Lights and Sirens
Part 46 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“Marvelous are the works of the Lord. Blessed is he who is not shocked by them.”
~Knight Hospitaller, after a defeat by Saladin, in the year 1177
An Own Goal
The only real question, every Fourth of July, was who was going to get stabbed at the Dolphin Fountain where, like many Santa Barbara cops before you, and many who would come after, you earned the coveted Naked Crazy Badge for arresting a naked and crazy tweaker who was taking a birdbath with the concrete dolphins and threatening to blow up buildings, or burn down the wharf, while playing a version Marco Polo with himself in the water.
Crazy is one thing, but when you throw in naked—it’s never a GOOD naked—and a healthy dose of the determined psychosis which is the one predictable result of smoking battery acid, industrial solvents, and acetone, the game is elevated to different levels. You have to make some decisions about how you are going to take this amphibious creature, with his crank swinging in the wind, with his demands that someone produce Brittany Spears for negotiations, safely into custody in front of three hundred influencers and a crowd of gawking midwesterners who are simultaneously amused—this is what they expected in California—and appalled to be seeing it up close, so soon after a lovely morning visit to the Santa Barbara Zoo where they saw Bangori, the Western Lowland Gorilla, and those wacky Slender Tailed Meerkats.
You have options beyond the least desirable, which is to go hands-on, and attempt to wrassle this creature to the pavement without throat punching him or doing things that would shock the public conscience—and probably see you doxxed and sued by the armies of Civil Rights attorneys hiding behind their cell phones.
Beanbags are always a nice touch, and effective, fired from a shotgun at close range they hurt like hell, as are foam baton rounds which will penetrate thick plywood and leave a considerable welt. Tasers are nice and usually effective, but you might have some questions about electrifying an entire fountain while a man is standing in it—hip-thrusting the air in a delusional mating ritual complete with monkey calls. So you sort through a number of these options while trying to talk crazy through his diatribes about MK Ultra and someone named Becky, that bitch, who apparently stole his guitar, and might be dead under the ice plant on East Beach, or overdosed in his van down by the stinking waters at the Bird Refuge.
It’s hard to know.
