Police brutality:

From time to time I plan on putting into print stories from my past or present that I feel are entertaining enough to share (which will also help me remember them).


The first:

Earlier this summer my friend Joe said that his sister was having a big barbecue at her house in Boston, and we were all invited. The plan was to go to my friend Kiely's apartment in Boston, take a cab to Joe's sister's in Southie, and party there before crashing back at our original digs.

The weekend of the party came, and I welcomed the change of scenery that a party in Boston with 28 to 30 year-olds would entail. I went in to Kiely's apartment with a few friends and then we took off en masse down the street to hail a cab. The first cab came, and I piled into it with three of my friends. We gave the driver our destination, and we were on our way.

A few minutes into our ride we pulled up into an intersection, and a kid went running across the street in front of us, obviously in a hurry. He was followed soon after by some enormous guy, very clearly in pursuit.

The light changed, and we went across the intersection, following these two runners and not yet aware of what was going on. As we gained with the big dude, we noticed that he was yelling into a walkie talkie as he chased this kid, and he had a badge and what looked like a bullet proof vest under his t-shirt. So, just as we're all realizing, "This guy is an undercover cop," we pulled even with him, and he took his eyes off the kid just long enough to notice all of us staring at him, perplexed, from inside the cab.

All of a sudden, an idea dawns on him, and he yells to our cab driver, who brings the car to a screeching halt. Still watching the kid that he's chasing, the cop JUMPS ON THE BACK OF THE CAR, bangs on the roof, and starts yelling, "GO GO GO GO!!!" Not needing another reminder from the enormous dude on the back of his cab, our driver takes off -- almost losing the guy off the back, since there isn't all that much to hold on to on the back of a sedan. We quickly make up the fifty or so yards to the suspect, and the cop jumps off the cab, not waiting for it to stop moving.

The kid finally turns and sees him, and his eyes got so big that they must have upset the weight balance of his body, because he stumbled. The cop is running over to him, and gives him fair warning: "I'm gonna fuck you up!" He grabs the kid, throws him to the ground, and gives him a powerful kick to the stomach. A man of his word, that cop. We couldn't see much else, as our cabby was occupying himself only with getting as far away from that situation as possible, but I imagine the cop continued to fuck him up.

So we're driving away, all yelling and spilling out theories and exclamations, like, "I thought that only happened in the movies!" or "I wonder what the kid did!" or "That was so COOL!" while our obviously terrified cab driver takes us to our destination. One of my friends noticed a second cop chasing the kid, who got there just after he got fucked up, and we all hypothesized that it must have been a drug sting or something.

You always hear about crime in the cities, but you never really notice it firsthand. I didn't get to see the crime, but I sure got to see the aftermath, and all I could wonder was whether hopping on the top of passing cabs was a skill learned at the academy or just a moment of brilliance after watching too much NYPD Blue.

Either way, it was certainly entertaining, and the story made a great icebreaker at the party that night, which was only the second-coolest thing we had all done that day. Our friends who waited for the other cab were, needless to say, pretty upset.