By Detective (Retired) Martin Swirko
Manchester, NH Police Department
It’s been a while since I’ve written and posted anything here, but I do have a few alibis. My main one is that I recently had surgery and its difficult to sit at a desk with a bent knee and type. Also, I’ve been working on a larger writing project seemingly for ever, and because I knew I might not be writing for a while after he surgery, I spent the couple of months before my surgery exclusively working on the larger project. In the meantime, I’ve come up with s few ideas to write some additional short stories about, so I figured I take some time now while those ideas are fresh in my mind. And, starting with the next paragraph and where it leads me just shows how my mind works.
We used to have a really nice kitty roaming our neighborhood, and she’s probably been around for at least ten years now. She belonged to a nearby neighbor, and it was an outside cat, and like I say, it was really friendly. Each day she would visit each house, hang out for a bit with whomever she came across and then went about making her regular rounds. Apparently she liked the attention she received at each stop, so she made herself available for us to stop and pet her or whatever. She even tried to get into my house a few times, but I wasn’t really sure how the resident cats would react, so, we never let her in.
During the warm weather I would often sit out on my back deck and read the paper and she’d come up and sit at my feet and stay there until I paid some attention to her, and after I did she’d move on to the next house. Sometimes she’d jump up into my lap which was OK with me and keep me company for a while. When I was working, often I’d go out to my car and I’d find her sitting on the hood apparently waiting for me to come out. In any case, this kitty was pretty popular in the neighborhood and just became part of it.
Recently my wife was outside when she saw this poor kitty get mauled by two dogs. What happened was that a woman we had never seen before was walking two large dogs that appeared to be Alaskan Huskies or some similar breed and although on leashes, they were able to pull away from the woman and severely attack the cat. The woman had a hard time controlling the two dogs, and although no one did anything wrong, the kitty was severely injured and had to be put down. I was a bit sad about that, especially since I really liked the cat. It was a nasty and most violent end for a gentle animal. All this got me to thinking about different animal laws in my community and how I dealt with that stuff when I was working as a cop.
In Manchester, we have city ordinances regarding dogs that regulated dog ownership. Those ordinances included that any dog, when in public had to be kept on a leash, that anyone walking a dog in a public place had to carry something with them so that they could pick up any material in case the dog defecated, and maybe most importantly, in my opinion, the dog must be licensed by the city. What makes that requirement important is that in order to obtain a license for a dog, you must prove to the city that the dog sees a vet and that it had been vaccinated against rabies.
Over my police career, especially when I worked in patrol, I came to learn that there are many, many irresponsible dog owners around. These folks obtain a dog wherever or however they can but then they don’t take care of them. Sometimes, when they decide to adopt or otherwise obtain a dog, they didn’t realize what a responsibility it was when they first got the idea. Then, they either find they don’t have to money to care for the dog appropriately, or, they just get tired of dog ownership. Whatever the reason I found that many dog owners don’t comply with the local laws, don’t feed or house them appropriately, and often let them get loose and run around the neighborhood they live often and cause havoc. After a while, I came to develop a certain distain for this type of dog owner, and as I eased myself into what was then my new police career, I found myself taking Dog at Large calls and Dog Bite calls more seriously.
The Manchester Police Department employed two Animal Control Officers (ACOs) during my time there. Although those officers weren’t fully sworn police officers, they did wear a uniform, which was different than our patrol officers, drive police department vans and were armed with pistols. Their responsibility included enforcing all city ordinances regarding animals, responding to various animal calls, such a as bats flying around inside of someone’s home (pretty common) dogs at large or really any animal from a bear to a snake being found within the city limits.It was always good for us as patrol cops because as long as there was an ACO available, who were really the experts in these things, and also had the proper equipment with them to deal with animals, we would not have to respond and deal with those kinds of calls. Unfortunately, those two ACOs didn’t provide 24 hour coverage, so, when they were not available, patrol officers responded to those calls and had to deal with them.
In New Hampshire there was, and still is, a law that requires doctors and hospitals to report any person they treated for a dog bite to the local police department, and that department was supposed to follow up on and investigate the circumstances of the dog bite. During my police career, I have seen some nasty, terrible injuries inflicted by dogs upon on people, and whenever I saw a child, or any person, but especially a child injured by a dog I alway felt really bad about it. As a result, whenever a person showed up at one of the hospital’s emergency rooms who had been attacked and injured by a dog, the police were called and an officer was sent to take a police report from the victim. Once a report was taken, normally it would be forwarded to an ACO and that ACO would do the follow up investigation and take whatever enforcement action he or she felt prudent.
