Alpha-Car

I am meant to go off at midnight, and after eight hours of observing I am exhausted.

Hell, after two hours of observing I was exhausted.

I can only imagine how tired the officers must be who have actually been working.

However, I'm in a police station at midnight, something that doesn't happen every Friday night, so I ask the shift commander to go out in another car.

My final assignment is with Officer Carlos F. Aquino and Officer Joseph G. Murphy in the alpha-car.

Officer Murphy used to be an accountant, and Officer Aquino is studying for a master's degree.

"[The police] are going after a more mature person. They want some professional background, or at least a diverse background," Officer Murphy says. "And I think it helps in how people relate."

A call comes over the radio about two intoxicated men trying to break into a shelter on Albany Street.

When we arrive, two men are standing by the door, both visibly drunk, and one with a gash over one eye and blood running down his face and shirt.

The supervisor of the shelter says the men have been trying to break the door down. He claims the men were fighting, and that one man hit the other in the eye.

The two men claim in broken English and slurred Spanish that the supervisor hit the man's head with the door.

They say they want to spend the night in the shelter, but the supervisor does not want to let them in as they appear to be violent.

An ambulance arrives, but the unharmed man does not want his companion to go to the hospital, despite the fact that the wound is still bleeding and the man appears disoriented.

The wounded man must sign a release if he won't go in the ambulance: He is so drunk that it takes a long time to get him to make him understand, and to physically get his hand near the paper. After he has signed and the two have walked off down the street, we climb back in the car. But as we drive off, we see the two men head back to the shelter, so the officers radio for the wagon to come pick them up.

Aside from a few sightings of the skinheads reported in the earlier fight, the night proceeds without incident, until I ask to be let off at Harvard around 2 a.m.

I am amazed about all of the officers' enthusiasm and sense of duty. If I didn't know better, I would say they must have all known I was coming and planned to say hello to the priest and take blind people out to dinner and talk passionately about respect.

In fact, the officer the police chief had planned for me to drive with was not there on that Friday, and it was all just a regular day.

As Superintendent Harold F. Murphy Jr. said, "the police force is like life insurance. You don't want to have to use it, but if you do, it's there."