Okay, I read the entry. First, the DART Police have not had there offices in Union Station since early 2002. Just so you can understand why there were no DART Police inside.

I can’t really comment on the dispatchers, other than to say that the officers may have been tied up on calls at the time and they were not able to make it there in time. Also, I am not really sure why 911 did not send the local guys. At times, depending on the severity of the crime, the local PD does show up to our locations. In fairness to the 911 operators, they may have been going on an existing policy that restricted them from dispatching local PD to DART.

Whatever the reason, I will tell you and the young ladies involved that I apologize for our officers not being able to get there. I can’t really offer an excuse, but I do know that we cover a wide area and at times we are swamped on calls. However, I will say that even though we are spread thin and extremely busy at times, we are normally still able to get to crimes in progress quickly and find the offenders as well.

While you are one in a million...a person actually taking time to care enough to call the police, there are far many more that just watch and then go home and say, "You know what I saw today on DART." If more people would get involved instead of looking the other way, maybe we could put a bigger dent in the crime. I had a situation where I was arresting a young man who was rolling a blunt and a lady sitting right next to the man looked at me and yelled, "Why are you messing with him? It is just weed." She had no problem with the fact that he was sitting next to her with a bag of marijuana. Granted, small amounts of marijuana are trivial compared to a rape or major crime. But, how far does it go? How far does it have to go before someone takes action. One of the major reasons that police officers don’t seem to be around when you need them is because of minor crimes. These are minor crimes that pull officers away from concentrating on major crimes. When a person calls in about someone (panhandler) bugging them for money, which I know you have an issue with that based on previous blogs, it bogs down service. While people feel uncomfortable having panhandlers around them, there are ways of just avoiding them. Most panhandlers can be told to leave by several people and they will vacate. At times they become more persistent and they need to be dealt with. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we don’t need to handle them, just that there are so many calls of a minor nature and they bog down response. I will take it a step further, there are actually calls from people saying that the person on the train sitting next to them or near them smell bad and they want the police to come get them. Last time I checked it was not against the law to stink. If it was, there would be a lot of people in trouble, and I am not talking about just homeless people.

Now, am I taking up for the department? Yes. What I would like you, as well as others, to understand is that crime does occur everywhere. We, as police officers in general, try to get there as quick as we can and we try to prevent as much as we can. The reality is, just as I have said before, the criminal element consists of more manpower than you or I could ever fathom. There are far more violators than there are law enforcement officers. And, in reality, the job doesn't pay all that well, so there is not that big of an attraction to the average person to decide, "Hey I want to be a cop." Much like problems in the Middle East, there has always been problems with criminals (since biblical times) and there always will be. There are tougher laws and punishment in the Middle East, and they still have crime.

Here is an interesting tidbit. There are people who practice disarming police officers or attacks on them daily, much like terrorist dry-runs. These people have nothing but time on their hands and they methodically run through scenarios to get their tactics down. That is scary. It is also a cold fact of life.

Look I have gotten on a serious soapbox here, so I will just close for now. NewGuy out.