A Night in the Life

It started off as more of a curiosity than a real question. What does a small town cop do all day? What are their goals and how do they perceive their role in the community? Many of those questions I had made broad assumptions about. They couldn't do much. Their goals are safety and convictions. They perceive themselves as many people do, as a sort of hybrid between policing agent and safety organization. Still, I wanted to see what it was like to do a ride along and be in the life of a small town cop in Glasgow, Mont.

The People You Know:

It was 7:40 p.m., Sept. 29, when I crawled into Glasgow Police Officer Josh Nolan's patrol car and shook the rain from my coat. The outside temp was 37 degrees and the rain was falling in large droplets that managed to hit you in the face from all directions, thanks, in large part, to the gusting winds that caused it to fall at a 60-degree angle.

"So before we do anything," said Nolan, handing me a piece of paper. "I'll need you to sign this waiver." After reading a disclaimer that basically said anything he asks me to do will cover me from liability but that I cannot do anything dangerous, like apprehend a suspect, and, if he kicks me out of the car, I have to get out of the car immediately – fortunately neither would happen. In fact my hope was to get an honest idea of what a cop walking the "beat" on a lazy Sunday evening in Glasgow would look like and not to score an episode of Cops.

I signed the form, handed it back, and with an "alright" we hit the ground running.

The first order of business was to determine if a person on conditions was drinking at a bar downtown. Conditions is usually a court-ordered prohibition set as a requirement for someone's release – either pre-trial or post sentence. If a person violates their conditions, then they usually end up back in front of the judge and sometimes jailed or imprisoned once more.

"So for us, stopping someone on conditions like this, you know, can prevent a DUI or something worse," explained Nolan discussing the reason why they were looking for the individual in the first place.

Before going into the bars to search for the individual (we are not going to use the names of those we encountered during the evening because we want to focus on the law enforcement aspect of the ride along and not the people encountered), Nolan met up with Valley County Deputy Casey Mulkey to plan the search. The need for the deputy is due to the fact that Nolan is, at this time on a Sunday, the only GPD officer on shift, so anything he thinks might require backup requires him to work with VCSO.

Before the two law enforcement officers make it into the bar to search for the individual, however, a separate call comes over the radio. The two listen in and then start towards their vehicles. The call suggested that a man, who both Mulkey and Nolan have interacted with in the past, was trying to "pick a fight" at a residence that both of the officers had also been to in the past.

"So," explained Nolan as we made our hurried way back to the patrol car, abandoning our first task for a "higher" priority, "the gentleman picking a fight at someone's house, that's a pretty common call for those people." He would add shortly after that, the individual had also pulled a knife during a shoplifting incident a year earlier but had avoided jail after the victims refused to press charges. The situation seemed to put Nolan on alert for a possibly contentious encounter, but the interaction ended up being anything but.

After entering the home and moving around a rather annoyed Pomeranian, Nolan asked if the owner of the house wanted the belligerent man to leave and the owner said yes. Nolan then asked the man to leave, to which the man slammed the rest of his beer and left. He only paused to find the stairs off the porch and then stumbled off into the street.

I asked Nolan if he was worried about the man's risk of exposure in the freezing rain.

"No, because he has his jacket and stuff and that's his normal state right there," replied Nolan in a matter-of-fact tone. "So that one there, he's one of, I don't know, I'll say four people in town that is at that constant state of borderline hospital-level impairment. So he can function at that level, he just doesn't listen too well and gets more rowdy the more he drinks." Nolan continued with a description that seemed to convey that he had interacted with the man so much that he was almost inoculated to the strange scene that had just transpired. "If it is at the point where he can't walk," added Nolan, "then it does turn into a situation where we have to take him to the hospital, transfer liability and get him care."

Then, as if just adding a random comment, he says, "We just dealt with that today already with him." Which meant the man who had just walked down the street in the freezing rain, dazed, confused and totally inebriated had already, just that day, been in the hospital for being too inebriated to function. The next day, I learned that the man ended up back in the hospital with a shockingly high blood alcohol content level of over .35. For perspective, the University of Notre Dame's website says that a BAC of .25-.399 results in alcohol poisoning and loss of consciousness. It also says that a .40 would result in a coma or possible death due to respiratory arrest.

With the one call resolved, Nolan made his way back to the bars to look for the potential conditions violation from earlier. As he approached the back of the bar, he was again set off course when he encountered another man on conditions who had in fact been at the bar. Nolan looked at the man, but having already sent Mulkey through the front of the bar, he could not stop to deal with the man and instead told him to wait for him where he was.

The search of the bar resulted in nothing, so Nolan and Mulkey returned to the man out back of the bar but he had, predictably, fled the area. Nolan asked two of the people he was with which way he went, but neither provided any help. Unconcerned about the man running, Nolan explained they could cite him anytime they see him in the future and that all he did was make it worse for himself. The two officers then continued to search the remaining bars along downtown.

In each bar, a flurry of comments and sarcasm followed. One man, clearly annoyed by their presence, shouted out that it was only 8 p.m., along with some obscenities, implying that the cops were doing "bar checks" a little early in the evening to be of value. The cop and the deputy did not stop to engage any of the comments and none of them stopped to justify what they were doing to anyone at all. After not finding the individual in question, the two moved on, and the flurry of immediate activity was over within the first half hour of the ride along.

On Patrol:

With no specific task or call at hand, the hours following the initial flurry of activity were spent on patrol. Nolan stopped a young man for a busted tail light and cited him for not having active registration. Otherwise, he was searching for things amiss in Glasgow.

