Chapter 38: Coming Together

Things moved along through the summer. At times it seemed as if for every step we took forward we were taking two steps back. Still, some good things happened. Our new Auto Theft Division made a major arrest mid-June. They grabbed a few cars out of the impound yard and fitted them with GPS trackers and allowed them to be stolen. That generated enough information to get warrants on a pair of ‘chop shops’, garages where stolen cars could be taken and stripped for parts. Lieutenant Dupree of Investigations got together with Captain Warren of Patrol, and they pulled together the necessary warm bodies in blue shirts to shut down the two shops simultaneously. That not only closed the shops but gave us enough info to grab the members of an auto theft ring. We didn’t get back the fancy cars whose thefts had started the Division, but it raised morale around the department. It also got the Council off our butts for a bit, and we started planning other specialized details.

I lost three more officers by the end of August. Two were Senior Patrolmen who chafed under the new requirements, and one of them was the officer who couldn’t pass his pistol qualification. The third was Lieutenant Sansone in Patrol. He was five years older than Captain Warren and thought Warren was nothing but a jumped-up pissant and he, Sansone, should have been the captain. I disagreed and Sansone took off for somewhere else.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I had the feeling that these were the last defections because they didn’t like the new boss. As I kept telling everybody, the key to a good department wasn’t the equipment, it was the personnel. We were advertising in print and social media, and I was in contact with all the local schools and colleges and academies. By the end of August, we hired two recent graduates of my alma mater, the Athens police academy. We also hired a couple of admins, administrative assistants, to help Mindy and the ladies in the office. One would be attending the academy in Forsyth in January and the other would begin attending Matucket County Community College at nights to get a degree in criminal justice. She would go to the academy when she graduated.

One interesting thing that happened was that when the changes in the MPD became known to the general police community I began getting calls from ex-MPD officers. It had been ten years since Crowley and I had been sent packing, and the council had brought in a new and improved chief. In the ten years since pretty much every officer I had ever known on the force had either been forced out or had retired in disgust. I began getting calls from some of those officers who were asking about coming home, so to speak. I had not been expecting that when I was figuring my estimates for rebuilding the department. I hired several of them and told them we were rebuilding the department. They liked that idea.

One very interesting morning I spent talking to a senior sergeant from Forsyth who had once been on the force with me. He was shown into my office at 1000 on a Wednesday morning. I smiled when he came in. “As I live and breathe, if it isn’t Little Billy!”

“Grim, good to see you again. The last time I saw you, you were being booted out of here unceremoniously.”

“And the last time I saw you, you were putting lifts in your shoes to pass the department height minimums. You still are, I see.”

He laughed. “Screw you, Grim. Screw you!” He stuck out his hand and we shook. I pointed him towards one of the armchairs and took a second. Little Billy was the nickname of one of my fellow Patrol officers back in the day, William Mayburn, so named because he was short and skinny. He was also smart and brave and a good cop. When the Somali tangoes had decided to come after me in 2018, he had been assigned to one of the blocking cruisers. After I had dispatched the six terrorists who came after me, he had nabbed the seventh, a driver who tried to escape by ramming Little Billy’s cruiser. Little Billy was smarter than the tango and avoided injury, and then tased the asshole and captured him.

“So, Billy, what have you been up to?” I asked.

He shrugged. Little Billy was about five years younger than me. He had made it to Senior Patrolman about the time I had made sergeant. “Oh, about what I put on my resume. I lasted here a couple of years after you left but was sent packing by the next chief.”

“The guy who replaced Crowley?”

Billy shook his head. “No, the next guy. He was supposed to cut costs left and right, and I wanted to take night school and get my bachelors so I could make sergeant. I was told they weren’t going to do that and weren’t going to be spending money on improvement like that.”

I gave him a curious look. “As I recall, paying for continuing education and college is in the contract.”

“Didn’t matter. They’d pay, they just wouldn’t give anybody time off or the chance to take classes. If you pushed it, you’d find yourself on graveyard until you got the idea and left.”

“And you pushed it.”

He nodded. “I was one of the first, but I wasn’t the only one. A lot of guys left after that.”

“I heard about it,” I admitted. “Penny wise...”