The only problem with his system was that when a person is bit by a dog, the doctor needs to know if that dog had been properly vaccinated against rabies. The only way to find that out was to contact the owner and get a record of the dog’s inoculations and /or determine if it was licensed. Without that knowledge, the victim of the dog bite would have to begin the long, and I am told, painful process of injections to treat rabies as a precaution. I hated to see someone have to go through that just because we didn’t know if the dog had been vaccinated or not. Furthermore, I started to believe, from an enforcement point of view, that there should be legal consequences for dog owners who did not follow the law and take care of their animals in a responsible manner.
Eventually as I settled into the role as a patrolman and learned what I should and shouldn’t spend my valuable time on (when I retired from the MPD we handled an average of over 120,000 calls for service each year, so time management was key) I decided that when I took a dog bite report, if the radio it wasn’t too busy, and the dog owner (if I knew who it was) wasn’t too far off from my assigned route or sector, I’d complete the follow up myself, rather than to just do the report and have it forwarded to an ACO to act on a few days down the road. The reason for this was so I could try to determine right away whether the victim needed to start rabies treatments or not. If the dog was properly licensed, then I could pass that on to both the doctor and patient. If that saved the already traumatized victim the pain and aggravation of needless rabies injections, or, if it helped determine the victim needed the injections I thought the extra effort was worth it my time.
The bosses were usually pretty good about it, and as long as there weren’t too many calls stacked in my sector or it wasn’t a crazy busy shift, they let me stay off the air long enough to do my follow ups as needed.
After a while, I discovered that often times the victim was attacked while minding his or her own business, either by walking down the street or quite often even in their own yards by a dog who got free from their owner allowed to run “at large”. So, as I started to follow up on these incidents I found more and more that these incidents were caused by owners not controlling their dogs, and I often found that they owners could not prove that the dog was properly licensed, and unable to show if the dog had been inoculated against rabies. As a result of this, I started to take these situations more and more seriously, and I regularly started summonsing these owners to court charging them with Dog at Large and Keeping an Unlicensed Dog violations. Both were punishable with only a fine, but I reasoned that a personal appearance before a judge might motivate that owner to properly care for their pet and prevent needless injuries which were often serious. So, whenever thought it was appropriate, I liberally handed out these summonses and had no problem doing so. At one point, I had a supervisor tell me that I probably issued more Dog at Large and Unlicensed Dog summonses than anyone in the department with the exception of the ACOs.
A-lot of the cops teased me about writing so many unlicensed dog tickets and on a busy department like MPD, some cops thought it was too trivial to spend their time on. But, I took their ribbing in a cheerful manner (Cops aren’t happy unless they are busting other cop’s balls) and I continued to enforce the city’s dog laws because I thought i was important, especially to the quality of life within all the neighborhoods in the city. I made sure I always had an ample supply of summonses with me, and in later years when I worked as a detective, I always took summonses and parking tickets out with me in case I needed them.
After completing my follow up, sometimes issuing summonses, I’d report the results to the victim and doctor, who were usually still in the emergency room, write my report and submit it. The ACOs didn’t mind that I did these follow ups since each one I completed was one less case for them. Not to mention, my supervisor was usually happy to see the activity on my daily reports as well. But I also started using the city dog laws as a different tool.
In the early 90’s we started to have unprecedented gang and drug problems in certain sections of the city. In fact, we started losing one inner city neighborhood after another to the street sales of Crack-Cocaine, and that brought with it the usual problems that go along with these “victimless” (some say) drug sales. These included prostitution, thefts, robberies and other violent crimes that infested these neighborhoods. And of course there was also the accompanying gang as different gangs jockeyed for specific street corners to sell either Crack or Gank (phony crack, usually sheetrock or ivory soap cut up and packaged to appear as though it was crack) depending on who the customer was.
Not having grown up in this area, I was regularly told by those who had that these problems were unheard of in the 60s, 70s and 80s. These inner city neighborhoods which were once great, blue collar urban communities to grow up in were deteriorating faster than we could respond. Sadly, times they do change. Crack-cocaine had hit the “set” and that contributed to the new gang problem we started to see in Manchester. Or maybe it was the opposite, Either way, we started to see a turf war develop over open air drug markets around Lake and Spruce Streets, between Union and Beech Streets, and it spread from there. By the mid 90’s, we were also losing various older neighborhoods on the West Side as well. Prostitutes roamed the areas from sundown to sunrise, along with the inevitable accompanying crime and at one point there were several shootings and a couple of murders that occurred over turf. Those of us working in patrol regularly came in contact with groups of people, usually young, hanging out and selling crack. This was compounded by the fact that people were coming into the city from all around NH to purchase drugs and prostitutes and naturally, this “demand” made the problem worse.
