“Apprehensions and Convictions: Adventures of a 50-Year-Old Rookie Cop”
Author: Mark Johnson
Publisher: QuillDriver Books
Pages: 344
Price: $18.95 (Hardcover)
Most new police officers are in their twenties, with some college behind them or perhaps a few years in the military.
Mark Johnson was 50 years old when he entered the Mobile Police Academy, having become irritated with the perpetual hassles of his work with The United Way. Make no mistake, Johnson was a success. Over a career of 20 years in several cities he had raised over 100 million dollars, organized legions of volunteers, and risen to be executive director for Southwest Alabama.
But he was sick of the meetings, fundraisers, compromises, and the unsettling feeling that it just didn’t make any difference. He asked himself: “What did it all add up to? Were these communities any better off for these efforts?” “Poverty had increased, as had teen pregnancy and illiteracy and divorce and disease and drug abuse and child neglect and high school dropouts and juvenile delinquents and wife beatings and homelessness and mentally ill zombies walking the streets….”
He wanted to be useful, hands-on useful, to a few families or individuals. He felt he could achieve that as a policeman.
Of course, there was a huge cut in pay– 75 %, his wife objected, their social circle was bemused, and his fellow officers called him Pawpaw, but Johnson persevered, serving for 12 years and rising to detective, often decorated. These stories, told with verve and honesty, are his adventures on the streets, as one policeman might tell another in the cop bar over beers, tales of domestic violence, drugs and thievery.
The title is a kind of pun, I think. Johnson approached his new career with apprehension, of course, but also the conviction that he was doing the right thing.
This is also a memoir, a summary of Johnson’s life, especially his search for his birth parents. This is dramatic, emotional stuff, obviously very important to Johnson, but truly, readers will want to get back to the cop stories.
His beat was for years the toughest neighborhoods in Mobile with the routine of patrol punctuated with violence. Early one Christmas morning, alone, arresting a young man breaking into a parked car, the man attacks, and it is touch and go. After taking a considerable beating, Johnson tasers the perp and regains control.
When back-up arrives, old Sarge remarks, “ain’t it great to know ya still got it?” Yes, Johnson replies, but thinking “especially when you never knew ya had it.” He is not taken by surprise again.
Johnson is green but is a learner, and experienced cops share their wisdom. His buddy Slocumb’s theorem: When it comes to burglaries nobody does just one. Catch the thief, question him properly, and you can clear a bunch of cases.
The police talk and then the interview/interrogation dialogue in this book are often racy and probably politically incorrect, but also comic, convincing and colorful, worthy of being staged. Many criminals are stupid; these guys are easily tricked. There is no elaborate CSI or DNA, just outsmarting the mainly drug-addled and slow. Some, however, are experienced and cunning, worthy adversaries.
Johnson’s decades in social services wear off slowly. Once in a while he feels a young criminal can be turned around. After all, as a young man Johnson himself had been wild, a drinker and drug abuser.
So he decides to give LaJuan Lawson a break, even chips in to bail him out. But LaJuan does not go straight. A lying career thief, he’s arrested again, and this time, it is “fool me once, shame on you, etc.” Johnson makes a call, and suggests they put it to him.
No longer in a conventionally liberal position as chairman of a philanthropic organization, in a sense, Johnson has seen poverty and crime from both sides now and in one scene is having dinner with some professional, white-collar friends; they ask how his opinions might have changed regarding “social problems and solutions” now that he is on the streets. His answer shocks them. There is not so much pure evil out there as “feral youth,” kids with no guidance at all, familial, personal or institutional. To break the cycles of illegitimate children, drugs and crime he recommends “monthly drug screenings and contraceptive injections as a qualifying condition for any and all government or charitable aid,” state-mandated adoption, and building more orphanages , instead of prisons.
That brought the dinner party to at least a temporary halt!
Alcohol and drugs fuel a lot of the crime Johnson deals with and I was surprised to learn that the high price—$3.00 per pound—for copper pays for a lot of drugs. Addicts rip copper out of everywhere, tearing down walls, hacksawing through big cables. It looks exhausting, makes the reader think it would be easier to get a job! Again, who knew?
Although not youthful, Johnson is nevertheless impetuous. The final chapter finds him chasing down an escaped cop-killer, alone, into the crawl space under an abandoned house, getting shot and just barely getting away with this foolishness.
But yes, he lived to tell the tale and it is a lively, readable tale.
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
