Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Bobby Wayne Remembers: CID Training
Bobby Wayne Remembers: CID Training: Back in the mid 1970s while working as a Military Police Criminal Investigator Assistant Special Agent with the United States Army (USA) Criminal Investigation Division at way out West.
Thursday, January 3, 2019
Lost Vehicles - Fiction and Reality
Lost Vehicles - Fiction and Reality
This story is based on a real incident from my past with just a little fiction tossed in to keep y'all from falling asleep...see if you can sort the real from the fiction...Smiles
Back in the day (Late 1970’s) I had a job finding lost vehicles for the Army. Yes, for some reason lots of vehicles were getting lost in and around the military post near Carmel California.
Finding those lost vehicles may have or could have gone something like this or not!
My job as a U.S. Army Military Police (MP) CID Assistant Special Agent (Enlisted Soldiers were Assistant Special Agents) while Special Agents were Warrant Officers was to help the individual who lost his or her vehicle find their lost vehicles.
The owner would park these vehicles in a public parking lot or private parking space and when the owner came back to where he or she left the vehicle, it would be gone. The owner still had the keys to the missing vehicle and there was nothing to indicate the vehicle had been broken into such as broken glass on the ground or other damaged parts from the vehicle left behind.
Developing information on the stolen and missing vehicles with information from sources and what I could find out from the owner along with surveillance of the area is how I use to find the missing and stolen vehicles.
Determining if the missing vehicles had been stolen, towed, repossessed, taken by a jealous or mad wife, husband, lover, friend or even wrecked by the owner was not an easy task. In some cases the missing vehicles would be parked in another location by the owner who forgot they parked the vehicle in the other location or the vehicle was destroyed by the owner for the insurance money.
One night while on surveillance in one of the many US Army troop barracks and parking areas on the military post as part of my efforts too locate one of the many missing vehicles I observed a pickup truck driving down the road with the head lights off. The bed of the pickup was loaded with motor cycles. As I watched the truck drive slowly down the street I saw two men picking parked motor cycles up and placing them into the bed of the truck. I saw only those two men and the man behind the wheel of the truck.
As required by CID and MP procedures I called the situation into the MP/CID desk and waited for assistance to arrive. After several minutes I was getting a little nervous that these possible thieves would finish removing motor cycles from the street and drive off before the MPs arrived.
I knew CID would not arrive since there was only one CID agent on duty besides me sitting out in the dark in my assigned CID vehicle, but there were plenty of MPs on duty.
No one ever wanted to make or attempt to detain anyone without assistance for obvious reasons. After what seemed like an hour, but was only several minutes, the thieves who were picking up the motor cycles walked to the truck and got in.
I was out of time and the MPs were not there to assist me in finding out what these three individuals were doing.
The men in the truck had not yet seen me sitting in my unmarked police vehicle just up the street from their location. While I was coming up with a plan on what to do my police radio came to life and the MP’s asked for further information on where I was located. This was a good thing since obviously my MP assistance was lost.
The radio noise was low but loud and may have traveled over the air waves down the street to the men in the truck. The lights on the truck came on and the truck lurched forward. The truck was headed in my direction and was gaining speed. These folks may have heard the radio transmission or not.
Remember I was alone and my MP backup had not arrived yet, but I did not want these folks to get away with what appeared to be stolen motor cycles.
As the vehicle approached I thought about all the police shows I had seen on TV along with my MP/CID training and decided I could get out of my vehicle, stop the vehicle, identify myself, determine what they were doing, detain them or let them go depending on the information developed.
It occurred to me that if they did not stop I might have to shoot out the tires of the approaching vehicle, detain them and find out what they were doing with the motor cycles in the back of their truck.
This action did not seem the best way to approach this situation so I was not a fan of shooting out the tires thing, since it only works on TV. I decided it would be much better if I plugged in my blue light which started flashing brightly and placed it on the dash of my car so the bad guys would know I was a cop and not another bad guy, stop their vehicle, identify themselves, be detained or released.
Thinking how I would proceed if I was going to stop these folks without MP backup had me getting out of my vehicle with the blue police dash light flashing, holding up my badge, and indicating to the folks in the vehicle to pull over.