"I'm looking for out of the norm, for something that is not normal like a car door being open," said Nolan who went on to discuss how when the city experienced a string of car break-ins, that was one of the signs that cars had been burglarized. Other things they look for are people who are overly intoxicated that may be laying by dumpsters or stumbling down the street. Nolan said, "If we see them and they're in trouble we have to help them." Alcohol became a recurring theme across the night.

Nolan and I discussed the elements of being a police officer in a small town. The exciting parts of his work which included pulling people from elevators, long strings of fake ID encounters, that he contends young people are ordering from the internet, a need to understand the community and people around him and to make sure the police department is acting in a way that they, and the community, can support.

We spent a good amount of time recounting stories from the various scenes Nolan had seen during his time on the job in Glasgow. He showed me some short cuts around town, some back ways under the tracks, and a few muddy streets. One route nearly rendered his new-to-him Ford Explorer stuck in the clay that had been completely saturated by the falling snow and rain.

After a few hours in the car, he decided to hit the streets and start walking the downtown area starting at 2nd Ave. It was not long before he spotted a man running behind a building near the BNSF right of way. From what we could see he looked to be sprinting over the tracks.

"That looks out of place," said Nolan, before picking up his pace towards the man's path. Approaching cautiously, he hands me a flashlight. Nolan searched the area along the tracks, behind the businesses and across the rails, but found no one. We circled to the far side and did a cursory scan of the area, but still found no one. We continued on patrol.

The only other notable event during patrol was that Nolan gave a woman a ride home who, as she put it, was, "a little too drunk" to finish her walk from the bar. He did not know it then, but that same person would play a role in a later investigation between her and her ex-significant other.

That investigation began shortly after Nolan dropped her off at her house, when dispatch sent Nolan to a bar downtown to talk to a man who wanted to complain about his ex-girlfriend attacking him – including throwing scissors at him – but he was hesitant to report her. Nolan gave him a series of witness forms and asked him to get in touch with the department in the morning to file a complaint.

It was only a few minutes after leaving that call that dispatch sent Nolan back to the house where he dropped off the woman earlier that night to hear her complaint of a partner assault. Her story was, unsurprisingly, the complete opposite of her ex-boyfriend's story and she claimed that he had assaulted her and at one point threatened to kill her pets. Unconvinced, Nolan gave her the same witness forms and asked her to make a complaint with the PD in the morning.

Nolan clarified that no arrest was made because neither party was in direct threat of harm and they were nowhere near each other at the time.

Particularized Suspicion:

Of all the things he did that night, Nolan was the most deliberate about one thing: Curbing driving under the influence. For Nolan, it is a no-brainer that intoxicated driving is a bad decision. He feels so strongly about it, in fact, that he organized a radio broadcast with both a drunk driving victim and a man who killed someone while driving drunk. But it's not lost on him that driving under the influence is a touchy subject in Glasgow.

Culture aside, Nolan's approach to DUI enforcement is simple. He wants to make good stops. Most of those stops involve particularized suspicion, and, as I found out, that can be a tough game to play. To break it down, particularized suspicion is the process at which a cop can determine that a crime is likely being committed even if he has no direct proof. Once he determines suspicious behavior that is particular to a DUI, he can stop that person to further investigate.

According to GPD Sgt. Rob Weber, "particularized suspicion is based on the totality of circumstances (actual facts with rational inferences), that a reasonable officer believes, and can explain that from their knowledge, training and experience, that a crime has been committed or will be committed."

Nolan really only has to get particularized suspicion when the person has not directly broken a law. So in the event that they have a broken tail light or are speeding, he just initiates a normal stop and looks for signs of impaired driving after that. However, in the event he does not have a normal stop, he uses particularized suspicion. Those indicators include any number of things from driving at erratic speeds, making sharp corners or jerky corrections, wavering in the lane or slamming on their brakes when they see a cop car – which we saw a few times. For GPD, the idea is to get four or five strong indicators of particularized suspicion before initiating a stop, a threshold we never reached.

In spite of following at least a half-dozen cars that showed some sign of impaired driving, none of those vehicles reached the four or five clues before making it to their destination. The task was almost tedious. The bars were approaching closing time and the streets had started to fill up with vehicles, some driving frantically and others normally. He would see a clue, follow a car, they would change their driving habits, and then they would arrive at their destination and Nolan would move on to look for other potentially hazardous drivers. Despite strong suspicions that there were intoxicated drivers on the road, Nolan never saw the criteria to initiate a stop.

He did discuss that many in the area feel the opposite about DUI enforcement, and that the department is often accused of harassing people for DUIs, but, as he pointed out after we followed six drivers home, that is not exactly the case. In fact, he argues, the GPD is trying hard to give people the benefit of the doubt and only looking to establish strong particularized suspicion before making a DUI stop and possible arrest. That way they can better enforce the law and ensure public safety, but, also, not alienate the public while doing so. It becomes a delicate and frustrating balance and one that was on full display this particular night.

After everything I saw on the ride along the only ticket issued was for an unregistered vehicle. Much of the rest of the night was spent mitigating alcohol and its affect on the community. For Nolan, that is the most obvious factor in each of his interactions, and an unfortunate part of being a small town cop.

The other noticeable detail about the ride along was that Nolan knew quite a few people that evening from past experiences and the only one he did not know was the one he pulled over for the tail light who was heading home. That knowledge is both impressive and depressing. So many times the same people commit the same crimes and it is due, mostly, to alcohol consumption.

In the end, many of my assumptions had been challenged. At one point Nolan had stated, "If you want to be busy all night you can be, but you also want to make good stops." In his view it was about balance. About finding things worth dealing with and avoiding stops he saw as petty or knit-picky. The key reason he feels that way is because, like the rest of us, living in a small town requires a certain finesse or balance. It requires them to weigh the good and the bad and act accordingly, so that they can do their jobs and still be a part of the community.