On Police

WICHITA, Kan. - A policeman is one of those professions, like being an astronaut or a race car driver, that fascinates children of a certain age. Ask a few 6-year-olds what she or he wants to be when he grows up, and an assortment of professions that deal with high-tech gadgets, frequent danger or swashbuckling will come up.

I don't know any astronauts or race car drivers. But I do know cops. I spent the better part of 40 hours this week with them, stumbling my way through a week on the police beat.I covered a runaway truck, a domestic violence beating, pickle juice damaging a car and a shooting. It was a pretty normal week.

Police talk to media more than any other profession, even politicians. Therefore police departments need to have specific protocols for handling the media. Here in Wichita, that means a daily briefing, held in the monolithic police headquarters downtown. From a dull conference room, a captain reads the most important items off of a dispatch known as the Interwatch. He takes questions and then repeats the most important cases for radio and television cameras. As he's talking, sheets are passed around with arrests and reported incidents in the past 24 hours. Reporters furiously scribble down cases that they believe are interesting, the vast majority of which will prove irrelevant later in the day.

The briefings are generally light. One captain makes self-deprecating jokes about his lack of hair, another allows himself to be taunted for not wearing a bulletproof vest.

One heavily pregnant reporter gives daily updates on her hopefully-soon-to-be born child. A few minutes before a 3 p.m. briefing today, she cracked this joke:

"The date is the 31st, but my husband thinks it's coming today," she said. "At three o'clock."

The chief of police smiled, and then read from a statement about how one of his officers beat up his own mother while trying to destroy his apartment.

That's the thing that bugs me. No matter how many awkward jokes they make or times they allow me to peek a couple feet over the line, I can't be convinced that I should let my guard down around cops. These are people who control one of the really "cool" gadgets that children like: the law.

Wednesday I was interviewing a witness to that runaway truck. The poor man watched as a 15-foot rig slammed into the side of his sister-in-law's shiny red Mustang. I left, but forgot to ask him the rather obvious question of whether the back of the cab was attached. I stopped the car across from the Mustang on the narrow street.

Then an officer came up from a nearby van.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said to me. "You stay like that and I'm going to have to write you a ticket."

My wheels were facing the wrong direction, he said. This offense carries a $120 fine -- three days pay to a minimum wage worker.

He didn't write me a ticket, but he could have. There are enough laws that cops can almost always find a reason to charge people. I have to wonder what someone did to get a charge of "disturbing the peace" or "asking for money." Surely dozens of people do these things each day without getting arrested. Who does is solely up to the man in the uniform. He may come armed with a few jokes these days, and make cameos in elementary school classrooms, but he can still put me away for a long, long time.