Tales From the Laurel Police Department
Fall 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.
Midnights are the best shift. You don’t have to put up with the junk calls you get on day shift: it’s the time you get to do real police work. Like finding creative ways to abuse departmental vehicles. When I started on the job our cruisers were all shared fleet vehicles. You turned over your car to the oncoming guy on the next shift so there was always at least one other person who would notice something wrong with a car he was taking responsibility for. At shift change in the squad room the everyday cadence of oncoming officer passing the off-going officer:
“Keys in it?”
“Yep.”
“Seat back?” (Long-legged guys want to jump in—not squeeze in.)
“Yup.”
But when we started getting take-home cars it was more up to the sergeant to inspect his guys’ cars for, oh, things amiss. I didn’t make ‘em line up with their doors open and hoods up, like I’d seen Lt. Brown do in the long-ago 1970s. But I’d keep an eye out and encourage better care when warranted.
“Carl, your car smells like a dumpster. Do you EVER clean the trash out of the front floor?” It looked like a week’s worth of food wrappers and apple cores and unrecognizable stuff. “What happens when you have to give some citizen a ride home? They have to sit in that?”
“No, Sarge, then I throw it in the back seat.”
More to the original point of this story, now we have personally-assigned take-home cars and life is good. But one night I had a guy on my squad who decided to see if he can drive up the asphalt path toward Laurel High School from Harrison Drive at White Way. It’s dark. The woods there are pitch dark. The path looks inviting and he thinks, “You never know who might be in there this time of night.”
So he drives up over the curb—back then there was no ramp in the cement—and starts up the path. If you’ve never been there, the surrounding landscape becomes really swampy on both sides after about 40 yards. He must have known there was no way he could turn around and would have to eventually back out, but regardless he forged ahead with his wheels straddling the 4-foot wide asphalt pathway. Needless to say, after it got so wet and muddy on both sides his car sunk until it became solidly stuck on the path and he had to call for a tow truck to come get him out.
Embarrassing, yes. No cell phones back then: There are no secrets over the radio. But that’s midnight shift. Good patrol work, going “where no man has gone before.”
My own vehicle abuse came when Woodbine Drive was under construction. The curbs were in, but no asphalt had been laid yet. No problem—the subgrade looks good and solid. I get down to where it’s too unfinished to go any further and turned around. But my front right wheel went over the wrong side of the new curbing and dropped down into a hole. Again, before cell phones. The world knew I had to have DJ’s Towing come pull me out.
When I was on ERT (our SWAT team), we would hold regular training sessions and various scenarios to work out methods and tactics. This would involve activating the team as if it was a real callout, although word generally got around in advance, so we always had excellent response time. Then we’d set up the scenario—sometimes a search warrant, sometimes a hostage/barricade incident, etc.
One such practice session involved a hostage being held at the Public Works office at First Street & Little Montgomery Street. Of course, we needed people to fill the roles of bad guys and hostage. That day I was one of the bad guys and Lt. John was the hostage, though his role was as a civilian hostage. I forget the reason behind the hostage-taking. Maybe we were disgruntled garbage men. But here we were, hunkered down in the Public Works office with Lt. John tied up in a chair in the middle of the room. I think PFC Bill was the other bad guy.
So, we’re in there and it’s quiet as a church at night, and we just know the ERT team is forming up somewhere outside and planning their assault on us. Time drags on and none of us are talking, trying to listen for movement outside and tension is rising.
Lt. John, who’s been quiet, too, all this time and I guess he got bored, blurts out at full volume, “SO, WHERE YOU GUYS FROM?”
Scared the hell out of both us. We almost shot him right then. Blanks of course.
But it broke the tension a bit and soon we could hear the team stacking on the First Street side of the building preparing to make entry. The flaw in the plan, the monkey in the wrench, was that door opened into a long hallway, a “fatal funnel” we had always been taught to avoid. But in they came. The lights were all off and I was hunkered down behind some furniture or desks with full view down the hallway. I waited until four or five guys were all lined up in the hall and I opened fire. I probably hosed the entire team.
