Riding with Ray

WASILLA -- It is the swing shift, Saturday afternoon, at the Wasilla Police Department when I report for my ride-along. The building seems empty and quiet when police Sgt. Ray Chmielowski unlocks the front door to let me in.

We walk through silent hallways to the core of the building where Chmielowski introduces me to the other personnel on duty in the squad room. I meet Officer Kristi Witherspoon and a tall, husky young man they introduce as a captain with the department's Explorers, a group of young volunteers who provide extra hands while learning about police work.

Although it is Saturday, today is Chmielowski's Friday. He will be off for the next three days, so he hopes his last shift for the week will be a quiet one, leaving him with a minimum of paperwork to do at the end of it.

The afternoon, however, has not been quiet. Before I arrived there were two traffic accidents, one a three-car collision on the Parks Highway within WPD's jurisdiction. Fortunately, neither accident resulted in serious injuries.

With the afternoon's burst of activity, it is almost 3:30 p.m. and Witherspoon, who will be going off duty soon, is only now getting to eat her lunch. She still has paperwork to do before she can go home to her family.

Yes, she smiles in answer to my question; her nine-year-old daughter is proud of her police officer mom and happy whenever Witherspoon can visit her school. She shows me a photo, taped to her workstation, of a little girl in a cheerleading outfit.

Meanwhile, Chiemelowski hands me a single sheet of paper, a waiver form absolving the police department of any responsibility should I come to harm as I ride with him on his patrol. I read the legalistic phrasing of the waiver, fill in the requested information and sign the waiver. I consider asking for the loan of body armor, and then decide against it. I am counting on the experience being more educational than dangerous.

We go out to Chmielowski's patrol car, warm in the bright October sunshine, and open the doors. A clear partition separates the front seat of the car from the rear, encapsulating the front in a sort of portable command post. On the other side of the partition, the back of the car is sparse, with no upholstery.

Chmielowski, who seems proud of his car and a bit unhappy with the slight patina of dust on the body panels, says that the car sometimes smells bad, a momento of intoxicated passengers he often has in the back. The car looks and smells fine to me. I toss my jacket into the back along with his, and get into the passenger's side and take in my surroundings.

The driver's side of the dashboard bristles with electronics, handcuffs hang within easy reach of the officer, and what appear to my inexperienced eye to be assault rifles are bracketed upright directly behind our heads. I am sitting in a real police car, for sure.

Even so, draped across an instrument mounted atop the dash is a small white stuffed animal, perhaps a lamb. The toy is his mascot, explains Chiemelowski, a gift to him from Witherspoon's little girl.

Chmielowski swings the quietly powerful car out onto the Parks Highway, heading east for the first leg of his patrol. Recently promoted to sergeant, he has to spend much of his duty time on departmental paperwork, but patrol remains his first love. As we ride he explains that we are one of two patrol cars out in Wasilla this afternoon, while a third K-9 officer is making a public appearance at a local shopping area.

The radio crackles. A burglar alarm at a bank on the Parks Highway has been set off. Although he heads immediately for the scene, Chmielowski says that it may be a false alarm. The dispatcher provides a physical description of the bank employees who will meet police at the bank.

We reach the bank and Chmielowski gets out of the car. He checks the building and finds it secure, with no one inside. Dispatch tells him that bank employees are on their way to the building. The other car on patrol also swings through the parking lot.

Chmielowski says that false alarms are regular occurrences that become more frequent in winter as Alaska's cold temperatures cause tripping mechanisms to occasionally malfunction.

We patrol past nightfall, cruising residential streets and major thoroughfares, stopping once at the police station, and again at a service station to fill the gas tank. As we pull away from the pump, a man walking in the shadows in front of a nearby store waves.

As he drives and talks quietly about his job, Chmielowski's eyes scan constantly from one side of the street to the other. He covers a lot of territory. I see parts of Wasilla I did not know existed, that perhaps only the people who live there and the Wasilla police see regularly. We move from streets flooded with artificial light to areas with no light at all, the car's headlights cutting a swathe through the gloom.

According to Chmielowski, policing in Wasilla is different than in other places he has worked. He explains that Wasilla's location as a crossroads of major highways make it a magnet, attracting people from other places for all kinds of reasons, some of them less than wholesome.

One drawing card is the fact that bars in Wasilla don't close until several hours after Anchorage bars do. As the Glenn Highway has improved, he adds that it is easier and faster than ever for Anchorage bar patrons to continue the evening's drinking in Wasilla, so they often get back on the road to Anchorage at exactly the time that Valley commuters are heading to Anchorage jobs.

His voice is quiet and even, but you can hear the slightest edge of frustration as he talks about what it is like to arrest the same people over and over again, for drunken driving or driving without a valid license.

Chmielowski says that Wasilla officers normally run one-man patrols unless there is a reason for two officers to answer a call. He adds that he learned the hard way to get backup for domestic violence calls, for instance.

Responding alone to one call for help at a residence, he recalls breathing a sigh of relief when he saw a woman on the front porch where she could easily be rescued. His relief was short-lived, however, when the woman told him that there were children in the residence.

The man inside was drunk and had smashed almost everything in the home. Still, Chmielowski talked reasonably to him and remembers thinking again that the situation was under control. When the officer said he would be taking the woman and children to a relative's house, however, the man became violent once more and the officer found himself in a struggle.

He managed to get handcuffs on the man, but not before he had himself been bent backwards over a kitchen counter, injuring his back and costing him a lot of pain and several days of incapacity.

Chmielowski has been with the Wasilla Police Department since its birth in 1993. During that time, he says he has watched youths get in trouble as youngsters and continue to make the same bad decisions over and over in their lives until they are young adults with children of their own, beginning the cycle again.

Chmielowski seems perplexed by the defiance of kids in trouble toward the police officers who talk to them. And he is frustrated by the experience of picking up the same runaway youngster four or five times during a single night.

Tonight, though, there are no runaways, no domestic violence calls, no robbery calls or traffic accidents. The radio spits occasionally, but Wasilla streets are peacefully busy on this Saturday evening as Chmielowski cruises the first part of his shift. As he drops me off at the police station, we hear the barking of a dog in a nearby patrol car.

It is Hero, the K-9, and the only part of him I can see in the darkness of the car is bared white fangs. Still, Chmielowski laughs and says he really is not vicious. He just does not like people standing close to his car.

As I leave I hope that the rest of Chmielowski's shift was quiet and that he got to go home on schedule Sunday morning. Still, he is a police officer and things can happen in his world in an instant, changing a peaceful evening to one filled with flashing lights and violence.