If the folks in the truck slowed and stopped the truck, got out of the truck, talked to me, explained what they were doing, identified them selves, and provided enough information for me to decided if they should be released or detained, and my MP back up had arrived all would have been right with the world
If the truck and the bad folks had not stopped and attempted to run over me I would have gone with the shoot the tires out idea with my little Smith & Wesson pistol bucking six times with red, blue, and orange flame coming from the barrel each time. The rounds from the smith would have hit the engine and the front two tires. The truck, which would have been almost on top of me, would have seemed to just stop kind of suddenly and spun side ways, tilted and fell on its side spilling the three men who were not wearing their seat belts onto the pavement.
As happy as I would have been at that moment my happy feeling would have changed if several of the motor cycles from the rear of the truck had gone air born in my direction and I had just managed to jump out of the way as two of the motor cycles hit the pavement where I had been standing.
Jumping out of the way of flying motor cycles is not easy and landing on hard pavement could have resulted in my sliding across the pavement like it was ice resulting in my sliding about ten yards to the curb, coming to a very hard stop. The slide across the pavement would have caused me to loose my pistol, which might have slid into the storm drain.
These thought projections of what to do in a situation take only seconds, but this one was not going the way I wanted and adding injury to the thought process was not fun since I had a terrible pain in my left shoulder all the way to my left wrist.
Again this possible action in stopping, identifying, detaining or releasing suspected motor cycle thieves was not turning out the way I had planed it.
As the seconds spun by out of control I heard the approaching sirens and knew all was going to be ok, but just when you think something is going to be ok it can turn out not to be ok.
As another possible outcome of my proposed stop and detain actions took over, II looked up and the three guys from the truck were walking towards me and they were not happy and they all had guns (I was right they were bad guys) and their guns were larger than the gun I had just lost down the storm drain.
In reality I would never have let himself get in this situation and the MPs would not have let me down like this by arriving late but just like in many thought projections of what we should do, all of a sudden one of the motor cycles laying on the ground behind the three bad guys exploded and knocked them all down.
In reality I would have managed to move quickly away from the area just as the MP vehicles arrived and the MPs would get to the three bad guys quickly detained without further problems.
This entire proposed action and brush with serious injury and various protocol issues with detaining folks was avoided since as a U.S. Army MP Assistant CID Special Agent I let the truck pass by me (Folks in the truck had not heard my previous MP radio transmission), further identified the truck, observed who was in the truck, got the license plate number, and once the truck was past me called the information into the MP desk.
This one incident taught me to always have a partner with me no matter what and have more people than the bad guys if I want to be the one detaining suspected bad folks.
The life and times of me in the shadows way back when or not - Can any of you sort the real from the fiction or was there any fiction ... Smiles
This story is based on a real incident from my past with just a little fiction tossed in to keep y'all from falling asleep...see if you can sort the real from the fiction...Smiles
Back in the day (Late 1970’s) I had a job finding lost vehicles for the Army. Yes, for some reason lots of vehicles were getting lost in and around the military post near Carmel California.
Finding those lost vehicles may have or could have gone something like this or not!
My job as a U.S. Army Military Police (MP) CID Assistant Special Agent (Enlisted Soldiers were Assistant Special Agents) while Special Agents were Warrant Officers was to help the individual who lost his or her vehicle find their lost vehicles.
The owner would park these vehicles in a public parking lot or private parking space and when the owner came back to where he or she left the vehicle, it would be gone. The owner still had the keys to the missing vehicle and there was nothing to indicate the vehicle had been broken into such as broken glass on the ground or other damaged parts from the vehicle left behind.
Developing information on the stolen and missing vehicles with information from sources and what I could find out from the owner along with surveillance of the area is how I use to find the missing and stolen vehicles.
Determining if the missing vehicles had been stolen, towed, repossessed, taken by a jealous or mad wife, husband, lover, friend or even wrecked by the owner was not an easy task. In some cases the missing vehicles would be parked in another location by the owner who forgot they parked the vehicle in the other location or the vehicle was destroyed by the owner for the insurance money.
One night while on surveillance in one of the many US Army troop barracks and parking areas on the military post as part of my efforts too locate one of the many missing vehicles I observed a pickup truck driving down the road with the head lights off. The bed of the pickup was loaded with motor cycles. As I watched the truck drive slowly down the street I saw two men picking parked motor cycles up and placing them into the bed of the truck. I saw only those two men and the man behind the wheel of the truck.
As required by CID and MP procedures I called the situation into the MP/CID desk and waited for assistance to arrive. After several minutes I was getting a little nervous that these possible thieves would finish removing motor cycles from the street and drive off before the MPs arrived.
I knew CID would not arrive since there was only one CID agent on duty besides me sitting out in the dark in my assigned CID vehicle, but there were plenty of MPs on duty.
