This diary and others like it about the brutal Bakersfield Beating reminded me of an incident that taught my wife and I: think before you call the cops.
We were in our local neighborhood park at dusk. It's a nice neighborhood. Off in one corner, we saw a body, a man lying down. That's unusual for our part of the city. We approached him, even went right up to him, but he wasn't responsive in the least. In fact, I wasn't sure he was alive; I couldn't tell if he was breathing or not. We looked around and noticed it was starting to get chilly, and he wasn't dressed warmly at all. I recalled how a coyote had attacked my dogs in that same park just a few years earlier. Starting to get worried for his safety, we decided to call for help.
We dialed the police non-emergency number, and explained to the operator who we had found, and that we were worried something might happen to him, and could they send help. We hung up, we waited, not long.
Three minutes later, a parade showed up: three cop cars, two fire trucks, and an ambulance. The cops got out first; we pointed them to the man. They approached him and stood around him in a circle. One nudged the man with his toe, and he woke up, finally. After conferring with the fire crew, the two fire trucks left. So did the ambulance. The cops handcuffed the man and put him in the back of one of the squad cars, gently and respeectfully as far as we could tell. Another cop approached us, thanked us for calling the incident in, said they'd been keeping track of this guy and hadn't appreciated that he'd landed in the neighborhood. We explained that we'd called just so the man would be out of any potential danger. We got the distinct impression, however, that the cops didn't care that much about him except to get him to go somewhere else.
The cops left. We never saw the man again.
Talking about it later, we realized we were both surprised that the cops really had their own agenda in the situation, and it wasn't aligned with ours much at all. We wondered if we made a mistake. So next time you think to call the cops--for anything--think again just to make sure that's what you want. What you get might be something different.