Two Years

Today marks two years since I retired from the Seattle Police Department.  People always ask me the same question:  Do you miss it.

There are some things I miss and some things I don’t. Here’s my list.Things I don’t miss:

• Working nights every third month.
• My phone ringing at 1:30 in the morning, sometimes several nights in a row.
• 30 hour work days, or 20 hour work days, several days in a row.
• The dreaded STH. (Straight Time Homicide—See my credo: We will solve no crime before overtime.”)
• Dead kids.
• Dead cops.
• Looking in the face of someone who’s had a family member murdered, particularly the truly innocent victims, and telling them I’ll do my best to get the bastard.

There are some things I do miss.

• Having someone riding two feet off my rear bumper at freeway speeds, then flashing the red and blue lights in my rear window and watching them suddenly drop back several  hundred feet.
• Driving on the shoulder of the freeway at 60 MPH in rush hour when traffic is stopped. (See also: Driving on the sidewalk downtown at rush hour).
• Seeing the look on my partner’s face while I’m driving down the freeway shoulder at 60 MPH when traffic is stopped.
• Arriving at a murder scene at 2:00 AM and hearing “Good morning, father,” because one of my sons is a patrol officer at the scene.
• Interrogations.

Me: “You know, there’s a legal term for the situation you find yourself in today.”

Suspect: “Really?”

Me: “Yeah. You’re fucked.”

• Arriving at a true whodunit murder, having no idea what happened, or who did it. Working 30 hours straight of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants work, arresting the suspect, getting a confession and booking the suspect in the jail. Then at 3:00 AM, sitting in the office with my squad and a prosecutor or two with bourbon’s all around. (In case anyone important is reading this, that didn’t really happen. Ever. No, really, I mean it.)
• Getting to call those family members of a murder victim and being able to tell them we got the son-of-a-bitch.