A Different Perspective

Last Wednesday, I posted a piece about an encounter I had with the Long Beach police. Today, I want to relate two encounters with the Long Beach police that were a bit different. I didn't have the encounters, I just witnessed them.

The first was just outside a restaurant in Long beach. I had been sitting in a booth with my then girlfriend who worked on the "Pike" in downtown Long Beach. There were four of us in the booth, just drinking coffee and chatting, when a couple of cops came in and walked up to a booth with a couple of guys in it. They asked one of them to come outside and talk with them. He did. As they approached the police car, they turned and seemed to confront the man they had invited to come outside. As I watched, they had the guy face the rear door of the car and "assume the position." After he leaned toward the car, placed his hands on the roof, and spread his feet apart they began asking him questions. I couldn't hear clearly through the restaurant window but they did not seem to be friendly questions. At one point, the guy turned his head toward the cops and one of them turned it back forcefully and pushed it into the window of the car. He did this hard enough that I saw a smear of blood appear on the window and heard the guy cry out. After that, they let him go and drove off. He came back in and sat in the booth he had left and blotted his face with a napkin. I learned a little later that he had recently been paroled after a burlary stint.

The second encounter involved a young man his roommates had asked us to check on. I was on Shore Patrol at the time, partnered with a guy who introduced himself as "Pineapple" (a beefy Hawaiian whose real name I don't recall). He was a good guy to have as a partner, tough and loyal. The guy that the roommates (a guy and his girlfriend) told us about was supposedly a deserter from the Army. We found him in a greasy spoon a few blocks away, went in, and sat down across from him at a table. Pineapple asked him for some ID and about his status. He said he was visiting the US on a visa from Germany and produced a German ID (driver's license, I think). We chatted for a little while (Pineapple did, I stayed silent). His story sounded fishy to me. And to Pineapple. But we had no real power to do anything so we asked him politely to come with us to the SP station so we could sort things out. To my surprise, he agreed.

As we were walking down the street toward the station, we ran across a Long Beach cop. He asked what was up and Pineapple told him the story... quietly. The cop offered his services and Pineapple said somthing like "He's all yours." The cop asked him a couple of questions I do not recall, they seemed innocuous. Then he asked for the guy's ID and, when he pulled out his wallet, the cop just grabbed it and started looking through it. He found a folded up letter which he read for a bit and then askede something like "How long have you been gone from your base?" The guy was flustered but admitted to being AWOL so we called for the wagon to pick him up. The Marine who worked with the Shore Patrol was not happy with our friend and gave him a lot of grief about bailing out on his unit.

The guy was polite and cooperative. Had he not been, we might not have suspected him of deserting.