Bullet-proof vest and all

Last Tuesday I had the opportunity to do a police ride-along in the Bronx. Did you know that anyone can do a ride-along? You just have to fill out a request at the municipal building and pass some sort of approval process. Who knew? I now know, but didn't follow the process, it was part of our fellowship (one of things I was looking forward to the most! That, and Rikers...). I chose the 40th precinct, which is where I worked last year at Mercy Center. I was interested to see the streets that were so familiar to me in a different light. My UF partner Jess and I suited up in bullet-proof vests (no pictures allowed, unfortunately, although mine was waaaay too big and made me feel like I was wearing a life jacket...) and hopped in the back seat of the car with our two officers.

We took off with the siren shrieking and dodged traffic for a few blocks and I thought it they were just showing off, but as we approached an upcoming intersection it was clear something was going on, as there were a few other cop cars and an ambulance parked in a huddle. Our officers got out and Jess and I looked at each other, then scrambled out after them. It turned out a man had gotten slashed across the face by his ex-girlfriend's brother, he said. By the time we got there he was pretty patched up, and we listened to our officers as they questioned him and some of his friends who had witnessed it. Then we followed the ambulance to Lincoln Hospital to finish the report. I've never seen the inside of Lincoln Hospital before, although I've heard many horror stories from our participants and others in the Bronx, so it was interesting to finally get to go inside. No one paid much attention to the two of us, so we just followed walked around like we we knew what we were doing until someone told us to leave, and no one ever did. We sat in on more questioning of the guy who got slashed (who, by the way, was not someone I would want to mess with - he was huge!) and then headed back to the station to file some paperwork and switch cars (our siren had broken).

The rest of the evening was a little less eventful. We answered two calls of fires within 10 minutes and two blocks of each other. The first was from a beauty parlor, and the women were standing out front with their hair in HUGE rollers, the kind you see in the movies or music videos - I didn't know people actually used those. The firetrucks arrived simultaneously though and they were just investigating the smell of smoke, so there wasn't much for us to do. The second involved more crazy driving (with our now-working siren) and a climb up the stairs of an apartment building, where the upstairs neighbor had called 911 over what basically amounted to a burned dinner downstairs. We also stopped a guy for having an open container and checked on a tripped burglar alarm at a storage facility.

All in all, it was pretty eventful and very eye opening. And not just my eyes, either, you should have seen the stares we got riding around in the back of the cop car! Pretty funny. Anyway, definitely once in a lifetime experience.

In honor pretending to be a member of the uniformed services, but since they didn't let me take any pictures of the police ride, I'm posting this picture of my nephew and me a few weeks ago at his fourth birthday party in Florida. My sister knows someone and arranged to have a firetruck come, and everyone got to try on a firefighter coat, including the grown-ups. Cute, huh?