“ ... and pound foolish,” he finished. “Yeah, that’s about right. Anyway, I wanted to stay in the cop business but wanted to move up the ladder, so I enrolled at Matucket State for a couple of years and got my bachelors. Maggie had a decent job over at Joseph Wheeler Elementary, so we could afford to send me to school if I kept doing some security work on the side. After that I started applying at various departments around the state for sergeant positions I could test into. I ended up down in Forsyth on the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department as a sergeant.”

“Like it down there?” I’d been to Forsyth many times but only because the main academy was there.

He shrugged and nodded. “It’s okay. I do some part-time work over at the academy, too. Still, I wouldn’t mind moving home again.”

“Home is here?”

“Pretty much. I’m from Haralson myself but Maggie’s folk are over in West Springs. I get back on the force here, we buy a house over in West Springs, Maggie, she’s going to be very thankful, very thankful indeed!”

I grinned at him. “Define thankful.”

“I’m not going to get too specific, but I am sure it would lead to acts that would violate the moral and criminal codes of Georgia and the rest of the Bible Belt,” he laughed.

“You say that like that would be a good thing.”

“I certainly hope so!” he said, smiling.

“Any specifics on a position here in Matucket?” I asked. With that we got down to a serious discussion. Little Billy wanted to move back to Matucket and get on the force here, but he wasn’t going to slit his throat for the privilege, and he was feeling ambitious. Well, nothing wrong with a little ambition. He was looking for something in a senior sergeant slot but was really interested in Lieutenant. That made me a bit curious; I had a slot for a lieutenant in Patrol. I was going to have to talk to Holden and Warren about this idea. I told Little Billy that I was interested in talking some more but that I couldn’t make any promises until I talked to a few more people. I also told him I was going to make some calls, including to Monroe County. He nodded and said he understood, then shook my hand and split.

Captain Warren was interested in a new Patrol Lieutenant, enough so that he asked to interview Little Billy himself. I called the Monroe County Sheriff and asked him about Sergeant Mayburn.

“I was wondering if you were going to call, Chief,” he replied.

“I told Sergeant Mayburn that I was going to be checking on his references. You would be one of them.”

“Little Billy told me he had talked to you.”

I smiled at that, though the Sheriff couldn’t see that. “You call him Little Billy, too?”

“I think everybody in the world calls him Little Billy. It’ll probably be on his tombstone someday.”

I laughed. “So, how is he down there? I’ve been to the academy any number of times, but I can’t say I have any experience with your department, sir.”

“Little Billy is one of my better sergeants. In some ways I’d rather not see him go. He’s able to do any of the jobs in the office, training officer, patrol supervisor, shift commander, anything. Still, I know he has a lot of family up your way and happy wife, happy life.”

“I hear that!” We talked for a bit more and I believed the Sheriff when he said Little Billy was qualified to be a lieutenant. There’s a lot of responses you can give when you get asked about an employee by a possible employer. Because of legal concerns about being sued for giving a negative recommendation, most personnel departments simply reply, ‘Patrolman X worked for the department from such-and-so date to such-and-so date.’ That’s all you get. Still, it’s quite possible to find out some truth. If the candidate was a good employee, you can usually find somebody who will say so. On the other hand, if somebody is an asshole, you might not find anybody to talk about him, or if they do, the tone of voice can tell you all you need to know.

In any case, my captains met with Little Billy and signed off on him, so we made him an offer and he signed on the dotted line. Then we had Sue Thadwicket come over to swear him in and take pictures. We also had somebody over from the Times-Dispatch so they could put it in the newspaper and online edition. I was constantly looking for positive news to publish, since we needed every bit of good news. Manpower-wise I was barely holding my own. We had lost as many people as we had hired, and while quality was improving, the numbers weren’t. Good publicity would help with hiring.

Another thing that was working against me was the fact that we were starting to send people to Forsyth for training. Training meant fewer officers on patrol or investigating but it also meant better trained officers overall. It’s one of those long-term things, training costs money and only pays off over years. It’s an easy target for cost cutters but really messes stuff up for the future.

