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Breaking Boring
In 1982, I was an Albuquerque Police Department (APD) recruit working with a training officer (TO). One day, we were dispatched to a hit-and-run crash. The victim had a description of the vehicle, a very distinctive description of the driver, and a license plate number. We ran the plate through the state Motor Vehicle Division, and it came back to the same make and model described by the victim, belonging to a Jimmie Joe L____.
We went to the address from the registration and found the vehicle in the driveway. It exactly matched the victim’s description and had damage consistent with the crash. The house, or I should say the property, was very strange. There was an eight-foot wooden fence around the entire border except the driveway. We walked past the vehicle and knocked on the gate, receiving no answer. As we were walking back down the drive, one of us looked into the vehicle and saw a revolver lying in plain sight on the front seat.
Both front windows were open, so one of us simply reached in and picked up the weapon. The gun was loaded, but the most distinctive thing about it was a strong chemical smell emanating from it. Neither I nor my TO recognized the smell at the time. We took the gun.
When we got back to the station, my TO did a record check on Jimmie Joe L____. It turned out that Mr. Jimmie was a distinctive looking person who had an extensive criminal record and was an apparent member of a motorcycle gang. He had me put the revolver into evidence as a “found item.” When I asked about the legality of what we did, he pointed out that it was an unsecured deadly weapon sitting in an open vehicle in a driveway easily accessible from the street. We were doing the owner a favor to keep his gun from being stolen and possibly used in a crime. And besides, he said, Jimmie Joe L____ is never going to report his revolver missing. He was right about that.
I wrote a report on the crash and forwarded it to the Hit and Run unit. I never heard anything further about it.
Several months later, I was a rookie APD officer working nights in the same general area. Another officer and I were dispatched to a domestic disturbance. As soon as I walked in the door, something struck me as being familiar even though I had never been there before. The complainant was a woman who reported that her husband had beat her up and left. She also told us that he had a drug lab in the shed in the back yard.
My partner and I went into the back yard and were immediately struck by a nauseatingly strong chemical smell. When we opened the door to the shed, the stench was overwhelming. We looked in and saw tubing, weird chemistry glassware, and a large jar filled with yellow liquid. We immediately backed off and called for the narcotics unit. Throughout this, I had a feeling of déjà vu that I couldn’t place.
Once the detectives got there, the other officer and I were just bystanders. They interviewed the wife, who told them that her husband had been manufacturing drugs for a guy named “J” who lived a few streets over in a house surrounded by a tall security fence. Her description of “J” was very distinctive. At that point, one and one and one and one added up to four for me. (My police math skills were not that good back then.) The initial “J,” the distinctive physical description, the house with the fence, and, especially, the smell all came together. “That’s Jimmie Joe L____,” I exclaimed.
I told the detectives about the hit and run when I was with my TO: The vehicle that led to the house with the fence and the gun with the smell. The detectives were skeptical at first but warmed up to my story when I told them about his ties to outlaw motorcyclists.
One problem was the detectives had no idea what we had stumbled on. Our wife beater had taken all the product with him, leaving only the chemicals and lab equipment. The solution was to put it all into evidence for later analysis. “Jose, you’ve got a big trunk.” So the entire stinking lab was loaded into my ’78 Plymouth Fury. Doing 70 on the freeway with the windows open made the smell somewhat bearable. When we got to police headquarters, we hauled the entire mess up to evidence and put it in the overnight lockers. At that time, the evidence department was on the third floor and the dispatchers were all in the basement. A couple of hours later, the dispatchers and the rest of the building had to be evacuated due to the smell.
Jimmie Joe L____ eventually got arrested and sent to the pen for drug distribution. I never met him in person. My police car smelled like cat piss until I wrecked it a couple of years later. I did become very adept at sniffing out a certain illegal substance in vehicles and on persons. From then on labs seized in similar circumstances required the assistance of a fully suited-out Fire Department HAZMAT team.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I became the first APD officer to seize a methamphetamine lab.
After I retired, I told this story to an acquaintance who was a reporter for the UT Football News. His response? “That’s boring. There’s more excitement in a single episode of Breaking Bad than that entire story.” Which is true. Breaking Bad is supposed to be exciting. It’s fiction. My reply was “Real life doesn’t have scriptwriters.”
Real life also doesn’t have reshoots, alternate takes, director’s cuts. Real life happens once. Real people are not characters, they don’t have arcs, and they don’t rehearse their lines. Real life doesn’t have a plot; there is no narrative. Yes, real life is mostly pretty boring.
Fiction is just a simulacrum of real life, and it always gets something wrong. Breaking Bad‘s premise was off from the start. Meth is like Night Train®; its consumers are not particularly concerned about quality. Breaking Bad takes place about the time I retired from the Albuquerque Police Department. By then meth labs didn’t need a bunch of weird chemistry glassware in the basement of a laundry service, an RV, or even a backyard shed. All you needed was a couple of Big Gulp® cups connected by plastic tubes to refine the Sudafed® you stole from a drug store.
