Making Waves

There's an area where we have always known we have trouble with contraband. The inmates who clean up the roadways and homeless camps find lots of interesting things and, when they can, they smuggle it into our facility. I had the idea a few weeks ago of attacking this problem in the middle instead of at the ends (the ends in this case being the work site and the entrance to the facility). With the help of the friendly neighborhood K9 drug dog, we went through the trucks.

We went through some of the trucks.

Well, only two really.

Because that was all the contraband we could lift. Knives. Smokes. Lighters. Tools. Porn. Complete sets of civilian clothes. CDs and players... The stuff from one truck covered four tables in the conference room. We knew there was a problem, but no one had imagined this. Deputies with twenty years in were saying, "No way! No fucking way!"

There were only three of us involved in the actual search, but it had been planned with work crew, senior administration and enforcement. It wasn't, or shouldn't have been, a surprise to anyone. Yet one deputy says it was grandstanding to take pictures of the contraband. He, and he alone, is more worried about a colleague being embarassed than the same colleague supervising inmates with hidden knives. It's true that the work inmates have chainsaws, but the officer hands them the chainsaw and knows who has it. The one he doesn't trust with the chainsaw may have a knife...

The pictures were really impressive, but I'm just grandstanding...
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Paranoia moment: A friend said, "Hey, I was down at headquarters and I heard some good stuff about you, heard you were doing a good job."

I froze, and stuff started sliding through my head, old conversations from headquarters: "What you need to understand, sergeant, is that there are line monkeys and there are office people, and you're a line monkey..." "Sergeant, you're just a tactical guy. You shouldn't even be speaking on these matters..." "Everyone who works the line is beating people up every night and they're lying about it!"

I honestly thought that there were only two kinds of people at headquarters- people who didn't know I existed and people who couldn't stand me. Looks like I need to get over that.