It was late September when I started getting a feeling that things might work out. By then the losses in personnel were over. Anybody who didn’t want to stick around was gone. The ones left were the ones who wanted to fix the department. As the saying goes, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. The problems were gone. We were also slowly rebuilding, with another couple of recruits hired in August. I assigned Crenshaw and Warren the job of picking training officers. In the old MPD, where we hired young recruits and trained them in-house, training officers would take young recruits straight out of the academy and teach them what happened in the real world. In the last ten years we had completely stopped hiring rookies and no longer had training officers. It was a position usually held by Senior Patrolmen, officers who were experienced and able to pass along how the world worked. A good turn as a training officer was critical to serious consideration to promotion to sergeant. Crenshaw and Warren had the task of deciding which of the non-burned-out senior patrolmen could be training officers.

September 27 was a Wednesday and was a normal early fall day. School had started a month earlier so the kids were off the street and by ten in the morning everybody was at work, wherever they worked. Everybody who had a job, at least. That morning three young men who didn’t have jobs decided they needed to be compensated for their lack of employment by requisitioning some funds from the Matucket Square branch of SunTrust. In other words, they decided to rob a bank! They didn’t have much of a plan to do so, figuring three handguns and three masks would be more than sufficient to accomplish the deed.

It wasn’t all that great a plan. There have been plenty of studies over the years about what makes people become criminals. One theory is that they are looking for a fast payoff but that doesn’t really hold up when examined. The real thing that separates criminals from normal people is the total lack of self-control. Pretty much everybody has said something stupid, like why don’t we go out and rob a bank, or a convenience store, or something equally dumb. The big difference is that normal people immediately laugh and say that was the dumbest thing they ever heard and decide it’s time to stop drinking and go home. Criminals, on the other hand, don’t have that common-sense switch. They don’t go home. They go out and rob a bank.

An average bank robbery takes in less than ten grand in cash. The odds of successfully robbing a bank are lousy, too. About a third of all bank robbers chicken out and run away, and of the rest most are caught within one to two days. The best, the ‘professionals’, end up getting caught within four to five robberies. It’s also easy to convict a bank robber. There is usually plenty of forensic evidence, too, dye packs, security cameras, fingerprints, and money found in cars and houses and such. Afterwards, jail time is almost guaranteed. Juries are notoriously unsympathetic to bank robbers. If they simply pass a note the take is low, but the sentence is still several years. If they use a gun the take is typically larger, but they’ve just committed armed robbery and are a lock for twenty years or more. That’s a really lousy hourly pay rate!

These three guys drove up to the Matucket Square branch in a pickup truck. They were white trash wearing hoodies and had three 9mm pistols between them. Right before they went inside, they put on some Halloween masks - Frankenstein, Dracula, and Casper the Friendly Ghost. They ran inside with three gym bags, brandished their guns, and demanded that everybody get on the floor and the tellers fill the bags.

By then the whole thing had collapsed, though it took another few minutes before they realized it. One of the tellers hit the silent alarm before cooperating with the robbers. Dispatch promptly called Paul One-Two to investigate. One-Two was already at the Matucket Square shopping center on a routine call to see the manager of the Target about a shoplifting incident the night before. He was all of thirty seconds away from the bank. Talk about your bad timing! Jace Booker was driving One-Two and he pulled up to the door and blocked the pickup truck as he got out. Like a lot of banks, the front was a bunch of plate glass windows, and he could see three masked assholes inside running around with guns and yelling. Jace immediately called Dispatch and said, yes, there’s actually a bank robbery going on, so please, please, pretty please with a cherry on top, send some backup! Then he hunkered down and prepared to hold the fort.

Dispatch sent some more people over right away, including a sergeant as supervisor. It just escalated from there. The sergeant called in that they had a hostage situation and the entire department got into high gear. Captain Warren was in New Orleans with his wife on vacation, so the whole mess ended up in the laps of Patrol Lieutenant Mayburn and Chief of Police Reaper. We rolled over and found Sergeant Hickle in charge. We kept low and I dug a vest out of the back of one of the cruisers. “How we doing, Lou?” asked Billy.

“Eh, so, so. There’re three knuckleheads inside, armed and waving guns around and making a lot of noise. Hostages, but not sure how many. I’ve seen four, but I think there’s more. This is SunTrust’s biggest local branch,” Hickle answered. “How do you want to handle this?”

“Have they tried to contact us?”

