Berkeley Riots - 1970

I first became a policeman in 1969 with the San Leandro Police Department in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. We had about 90 police officers total.

During that time the "students" and other life forms at or near the University of California at Berzerkley were periodically rioting about various social causes such as the war in Viet Nam. there was also a vacant lot in Berkeley near the campus that some local people had turned into what thy called "People's Park." The "money grubbing, burgeois, imperialistic, captitalist" owner of the land wanted to develop it and had the police try to evict the squatters who occupied it.

Berkeley PD couldn't handle all the rioting so we all got to go to Berkeley (I went two or three times) to help out.

On this one day, we were with a group of police officers from various departments and we were all kind of hanging out in reserve at the track stadium near the Campanile Bell Tower which is somewhat of a landmark for the University.

Suddenly a group of rioters who managed to get into the track stadium and up on the grand stands above us began lobbing cinder blocks down on us.

I, and some other officers near me, had just been issued a some "Ball" grenades. These marvelous devices are about the size of baseballs and when you pull the pin and throw them, they don't exactly explode, but CS gas (tear gas) puffs out of them in about a ten to fifteen foot cloud. They are pretty cool crowd control tools.

About five of us immediately lobbed some ball grenades over the top of the grand stand - about fifty feet up - and other officers ran around each end and we wound up with about ten good arrests (ADW on a police officer).

If you have never seen the UC campus in Berkeley, it is one of the most beautiful imagineable. It was a shame that every time I went there as a cop, it always had the smell of tear gas just hanging in the air.

One day, a group of CHP officers arrived sporting wrist-rocket sling shots and bags of marbles for ammo. They would get behind the rioting crowds and from about a hundred yards would shoot these marbles into the legs and feet of the rioters. I don't want anyone to think that I might have enjoyed watching the rioters jumping up in pain and grabbing their lower legs and ankles trying to figure out what had hit them, so I won't say any more about that.

Many years later when we basically had to watch rioters carry stolen goods out of burning buildings in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, I sort of wished we could have been issued sling shots and marbles just to make those rioters feel a teeny weeny bit uncomfortable while they were looting.

I recently watched South Pacific and enjoyed it a lot. The credits indicated the musical was based on James A Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. So i got it and read it. It was Michener's first book and was a collection of tales by different men serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Michener was a Lt. Commander in the Navy.

So I'm wondering if Rogers and Hammerstien will do a musical based on the ramblings of my Tales of Being a Cop. I think not.

Persistent Paul Beats Persistent Squirrel

Since moving to Kentucky we have been enjoying the extensive variety of birds that populate our area. We visited Audobon's Owensboro, Kentucky home and enjoyed the birds that were attracted to the bird feeders there so we have experimented with bird feeders here. I made them out of wood and found that the squirrels had no problem getting to them. We don't have anything against squirrels but we are trying to feed and attract birds.

I went to metal poles but the squirrels had no problem climbing them as well. then we heard that squirrels hate cayenne pepper but birds have no problem with it so I scattered pepper around the base of the poles and just to be sure, I greased the poles too. Turns out that both were good ideas. Check out the video. The squirrel is trying to avoid the pepper by leaping over it.

"High Water" - Not a Flood

Today, March 18, 2010, we got a look at the Ohio River when it is about one foot below official flood stage. It is supposed to crest tonight at 1:00 AM at an inch or two higher than it is right now. I took some photos just for the record. Although, as you will see, the water is high, no major flooding has occurred that would damage homes or businesses in a major way.

I included this first photo taken earlier in an effort to provide comparison. It's not much of a comparison unless you can look at the pilings and see that there is about twenty feet less in the second photo than the first. (I can't really see it but trust me).




This next photo is of the Harrods Creek Boat Harbor where I am a member. It's nothing fancy but it serves as a legal and safe place for me to launch my kayaks when I go out on the Ohio or Harrods Creek. The best reference here is the little bit of the Harbor's Store that is poking out of the water. It is, of course, normally on dry land and the boat ramp is just to the right now under about fifteen feet of water.


This last photo is taken at a restaurant called Captain's Quarters. This phot depicts a walkway (lower left) that normally descends down to the normal water's edge. You can also make out a path lamp (like a street light) near the right edge of the photo. This too is normally well up on dry land.



All of this is well below our home and we are in no danger of flooding even when the river exceeds flood level. But we have seen photos of much higher water levels that have occurred in the past.

Stephen Yagman - "I Sue Police Officers"

A few years ago there was an attorney in Los Angeles named Stephen Yagman that made quite a name for himself by suing police officers in general and LAPD officers in particular. He was particularly fond of suing the detectives of the Special Investigations Section (SIS) of the now defunct (I think) Robbery Homicide Division.

