few days earlier. Could we be looking for the same guy?

Sergeant Fenton heard my description and soon saw a man fitting the brief description I had given over the police radio channel (gender, age, height and weight—which, of course, included many people in Oakland, but was nevertheless accurate). Making a U-turn to get a better look at this fellow, Fenton saw the man break into a run and disappear into a backyard. Now it was Fenton’s turn on the police radio. He directed responding police units to various places to set up a perimeter in which to contain the man who had run from him, an area close to the original crime scene. Soon all officers were in their assigned locations, and at Fenton’s direction OPD Dispatch telephoned Piedmont PD to describe the search underway close to the Piedmont city line.

Meanwhile Paulson had called for an ambulance (code 3, using red lights and siren) for the seriously injured teenager.

The boy had returned home from school early because he was not feeling well. When he came inside his home he found a burglar. The burglar picked up a heavy wooden cutting board in the kitchen and beat the boy senseless. It was the boy’s screams that the telephone lineman had heard.

The ambulance transported the teenager to Highland Hospital for treatment of head injuries.

Meanwhile the somewhat passive search for the suspect continued. It was pointless for any officer to enter the backyards, as visibility was limited by the trees and bushes there. We simply kept our posts and listened. As the sound of crashing and thrashing moved uphill, we moved our perimeter uphill, to keep the sounds within the perimeter. We had all concluded that the man who had fled upon seeing Sergeant Fenton was in fact the man who had committed the assault.

For two hours we followed the sound of the suspect’s trek through the overgrown vegetation and over numerous fences, until the sounds were emanating from near the end of the block. Would he come out of the woods onto Trestle Glen? Onto St. James Drive (the Piedmont street on the far side of the wooded backyards)? Or onto Park Boulevard., which connects the other two streets? The man had run out of backyards and out of leafy concealment. What was before him was a schoolyard. With a dash across the schoolyard he could reach a large, hilly, neglected area adjacent to a golf course, a place too big for officers to encircle, and the path to freedom for him.

The suspect climbed over a high chain-link fence and dropped down onto the asphalt in the schoolyard. There were no students at play in the yard; they were inside, pressed against the classroom windows, watching the developing spectacle. For, as fast as the exhausted suspect climbed over the fence, police cars filled up the schoolyard in his intended path. Without a word, the suspect surrendered to Sergeant Fenton, Officer Tom Campbell, Officer Jim Pedersen, Officer Al Zaragosa, PPD Officer Don Zolman, and me.

Officer Pederson recognized the suspect. When Pedersen heard the suspect give a false name, he corrected him, No you’re not. You are the same Joey Zamboni who grew up living down the street from me. (Pedersen’s childhood home is two blocks from Trestle Glen Road; at the time of this incident his mother still lived there.)

I was assigned to take a written statement from the mother of the injured teenager; she had returned home as we were tracking the suspect. She was a great witness: not only did she identify as hers all the jewelry that we found in the suspect’s pockets, but she described where and when she had bought each piece.

The injured teen eventually recovered, though he missed a semester of school during his convalescence. In due time Mr. Zamboni was convicted of attempted murder, and sent to prison. At the conclusion of the trial, the parents of the teenager, the deputy district attorney who had prosecuted the case successfully, and the officers and evidence technicians who had been involved in the case all met at a Mexican restaurant near the police building to celebrate justice for Mr. Zamboni, a going-away party of sorts. Cheers.

Nationally, 98% of all burglar alarms are false. That is, only two percent of tripped alarms are tripped by intruders. The 98% include failures on the part of residents, employees, business owners, et cetera, to turn off the alarm upon entry; cats activating motion-detection equipment, wind rattling windows