I was a street cop for twenty years in the city where Breaking Bad was set. After the first few episodes, my wife and kids wouldn’t let me watch it with them. “That’s nowhere near there; it would have taken a lot longer.” “Moving an ATM is not that easy.” “All by himself? No backup? And he didn’t call the hospital?” “Why didn’t the police get called?” Based on my police experience, I had a nitpick or two for every episode.
Except for the finale, where my medical training came in. “That’s not a fatal wound,” I said.
Published in Policing
I think that is a very, very cool story! Good for you—-and…yikes.
My family hates watching any police drama with me, because I do the same thing: where is their probable cause?…yeah, a hanging victim looks a lot worse than that…if that guy is floating, he didn’t drown…and so on. Only I add in, at predictable points, “now you see…they need a chaplain!”
I got over that while watching 24, the show where you could travel between any two locations in LA County (including from downtown to scrub desert) during the timespan of a commercial break.
The more you know about how things really work the harder it is to watch films. I indulged my wife in going to see “Dog” at the movies. It was mildly entertaining, and certainly had its flaws.
But at one point our damaged hero was asleep in the bed of his Ford Bronco with the tailgate open. He was awakened by his tough sergeant in a rather abrupt manner – he grabbed him by the ankles, and yanked him out . Handsome tough-guy hero lands like a 2×4 flat on the pavement. All in good fun. Two badasses. Of course, our hero was unfazed and not even annoyed having his back and cranium crashed.
Later in the film we learn out hero had had two back operations. Hard to imaging his C.O. didn’t know about that, but the act was so physically brutal as filmed I can’t believe they went through the filming and editing process.
In this case, you didn’t need to know anything but simple physics, and what it might be like to be effectively dropped four feet flat on your back on pavement with no warning.
I call it “the CBS magic carpet.”
It is truly funny when an LA cop gets a frantic call from someone with a gun to her head and he says, “I’ll be right there” and then he does get there in time to save the caller. :-)
Great story, and quite a bit of the time police work is not as exciting as it’s portrayed on the big, or small screen. I conducted a traffic stop in the early morning hours on a vehicle that was definitely out of place in an upscale neighborhood. The driver ran a stop sign. I filled out a 3×5 FIR card (Field Interview Report), as well citing the driver.
About a year later I got a phone call from a detective asking me if he could visit me at home. He brought the FIR card with him. He told me that FIR card led to the arrest of a burglar that had committed well over 50 home burglaries. That detective did his share of the grunt work by going through boxes of FIR cards.
And when you’re dead, you’re done, no replays. I always had this in mind when rearing and guiding my children.
Great story, Jose. Thanks!
Is that you in the photo? If so, what’s the goo you’re carrying?
Great story, of course. I can only imagine some of the tales you guys have.
But of course, fiction and drama are not exactly supposed to be real, they are supposed to be entertaining, to elicit an emotional response, or possibly a moral at the end. Good guys win, bad guys lose – that is what fiction means, according to Oscar Wilde.
A documentary about police work might get closer to reality, but even that would have some problems that an experienced officer would catch.
Breaking Bad is brilliant in its construction, its timing, and its creativity. It does elicit an emotional response.
But i will still chime in with my favorite:
Die Hard falls apart as soon as they set off the fire alarm. There is no way the fire department would stop and turn around because they got a phone call. Once they roll trucks, they have to go and physically observe that there is no fire or other problem. They have to determine what set off the alarm, and often it is illegal for anyone other than them to reset and rearm it. That shot of him looking down and seeing the trucks all turn around always makes me grin.
I have accidentally set off the fire alarm on buildings I was working on several times. A quick “oops, sorry” phone call won’t stop them from checking it out anyway.
Zackly.
Badfinger – Baby Blue (Breaking Bad Soundtrack) (HQ) 1080p – YouTube
I gave BB an award for Best Use of one of my Favorite Songs All My Life in an Outstanding Show
Yeah, THAT’s where Die Hard goes wrong…
I was leaving work one day and passed a co-worker who I thought had left several minutes before me sitting in the lobby. Asked why she was sitting there, she said she’d accidentally triggered a call to 911 on her cellphone, and now she was waiting for the cops to arrive and make sure she was not under duress before she could go home.
Reminds me of the time when I was at Loring AFB. I saw some teenagers in a remote area after curfew. (Yes, a nuclear base had a curfew for minors. This was probably around 0030.) I interviewed them, filled out an FIR, and called the Flight Commander to take the kids home (courtesy demanded that an officer return an officer’s kids to his house). Finished the shift, went to the barracks to get some sleep. Around 0930 I was awakened and told to report to the LE desk. An OIS sergeant met me and confirmed I had actually interviewed the kids at 0030. I confirmed it, and then he told me he brought the kids in and they admitted to r ~$12,000 of vandalism in base housing.
Not as exciting as your story, but it did get me a letter of commendation from the Wing Commander.
It’s so true that being behind the scenes in any industry ruins TV and movies for you. I know a nurse who won’t watch The Resident because “That isn’t how it works!” But it’s one of my favorite shows because who knew? But I do know when they get things wrong in airline plots after 11 years at Air France, and don’t get me started on the wrong ways they portray the modeling world. I mean they could make a phone call and ask, you know?
