Rent-A-Cop

Reading Glenn Farrington's blog over at Open Salon got me to thinking about my experiences as a private security officer back in the day. The time frame was the early 1980's and the location was Hampton Roads. I needed some money for college and found a part time/full time job with a large local private security company. I would eventually become a licensed private investigator and state licensed private security services instructor before entering my scumbag period.

At any rate, the competition was pretty fierce among security companies in that area and we ended up taking a lot of the high liability assignments that other companies would refuse. Many of these assignments involved bar security at some of the most violent clubs in the area. We had contracts with gay bars, dyke bars, biker bars, bars that had organized crime connections, bars that catered to the military etc. (Side note, this was the Reagan era and people were drummed out of the military for just having a few pot seeds in their possession)

Now, I used to work out pretty regularly through high school and while not a huge guy, I am 6'1" and, at that time, tipped the scales at 230ish so I figured I could pretty much handle myself in a one on one fight.

My first bar fight was at a Norfolk disco that catered to the military. Generally, at the larger bars we would have three security officers consisting of one uniformed officer and two plain clothes or just three uniformed officers. At this club we were all in uniform. Anyway, four British sailors had been having quite a time and were pretty toasted. They were politely asked to leave and unkindly refused to do so. Another guard, who used to be an NYPD officer until a bad guy stuck a straightened metal coat hanger through one of his lungs, joined me and we eventually got these guys outside and called shore patrol. All the while these Brits were screaming to be taken to the British embassy. Instead they got a free ride back to their ship via the shore patrol.......who, in those days, had no problem with getting real physical with their passengers.

We had another incident at that bar where there was a general bar fight and a couple of Norfolk's finest show up to help out. A female NPD officer made the mistake of walking up behind a pretty big guy who was busy pounding on a patron. She jumped on the guy's back and tried to get him away from the guy he was beating up. Well, he did not know she was a police officer and on reflex just turned around and nailed her. The officer down call went out and every donut shop in the area turned into a ghost town as dozens of patrol cars descended on the club. The officer was OK, but learned a valuable lesson.

There was another club in the area, which was Mexican themed, that we affectionately called El Horrible. The owner was selling dope out of the place and more than a few sailors would get their pot stash from the owner. This place had a stage, in front of which was a dance area, and a balcony with tables that ringed about half of the dance area. At this club we had one uniformed officer and two plain clothes officers. One night, a couple of hours into the shift we heard a blood curdling scream come from the balcony area........now you have to understand that the place was filled with cigarette smoke, so visibility was not good, and the music was EXTREMELY loud. This scream easily pierced the loud music of the live local band and immediately made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It turned out that all three of us pretty much simultaneously drew our guns and flew up to the balcony area ready to drill someone. Standing at the end of a table was a waitress with a horrified expression on her face and she was looking at a guy at the table. It turns out the guy was just drunk and needed to take a piss, so he whipped out his dork and started peeing on the floor and onto the dancers below. The waitress saw this and freaked out. The trouble started when the dancers figured out it was piss that was raining down on them...almost had a riot on our hands.

Another interesting incident at El Horrible came when a lady went into the club and after a few drinks started threatening some of the male patrons. Once outside we searched her purse and found a loaded small caliber semi-auto pistol. At that point we called NPD and asked them to send out a female officer to do a pat down of this gal. Turns out that several months prior to this she had been gang raped and the guys that raped her cut her abdomen in some manner, it was either a design or their initials they tried carving into her, I forget which. I felt pretty bad for her, but she could have caused some real problems if she had found who she was looking for. I do recall the female officer that responded was a bit upset that this lady had relieved herself in the back of the patrol car.

We had a contract at a rather notorious gay bar located near Old Dominion University. The Naval Investigative Service, as it was known then, had rented an apartment across the street from the bar and they would photograph any car that pulled into the parking lot that had a base sticker on it. The offenders were later dismissed from the military. This club was known for it's prostitution. For twenty-five bucks one of several bartenders would take a patron out to an old converted meat locker located at the side of the property and take care of bidness. I remember seeing one bartender come out of the locker and spit out a load of a patron's wanker snot onto the pavement....yuk.

For a brief period of time we had security contracts with the Virginia Beach School system, as they were having problems with people breaking in to various schools. We ended up catching a few burglars, but one time, at an elementary school, one of our guys caught the male janitor screwing his boyfriend in the middle of the gym. OOPS!!

One of the more interesting contracts we had was with the City of Norfolk waterworks department. Norfolk owned several lakes in neighboring cities which were part of the reservoir system. We would check to make sure folks had their fishing licenses and we also had to chase away trespasser's. In Virginia, private security guards are considered law enforcement officers and we could make actual arrests and issue summons, as well as testify in court, for offenses that occurred on contracted property. We were having trouble with trespassing cases that were constantly getting thrown out of court because the no trespassing signs were not proximate to where the violators were. One of our guys picked up about two hundred no trespassing signs and posted them all around Norfolk's lakes.

Well one day waterworks gets a call from a lady about suspicious behavior she sees. Instead of calling 911, she could look out her back door and see one of our newly posted signs and she called waterworks instead. So, two of our guys head out to one of the bridges going into Norfolk International airport, they park their car and one officer goes down the left side of the bridge and the other officer goes down the right side of the bridge and, lo and behold, under the bridge, but in view of some of the neighbors who live nearby, is a man busy choking his chicken while shoving what was described to me as a HUGE carrot up his butt. The ballbuster was that his wife and kids, who were all in court, had no idea hubby/daddy was engaging in this sort of behavior............although Steve did mention to me that when the shriveled carrot was introduced as evidence, the entire courtroom cracked up.

Occasionally, one of our guys would accompany waterworks personnel on the Norfolk lake while they were taking water samples. He would go with waterworks personnel back to the lab and hang around while the samples were analyzed. Well, the samples were starting to show somewhat hazardous levels of jet fuel and aircraft deicer in the water. Our contract was up for renewal and things were not looking too good. Waterworks sets up a meeting with the owner of the company to basically say they were giving us the ax, when the owner produces a photo that shows where the jet fuel and deicer were draining (with about half a dozen upper level company managers, and the owner, standing by the discharge, smiling) into the reservoir from the airport. In return for not taking the photos to the local news outlet, the contract was renewed.

We had a similar situation at one of the hotels we had a contract at. It was looking like we would lose the contract until one of our guards working the overnight shift caught the manager (an extremely hot looking female) doing some carpet munching with a young desk clerkette. That contract was renewed and the hours were extended.

Politics can be a beeyotch.