END EXERCISE
The scenario was over. Bad guys won. Some things you can’t teach in a classroom. Lessons learned.
Maybe it’s from snow days and schools closing during childhood but we never used to get enough snow to suit me. Laurel is just not in the snow-belt like where I live now. Then again, -38 temps is a little extreme but I’ll take it. I mean, winters without snow is just a waste of cold air. But when we did get a good snowstorm in Laurel, the typical panic buying and apocalyptic frenzy would grip the public. “I’ve GOT to get to the store. We need toilet paper!”
End-of-the-world 6-inch snowfalls also bring opportunities for overtime pay. One winter the city was paying us overtime to drive snowplows and salt trucks. A CDL license was required so I wasn’t in the running. But we had a guy, Sgt. Steve, and I don’t know if he had one or not—I’m sure they checked. Right. So, he’s out spreading salt with one of the city’s dump trucks and of course the dump bed is raised slightly so the salt will flow into the spreader on the back. The trucks can go anywhere in snow so life is good and he’s raking in time-and-a-half.
I don’t think at that time they minded us working 24 hours straight but it’s the only excuse I can think of for what happened next. Steve is coming back to the city lot at Little Montgomery & First Streets via Lafayette Ave. You see what’s coming, right? He made the turn onto Main Street under the B&O railroad tracks and BAM! The raised dump bed hit the train trestle. He was able to stop the truck and back up enough to lower the bed and get to the city lot. There may or may not have been paperwork involved.
Those who knew about it seemed to pause and listen the next few times a train rolled through town.
Changes in our uniform moved slower than the wheels of justice. When Archie Cook was chief, he was a solid proponent of a sharp dressed cadre of uniformed officers. Since way before my time, we had been issued shiny black patent leather uniform shoes for everyday patrol. They did look sharp, but we seemed to be moving into a time where we needed more protection on our feet. Rank and file patrol officers were the first face of the department and Chief Cook liked to maintain a professional image. At the same time, we had K-9 officers who wore boots, as did the ERT team when activated, so the patrol guys were a little jealous of the comfortable footwear.
As FOP president I remember one conversation with the chief where I was trying to convince him to allow boots on patrol and I said, “When I’m on calls with a K-9 guy, I don’t recall seeing the complainant glance at our feet and say they don’t want to talk to the guy in boots, chief.”
I don’t think that convinced him.
I think it was the growing list of OSHA injuries, now that we knew how to do the reports. And who seemed to have several? This guy. Severely sprained ankle just getting out of my cruiser on some freshly bulldozed dirt. Stepped on a nail clearing an open building on Main Street midnight door checks. It went right into my foot through that shiny dress uniform shoe. I’m sure there were other guys with similar OSHA paperwork and eventually someone somewhere started to notice and soon we were authorized to wear boots.
Then we wanted to start wearing our navy blue utility uniforms on midnights because they were a) more tactical for nighttime work, and b) much more comfortable. Well, give ‘em an inch and they want a mile. It eventually worked. Then we wanted them on day shift, too, and well, the rest is uniform history.
I don’t believe in striking a woman. But we had a woman one day... Corporal-at-the-time Bob and I went to an apartment at Laurelton Court to look for a guy on a warrant but his girlfriend was the only one home at the time. When she said he wasn’t home we asked her if we could just walk through the apartment to make sure; pretty routine.
We were almost done and, sure enough, he wasn’t home. The last room we checked was the bedroom. Now, this girl was wearing some flimsy negligee but believe me, she was a skinny doper like her boyfriend, so not a memorable encounter in that sense. But she was becoming increasingly agitated and abusive as we were about to leave, talking herself up into a lather. Suddenly she lunged for a dresser drawer and yanked it open. I was on one side of the bed and Bob was on her side. Bob shouted, “GUN!” and he grabbed her one hand in the drawer as it came out with a little silver revolver. He punched her right in the face with his other hand and they both fell back on the bed. I jumped in and we wrestled the gun away from her and replaced it with handcuffs.
Nowadays our guys have body cameras but that would have been a good training video.
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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