You never want to watch “entertainment” with someone who knows the reality. I watched The China Syndrome with a nuclear engineer. I got my revenge by making him watch Broadcast News with me.
Some of the fiction mystery novels I read today seem like they are taken from reality, especially when government agents join the bad guys.
My girlfriend got really pissed at me when we saw Wargames in the theater because I wouldn’t stop complaining about the ludicrous computer stuff in it.
That and my general antipathy for Mathew Brodderick makes that one a hard pass whenever someone suggests watching it.
That’s probably a good routine, although one time in Phoenix I let a neighbor kid use my phone to call his mom because he had gotten locked out of their home. Before he gave my phone back, he thought it would be funny to dial 911, and then hang up. When they called back – the first step, and definitely a good thing – I explained “Oh it’s nothing, a neighbor kid thought it would be funny to dial 911 before giving my phone back” and they didn’t actually come out. I guess I have an especially trustworthy voice. And/or I didn’t sound agitated, or whatever.
Previously, I had lived in a rural area north of Phoenix, and one night during a bad rain storm the land-line phone service went out. I don’t know if anyone remembers, but some of the earlier cordless phones – cordless home phones, not cell phones – when the battery died, would end up “dialing” 911. On this occasion, the static on the line from the rain storm, somehow did that. So the sheriff’s deputy came to my door, and I showed him there was nothing going on, and had him listen to the noise on the phone line which showed that nobody could have dialed anything, intentionally.
I thought everyone knew pretty early, that it wasn’t just a bad smell: those chemical fumes are toxic!
Imagine how us Star Trek fans feel – the ones who actually think and know numbers, anyway – when they do things like claim (in the first episode of the Enterprise series) that from Earth to the Klingon Homeworld is “four days there, four days back” when by the speed numbers given in that same episode, it’s something like SIX WEEKS just to Alpha Centauri, and the Klingon Homeworld couldn’t be closer than that!
Sure, “30 million kilometers per second” SOUNDS fast, but compared to interstellar distances you might as well be crawling.
Or lead the bad guys, as in recent cases involving the FBI.
There used to be a store in Old Town in Albuquerque called The Candy Lady. They made rock candy with blue dye and packaged it like the meth from Breaking Bad. If you bought some, they would let you take a picture with hat and sunglass props they had. Real meth was never that color. Any I ever saw in chunks that size looked like crystallized urine.
Yea, we figured that out pretty quickly, but I was a bit of a pioneer in this case.
Yeah. I hear you. The ship could barely make it to Warp 5 but was within reasonable distance of the Klingon homeworld and Risa? Qon’os and the Romulans are in beta quadrant. Not close by. I know they had to shrink the galaxy for dramatic purposes but…yeah…I hear you.
Actually it was cruising at warp 5 early on – it was the first Warp 5 Starship after all – but for some reason, later on they made it a struggle for no good reason. Because Plot/Because Drama, really. But they could have just made it a struggle to reach warp 6 instead, out of desperation. Or just anything over 5 really. Sloppy writing is all, sloppy continuity…
Considering the Kirk Enterprise came something like 75 years later, maybe they should have put the top speed of Archer’s ship at warp 4. Just from warp 5 to 6 doesn’t seem like much improvement after 75 years. But the ship was a lot bigger too, so that might be forgivable. And it was meant to be out a lot longer.
“In fact” it wouldn’t be “4 days there, 4 days back” for the Kirk Enterprise either. Based on the original warp^2 x c, the Kirk Enterprise cruising speed of warp 6 would be 36x the speed of light. 4 light-years to Centauri means it would be 4/36 years for the Kirk Enterprise. That’s still 40 days. Warp 5 being 25x the speed of light, means 58 days at warp 5. So I got my references flipped, it would be about 6 weeks for NCC-1701, but 8 weeks for NX-01.
That’s a fascinating story. Thanks for sharing – and sorry about your cruiser.
As a former methamphetamine aficionado . . . uh nevermind.
I thought it was a very interesting show, but the part that was the hardest to swallow was that public school teachers don’t have health insurance, so need to take up drug dealing to pay for cancer treatments.
I never watched the show, but maybe he wasn’t a full-time teacher or something? Or maybe the union gave up coverage for cancer in return for an extra day off?
Yes! This was the hardest thing to swallow about the show. I’ve complained about it for years. Otherwise, wow, brilliantly done drama. But dark, really dark, especially as time went on, though I guess that was the point.
I absolutely adored the show. I don’t demand that TV shows model reality, but I must have decent entertainment for a thinking audience, and I confess, sometimes the unthinking pleasure of simple SCREW YOU TOO.
This show absolutely delivered, and while TV is indeed a wasteland, it is not without its landmarks to lift our eyes from a bleak horizon. I greatly appreciate Vince Gilligan and his assembled talent, even if most of them are now spouting a bunch of woke nonsense.
Sigh.