“Not that I’m aware.”

“Let’s try calling them. Ask them to come out,” said Billy.

“You don’t want to go in?”

“Sure, as soon as we bring them out, we can go in and say hello. An assault is my last choice. What about you, Chief?” asked Billy, looking over at me.

“Same here. Start prepping for an assault but nobody does that without my personal go order. Let’s talk to them first. Billy, you ever take the negotiation course down at Forsyth?”

He nodded. “Took it. Never had to use it.”

“First time for everything, Lieutenant. You’re the man. Let’s figure it out.”

Figuring it out turned out to be a disaster. I’d been in these situations before, and the first thing you do is roll out the mobile command center. The mobile command center is parked in a parking lot near the hostage scene but out of the line of fire. It will have radio and phone links to the station and to higher authorities, like the state police and the FBI. It will have computer links and printers and is designed to coordinate everything locally and deal with the situation.

Small problem. The Matucket Police Department didn’t have a mobile command center. One of the cost cutters had decided it cost too much. Our mobile command center consisted of Little Billy’s cell phone and a tablet computer. Great!

By this time, we had reporters on the scene filming this mess and demanding interviews with everybody. I grabbed Hickle and told him, in no uncertain terms, that anybody who talked to a reporter was walking to the unemployment line. Nobody talked to anybody but the Lieutenant and me. Then I told him to have a couple of guys start stringing up police tape and getting the lookie-loos under control.

Little Billy had figured out a way to talk to the bank robbers by calling Dispatch and getting them set up to record his calls and give him the number for the bank. The phone company had already been contacted to shut down the phone lines so that Channel 9 couldn’t call in and try to negotiate for us. Now he opened the system to our use and called in on his cell phone. I was only hearing one side of the conversation, but it started out about like I expected.

“Hi there, my name is Billy. Who am I talking to? ... Well, I have to call you something. Maybe you can just tell me your first name? ... Great, Joe, like I said, my name is Billy. How are you doing, Joe?”

I leaned against a cruiser and listened to Billy talk while I looked around at the scene. The bank branch was a standalone building on the west side of the shopping center and Hickle had a cruiser blocking the nearest entrance. He also had several officers keeping people away from the building on the north and east sides and stringing a mile of police tape around the place. Another couple of officers were tasked with keeping an eye on the reporters; left to themselves they would barge right inside and tell the bank robbers we were going to barge in guns blazing and wanted to report on it as everybody died.

“Joe, can I talk to somebody from the bank, maybe one of the tellers or bank managers? ... Joe, that’s alright, I’ll just keep talking to you ... Well, Joe, I’ll have to talk to some people about that. I’m not in charge either. I want you guys to stay safe, you and everybody else in there ... Give me a few minutes, Joe.” Little Billy set the phone down and came over.

“How’s it going, Billy?” I asked.

He shrugged and smiled. “About what you imagine. They want a million dollars, a flight to Mexico, some beautiful flight attendants to give them blowjobs, and some meth, coke, and Oxy. You know, the usual.”

“And?”

“And we aren’t going to give them that stuff. I’m talking to one guy, sounds like a young guy, not too bright. I’m going to let him stew a few minutes and then pick up the phone again. See if you can get somebody to go into one of these stores and buy me a recharge cable for an iPhone. We’re going to be here for a while.”

Thus, we began. I grabbed a patrolman who didn’t seem to be doing anything important and sent her off to find a cord for an iPhone. Meanwhile, Little Billy got back on the phone and told Joe that he was trying to find somebody to discuss Joe’s requests. By the way, Joe, why’d you decide to come to the bank this morning and could he tell us how many people were inside? They just kept talking.

About half an hour later Billy reported that Joe had a total of seven hostages, three female tellers, a female manager, a male customer, and a female customer with a toddler sleeping in a stroller. He was trying to get them to send out the hostages, but this was just the beginning. Otherwise, it was more talk, talk, talk. Then he plugged in his phone to recharge. I got a call from Dispatch with some additional information. SunTrust had been contacted and the regional manager was coming over with some floorplans for the office, along with the names of the employees who were supposed to be at work. Meanwhile, the FBI had decided to get involved and a team was being hustled out of their Atlanta office, whether we wanted them or not.