I got home late. I was out all day. I left my porch light off. I left my porch door unlocked. Ever since the Odd Fellows went security crazy and replaced my low swinging gate with an eight foot high prison door, I have left it open. It was oddly closed and locked when I got home. I unlocked it and walked in to open my front door. Then I heard someone muttering. I immediately backed up into the alley and said "get the hell off my porch." The guy left my porch and headed out. This, in and of itself, is not terribly unusual around here. People need warm and dry places to sleep.

When I went back to open my door I noticed that my window was broken and there was blood on the floor. No one had come inside. Nothing outside was taken. There was a gym bag outside my door. I decided to call the cops. The officer arrived about ten minutes later and took the usual information from me. As we were talking, this guy [they always want to know what race the person was, I told them I honestly had no clue] walked by again. I pointed this out to the cop who went to follow him. "Don't make me chase you," he said.

At this point, I was forgotten. The cop put this guy up against the fence and frisked him & read him his rights. When the guy started flipping him shit, he was placed on his knees with his ankles crossed. When he asked to get up because he was uncomfortable, the cop apologized. When the guy started to get up, the cop threw him to the ground and stood on his neck saying "don't make me spray you." Another cop car came speeding up into the alley. The guy was handcuffed and yelled at, face still in the driveway. "Who's running this show?" asked the cop.

Once the guy was safely in the squad car the cop came back to me holding a switchblade. "It's a good thing I was here when he came back" he said, unnecessarily flipping the blade open. "Maybe so, maybe not" I replied. The cop handed me a card with my incident number on it and his name: G.A. Bernal. I asked him his first name, he ignored me. I asked again, he said he just used his initials. I asked him if the guy had admitted breaking my window and Officer Bernal said he had been "non-responsive" which, since I had been watching the whole sorry episode, I took to mean that they never asked him and probably honestly didn't care. I made sure they took the guy's gym bag with them when they left. I decided not to ask if I could keep the knife.

Now, granted, every bum sleeping in my doorway isn't necessarily a benevolent drunk. And I will also admit that I should get a grip that I am living in a big bad city and use some common sense sometimes and lock things. However, I resent living in a society where police are as much a "necessary evil" as the two-party system, and where a person employed to ostensibly keep the peace has to behave like such a swaggering jackass in the pursuit of so-called justice. I didn't feel protected, I felt like a creepy accomplice in this cop's weird playacting ritual and I was sorry I'd ever called him.