No one ever wanted to make or attempt to detain anyone without assistance for obvious reasons. After what seemed like an hour, but was only several minutes, the thieves who were picking up the motor cycles walked to the truck and got in.
I was out of time and the MPs were not there to assist me in finding out what these three individuals were doing.
The men in the truck had not yet seen me sitting in my unmarked police vehicle just up the street from their location. While I was coming up with a plan on what to do my police radio came to life and the MP’s asked for further information on where I was located. This was a good thing since obviously my MP assistance was lost.
The radio noise was low but loud and may have traveled over the air waves down the street to the men in the truck. The lights on the truck came on and the truck lurched forward. The truck was headed in my direction and was gaining speed. These folks may have heard the radio transmission or not.
Remember I was alone and my MP backup had not arrived yet, but I did not want these folks to get away with what appeared to be stolen motor cycles.
As the vehicle approached I thought about all the police shows I had seen on TV along with my MP/CID training and decided I could get out of my vehicle, stop the vehicle, identify myself, determine what they were doing, detain them or let them go depending on the information developed.
It occurred to me that if they did not stop I might have to shoot out the tires of the approaching vehicle, detain them and find out what they were doing with the motor cycles in the back of their truck.
This action did not seem the best way to approach this situation so I was not a fan of shooting out the tires thing, since it only works on TV. I decided it would be much better if I plugged in my blue light which started flashing brightly and placed it on the dash of my car so the bad guys would know I was a cop and not another bad guy, stop their vehicle, identify themselves, be detained or released.
Thinking how I would proceed if I was going to stop these folks without MP backup had me getting out of my vehicle with the blue police dash light flashing, holding up my badge, and indicating to the folks in the vehicle to pull over.
If the folks in the truck slowed and stopped the truck, got out of the truck, talked to me, explained what they were doing, identified them selves, and provided enough information for me to decided if they should be released or detained, and my MP back up had arrived all would have been right with the world
If the truck and the bad folks had not stopped and attempted to run over me I would have gone with the shoot the tires out idea with my little Smith & Wesson pistol bucking six times with red, blue, and orange flame coming from the barrel each time. The rounds from the smith would have hit the engine and the front two tires. The truck, which would have been almost on top of me, would have seemed to just stop kind of suddenly and spun side ways, tilted and fell on its side spilling the three men who were not wearing their seat belts onto the pavement.
As happy as I would have been at that moment my happy feeling would have changed if several of the motor cycles from the rear of the truck had gone air born in my direction and I had just managed to jump out of the way as two of the motor cycles hit the pavement where I had been standing.
Jumping out of the way of flying motor cycles is not easy and landing on hard pavement could have resulted in my sliding across the pavement like it was ice resulting in my sliding about ten yards to the curb, coming to a very hard stop. The slide across the pavement would have caused me to loose my pistol, which might have slid into the storm drain.
These thought projections of what to do in a situation take only seconds, but this one was not going the way I wanted and adding injury to the thought process was not fun since I had a terrible pain in my left shoulder all the way to my left wrist.
Again this possible action in stopping, identifying, detaining or releasing suspected motor cycle thieves was not turning out the way I had planed it.
As the seconds spun by out of control I heard the approaching sirens and knew all was going to be ok, but just when you think something is going to be ok it can turn out not to be ok.
As another possible outcome of my proposed stop and detain actions took over, II looked up and the three guys from the truck were walking towards me and they were not happy and they all had guns (I was right they were bad guys) and their guns were larger than the gun I had just lost down the storm drain.
In reality I would never have let himself get in this situation and the MPs would not have let me down like this by arriving late but just like in many thought projections of what we should do, all of a sudden one of the motor cycles laying on the ground behind the three bad guys exploded and knocked them all down.
In reality I would have managed to move quickly away from the area just as the MP vehicles arrived and the MPs would get to the three bad guys quickly detained without further problems.
This entire proposed action and brush with serious injury and various protocol issues with detaining folks was avoided since as a U.S. Army MP Assistant CID Special Agent I let the truck pass by me (Folks in the truck had not heard my previous MP radio transmission), further identified the truck, observed who was in the truck, got the license plate number, and once the truck was past me called the information into the MP desk.
This one incident taught me to always have a partner with me no matter what and have more people than the bad guys if I want to be the one detaining suspected bad folks.
The life and times of me in the shadows way back when or not - Can any of you sort the real from the fiction or was there any fiction ... Smiles
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