aqua fortis

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

COPS Modesto!


PICT0353
Originally uploaded by Aquafortis.

So, yesterday I heard something outside while I was working at the computer. I looked out the window and there were all these police cars outside a house at the end of our block. Naturally, I went outside to gawk.


What I saw was about 8 police cars, and about 15 officers, pulled up in front of this house which always seemed a tad scummy to me (plastic patio furniture on front porch, white boys blaring the occasional gangsta rap, guys wearing wife-beaters, etc.). Two of the cars were Probation Office vehicles and one was an undercover cop car. A few of the officers were kicking and hammering in the side fence of the house until they could get into the backyard.


About ten of the officers were standing around this guy who was cuffed and kneeling on the ground and apparently spazzing out in some way. Brandon (punk kid next door) and I speculated that drugs and/or alcohol were involved, and that the reason the cops kept hosing him off was to try to sober him up. Meeker (our neighbor from around the corner) provided a credible alternate suggestion, which is that they may have pepper-sprayed the guy and were trying to hose off the pepper spray.


Anyway, this scene went on for several minutes, with the police trying to get some sense out of the guy (or so I assumed; I could not actually hear the conversation from across the street, nor was I willing to go any closer). Then they searched his pockets and confiscated some small objects. (Again, Brandon and I figured, drugs.) At some point, an obese woman with pasty skin and long, black, permed hair pulled up in a car and walked over there and was giving the cops a piece of her mind (girlfriend? sister?). Eventually, they took him away in a police car. All the other cop cars left, and so did the angry large woman (which was a relief as her car was directly blocking our next-door-neighbor's driveway). Shortly afterward, all of us gawking neighbors also left.


But today, just minutes ago, I saw a City of Modesto truck siphoning something out of the sewer in front of that same house. Coinky-dink? Rob thinks maybe it was a meth lab--meth labs are a problem in this region. But then, he pointed out, there would probably have been HazMat trucks, too. So we don't know if the sewer truck is even related to what happened yesterday. But yesterday's action was exciting enough for me to bust out my camera and try to zoom in through my window. I did not feel comfortable bringing the camera outside where the police could observe me being a goober. So the photo quality's not great, but you can kind of see shit going down.


1 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

RANDOMLY
Okay - it's me, admittedly out of the loop, but what's a 'wife-beater'?! I've seen the phrase twice in the last month, for some reason, and all I can think of is muscle t-shirts? Is this a regional thing, like soda v. pop?