Riding the Beat with Elk Grove PD

The streets of Elk Grove are not particularly mean.  Yes, we have crime; sure, the evils of South Sac spill over the border; absolutely, there are gangs here.  But the policing of our city doesn’t demand the pedal to the metal position that we’ve come to believe all cops inhabit.  I saw this up close and personal when I spent a day riding shotgun with Elk Grove Police Officer Jason Jacobo as he did a shift as a beat cop.  Riding shotgun is absolutely apt in this case, because there really was a shotgun—or some sort of impressive-looking weapon—stowed between us behind the front seat. 

“Do you know how to handle a rifle?” he asked me as we started out for the day.

“I’ve never even been this close to one,” I answered.

“Okay, then we’ll skip that lesson and just move onto the taser.”

I thought he was joking until he pulled over to the side of the driveway as we were leaving, and began teaching me where everything on the patrol car was and how to work it.  There’s the Panasonic camera that records everything when it’s activated by any one of several things, such as the lights and the siren, or his gun. There’s a backup ignition—and there’s the taser.  This wasn’t an idle conversation; this was what I needed to know how to do if he “was down in the street and you need to help me.”  He made me practice with the taser and—yikes—those six seconds that it fires when you pull the trigger seem incredibly long when the thing is shooting its darts.

Fortunately for me (and the bad guys), I never needed to use the taser.  In fact, the seven or so hours Officer Jacobo and I spent together were remarkable only for being relatively unremarkable. We did some service calls, a couple of traffic stops, but mostly we drove up and down, in and out of the many neighborhoods that make up our city. The Elk Grove cops, Office Jacobo tells me, drive 50 - 100 miles a day as they patrol their beats. This means endless meandering through endless streets in which the houses are differentiated mostly by whether their yards are clean and clipped (by the owner) or overgrown with weeds (bank-owned).  

We answer a call that a homeowner’s alarm has gone off.  Is it a break-in or just the wind?  Jacobo jumps the back fence, enters the garage and determines that nothing is amiss . We drive around looking for school-aged kids with bulging backpacks who are truant; this, Officer Jacobo tells me, is the identity of the latest crop of Elk Grove burglars.  Last week he caught three or four of them over in Beat 4.

Another service call comes over the radio, a welfare check: The reporting party is fearful that something has happened to her employee, who has not shown up for work and isn’t answering the phone.  We get to the site and find another squad car already there.  They’ve checked on the employee and learned he’s okay. Jacobo stands on the corner discussing this with the other two officers.  I’m wishing I could read lips, when he comes back to the car and invites me to join them.  Introductions are made and I find I’m listening intently to three cops discussing the fact that the film industry constantly recycles the same plots over and over again.  Hello Hollywood, Elk Grove calling!

Sitting in a cop car doing a ride-along evokes interesting emotions in me.  I have a sort of split screen going in my head: One part of me is in the car, one of the cops, and the other part of me is just a citizen, reacting as I do when I come across a cop car while I’m driving.  It’s that second side that is strongest when we make a stop for a traffic violation.  A young guy rolls through a stop sign in a residential neighborhood.  Our red lights flash, and we pull him over.  I stay in the car, watching (and waiting in case I need to use the taser to save Officer Jacobo).  I feel sorry for the poor schlub.  Everyone rolls through those stop signs. Few get caught; those who do pay a hefty fine.

Officer Jacobo spots another two infractions as we’re on our way to a priority call.  “That guy ran a red light,” he says.  “And that woman over there, she’s texting while she’s driving.”  Those drivers luck out because we don’t have time to stop: We’re on our way to find a suicidal kid who’s wandering in the neighborhood.  We come upon a confluence of cop cars, just as the kid is being taken to a hospital for a 5150 (so-called for the CA Code which allows for a mentally disordered person who is a danger to himself or others to be held three days for a psychiatric examination).

At lunch, I tell Jacobo about my split screen, that I feel bad about the ticket he gave.  “Me too,” he says, and tells me how a traffic stop, a righteous cite (cop-speak for a justified ticket) by a good cop, changed his attitude toward the police and policing.  Before he got pulled over, he thought, as many people do, that cops are jerks just out to boss people around.  But that cop and that traffic stop showed him that there was another way to police, he said: to show the respect they deserve to everyone; to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing; to police with positive intentions rather than punitive, negative ones.

That’s the kind of cop Officer Jacobo has become—and he and his fellow officers say that’s the kind of police department we have in Elk Grove.  What has struck me over and over during the weeks I’ve attended the Citizens Academy is how incredibly proud of their department the individual cops are.  What they feel makes them special is that the ethos of the department focuses so strongly on community policing.

Community policing isn’t sexy or dramatic; it doesn’t make for a very good story arc in television drama.  It does make for a department in which the uniformed officers are, by their own lights, human beings first and foremost, doing a job as best they can day after day after day.  That’s the reality I saw on my ride-along—not some souped-up version of a cop show.