SIS detectives would go after the most violent and dangerous of LA's criminals. These guys seldom were interested in giving up and going quietly to jail and so they frequently wound up getting shot by the SIS... often they died as a result of their wounds.

Enter Stephen Yagman who would, while enriching himself, get some taxpayer money to help the grieving relatives gain "closure" from the sudden and unfortunate demise of these criminals. Keep in mind that they almost always went out having committed as their final crime, Attempted Murder of a Police Officer.

Yagman would sue any police officer though and was universally thought poorly of by most LAPD officers.

So one Sunny and beautiful Sunday in LA's West Bureau, I was working my favorite job as 34M30 (Supervisor of a squad of motorcycle officers), when one of my brighter young police officers, Patrick Bradshaw, called for a supervisor in Venice Area.

Responding, I found that Bradshaw had pulled over Stephen Yagman who had been driving a Cadilac with New York license plates on it. I generally speak to the police officer first to get a feel for what's going on.

Bradshaw, having observed a minor traffic violation, pulled the car over and found Yagman driving. Yagman had a New York drivers license and the car was registered in Yagman's name in the State of New York. The officer had formed the opinion that Yagman was legally a California resident thus making him improperly licensed and the car improperly registered. He believed that Yagman's car was impoundable because of these registration and drivers licensing irregularities, but before taking any steps that made his actions seem vengeful, unjust or wrong, he decided to obtain the advice of a supervisor (Me).

We have some nice technical tools, one of which is the ANI or Automated Name Index that we can access by radio through our Communications Center. Through ANI we can check a person by name and find out if he has a California drivers license and what the status of that license is. Our outstanding officer had done that and found that Yagman had at one time had a California drivers license but that it was now "Suspended." Bingo!

I approached Mr. Yagman and he introduced himself saying, "I'm Stephen Yagman the attorney." then he added, "I sue police officers."

I responded with something like, "So I've heard". I then gave him a brief rundown of what we had discovered and that we intended to impound his car and possibly arrest him adding that I wanted to give him an opportunity to provide his input or explanation that might change what we were thinking.

He responded by repeating several times that he was Stephen Yagman and that he sued police officers for a living. I wanted to thank him for the warning but I was able to control myself.

I finally told him that I would give him one more opportunity to try to focus on the events of the day and deal with them. He said the car was usually kept in New York and that he had an address in New York and that he drove it back and forth from New York to California. I asked him for a business card reflecting the address of his New York office. When he couldn't provide one, I asked him to give us his New York office phone number. I said I'd like to verify by listening to his office recording that he in fact had an office in New York. Wouldn't (or couldn't) do it.

We impounded the car and let Yagman go with a ticket.

Officer Bradshaw wrote up a marvelous report that included Yagman's ad in the local yellow pages reflecting an address in the Venice area of LA and a parking pass for Yagman's condominium complex in Redondo beach, California. He gathered an awful lot of evidence to substantiate that Yagman was a California resident.
Never heard anything later from Yagman. The Vehicle Coordinator at LAPD's Pacific Area Police Station said Yagman finally came in and got his car registered in California, settled up his license suspension and got his California drivers license.

I have always felt good about us helping that poor lawyer get straightened out. And, I don't know if it's related or not, but there weren't any more lawsuits against LAPD officers that I heard about after that. Probably just a coincidence.

My Start, Part II

My sister pointed out that I spent some time working for the BART PD. True.

When I was at San Leandro PD, the Bay Area Transit District established a police department and I signed up for that too. Well we had literally nothing to do because there weren't even any trains running yet. There were stations being built but they were guarded by security guards.

We had to wear royal blue blazers and drive around in police cars that were powder blue dodges with no isigniae on them. Our "jurisdiction" included all of Alameda, Hayward, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco Counties, and naturally our radios were frequently out of range.

I worked the AM (midnight to 0800) shift with a guy who had come over from the California Highway Patrol.

Did I mention there was nothing for us to do and huge territories in which to do it?

One memory was that some of the guys used to try to check out police cars that had almost no gas in them. They would take them to certain gast stations that offered 5 times Blue chip Stamps or Green Stamps. (Anybody remember those? Ask your moms or grandmas.) Then they would drive around all night and fill up again and get more stamps. I think they paid a lot more for gas at those stations but nobody seemed to care. I think they put the stamps in special stamp books and traded them in for appliances or other goodies.

Another example of government taking good care of the tax payer.

I think I stayed with that about six months before I became too, too disgusted with the whole program. That was just before I moved back to Salt Lake to make my last stab at getting educated.