One day, I was guarding prisoners in the “cage” at the old district court and I struck up a conversation with a guy from Florida who had been pinched slinging crack. I asked him what the hell he was doing in Manchester. He told me that in Florida, when the cops grabbed him, they not only took his crack but they robbed him as well. He said at least in Manchester the cops didn’t beat him or steal his money and drugs. So, he came up here to sling crack because the Manchester cops were honest? I wasn’t so sure his compliments towards cops in this city was such a good thing and I certainly hoped that he was full of shit about the cops in Florida. But the conversation that day, at least for me, put another spin on the increasing drug problems we were having in this city.
Another problem we were having was with some of our bosses. Whenever we went out onto our walking routes on the midnight shift (and often in cruisers) we were constantly discouraged by some from making drug arrests. I was personally told, several times those early years, both in Roll Call and individually, that we should leave the drug arrests to the Drug Unit, that’s what they were there for, and our job was to shake door knobs all night and find open doors and business burglaries. It seemed to me that certain people in city government didn’t want to publicly admit we had a drug problem, never mind a growing gang problem.
We had gangs coming nightly in taxis to Manchester from places like Lawrence, Massachusetts to sell crack because crack was going for $20 a quarter gram, commonly referred to as a “quarter” on the street, in Manchester while the going rate on the street in Lawrence was only $10 for that same quarter gram. You don’t have to be a Harvard Business School graduate to figure out which market was more lucrative. To add insult to injury, we soon learned that because NH had a reputation for sentencing street level drug dealers to lengthy prison sentences (yes, I miss the old days in some ways) something that apparently wasn’t happening in Massachusetts, the gangs in Lawrence (and I’m sure other cities in the Merrimack Valley) were sending juveniles to Manchester nightly in taxis to their corners to sell, and after the night was over, the juveniles would taxi back down to wherever they came from. The reason this was done, was because the dealers in Massachusetts knew that when we arrested a juvenile for possession of sales, normally a felony for adults, they would be held over night, go to juvenile curt the next morning and be released to go home. And, even if those juvenile offenders did come back from out of state to appear in subsequent court proceedings (there was no legal incentive for them to do so) they would be put on juvenile probation at most and escape any meaningful consequences.
So, in addition to everything else, we in patrol tried to break up and move these groups along the best we could, but in the “Live Free or Die” state, that wasn’t easy. As a result, many of us harassed these gangs to make life here in Manchester as miserable as possible, as much as the law allowed, and often that wasn’t much.
One thing I soon noticed about these gangs was they often had dogs, often pit-bulls wearing big studded collars with them, for whatever reason. I figured that may have thought the dogs would make them look tough, or look intimidating, or maybe they even brought them for protection. So, whenever I saw this, I did something I knew I could do lawfully. I could stop and inquire if the dog was properly licensed. Rarely did the dog have a license visible on its collar, and I don’t know where these jerks got their dogs, but when I asked if their dog was licensed they always said they were, but conveniently, they could never provide proof. So, out would come the pen and summonses, and after completing wanted checks and field cards on each member present, and I’d give the person with the dog a summons and a “must appear” invitation to Manchester District Court for keeping an unlicensed dog. This often highly pissed off the gang member / street drug dealer, but often times it was the most I could do to them at the time and they couldn’t say or do shit about it. The summons may not have been a big deal, and I would far rather have caught them in possession or in a hand to hand (sale) but if they ignored the summons, the court would eventually issue Bench Warrants for Failure to Appear, and then maybe the next cop who stopped and questioned them would find the warrant and lock that person up. So, I made sure when I went out every shift I had a good supply of what we called White Summonses with me. I started giving them out like I later gave candy to kids in Iraq.
It wasn’t a big deal, but eventually I stopped seeing the dogs, and sometimes when they saw me, (the thugs, not the dogs) they moved. You had to take the little victories as they came. It may not have made a big difference in the war on drugs, but I thought anything I could to make life harder for these hoodlums who were contaminating the quality of life for those that lived in those neighborhoods was worthwhile. So, in the end, I handed out lots and lots of Dog at Large and Unlicensed Dog summonses during my career in Patrol, and regardless of some of the teasing I got from both the bad guys and the cops I worked with, including all the Barney Fife wisecracks (Oh Oh, look out! Here comes Barney Fife!) in the end, I just didn’t give a damn. I looked at it as just another tool in my “tool box” the taxpayers paid me to utilize in the battle to keep the street safe. Also, it didn’t hurt that each time I issued one, it really pissed off the gang banger I gave it to. Too many times that was the best I could do. But, there always was tomorrow…
All Routes Are Amber 