to him, and then Amby'll go to Hilliard and say: 'Hey, for the luv va Christ, help me out here a little bit, willya? Get me some more State dough for Canterbury make yourself look good and at the same time, help me make the chief shut up.' And Hilliard'll do it for him, contradict alia mean things that his wife's sayin' about him, 'cause he still wants to look good, 'case he decides to run again.'
Chief Paradisio grounded his views of police station design, as he did his many other views, on his painstakingly careful and extensive study of human nature. 'Basically what I am is a professional scientist. My field is the continuing study of human nature,' he would say. 'All law enforcement officers are engaged in such studies. Or we ought to be at least: it's the essence of our work.' Because he habitually delivered his observations and findings in detail and at length whenever he believed that he had been invited to state and then defend any given premise 'and has such stamina,' Dan Hilliard said, 'guy's a one-man filibuster; he can stay awake for days' he generally prevailed against all who initially opposed any premise he happened to advance.
'It's a universal tendency,' Chief Paradisio said, 'to want to get away.' He was describing without having been asked how people reacted when placed under arrest, believing he saw the inquiry implied in a statement made by someone else at an early meeting of the Building Committee.
'I think it was, Diane, Diane Fox who was to blame,' Merrion told Hilliard over drinks at Henry's Grist Mill two or three nights later.
Diane's practice as a Licensed Social Worker counseling troubled young people in Hampton Pond was established and thriving. She was on the building committee as an ex-officio member of the board of selectmen, having been elected to serve out the unexpired three-year portion of her late husband's term after Walter's sudden death at the age of forty-two. He had had a heart attack while jogging.
'I got to the library and went into the trustees' room,' where the police station building committee had agreed to meet, 'and I was hanging up my coat. The rest of them the chief, Diane, Maurice Belding and Gerry Porter they'd already gotten there ahead of me, and so they all were sitting down, and Diane, while they're waiting for me to join them at the table just by way of no harm sort of threw it out that she'd been afraid she was going to be late because the cat'd gotten out. And she'd thought at least 'til she found it sleeping on the hood, her car, which I guess was nice and warm, this being a cold night, because she'd just gotten home to feed the cat and let it out, expecting it'd come right back in; that was the reason she'd stopped off there that it'd run away.
'And that was what set Sal off about how come people run away. I pity people who have to deal with him every day. The guy is unbelievable.'
The chief said the desire to run away was the reason behind his desire for an internal receiving area for prisoners in the new police station.
'It's just a normal human thing, I guess,' the chief said, 'that when someone has you restrained; you're under his cojatrol; he's bigger, stronger, younger'n you are, most likely, and he's armed, to boot; plus there may be more'n one of him so that you're outnumbered too, and all of them're authorized to use deadly force, on you; well, it's naturally upsetting. You're probably not used to this, in all likelihood, and so it would be perfectly natural then that you would feel confined. Being as you are. And since you have been brought up in this country of ours here, as most of us have been, you have always had the notion that you are well, what else? free And you are used to that. So now this guy in uniform, or maybe it's two guys, or one or two guys in plainclothes, could be that as well, whatever, but what you know is that they're cops, he has you in custody, and you are not free to go. And why would this be, then? Well, unless someone made a mistake which we don't make a habit of doing and I want to assure everybody here of that right now on that point normally it's going to be because you did something.
'It don't matter, really, does it, though, what it was. Because the overall effect's always the same. If you're drunk or operating under, you had a fight or something, or you're beating up the wife. Or you're breaking in a building. Or maybe you had drugs in your possession that you're selling someone, right? And you know you're not supposed to do that. But you're always on the lookout, aren'tcha, for the easy buck, and now it turns out, joke's on you, guy you're selling to's a cop, badge and everything. And he placed you under arrest. So here you are now; you've been arrested. Now you're going to the lock-up.
'Now at the present time if you would like to come down to the station as it is configured, the one on Lannan Street there, any night you care to come, although there'll generally be more to see on a weekend night as Mister Mernon can tell you, having been there setting bail a good many weekend nights for people we've arrested, Friday or a Saturday.
Unless it's one of those three-day holidays it seems like we're always getting now, at least one a month, in which case Sunday night as well we will have a lot of traffic usually, that is. And the first thing you will see down there, and I will show you this myself or have a sergeant escort you, because sometimes one of these guys that we've got arrested will decide, you know, because he's drunk, he'll decide he wants to fight.
'This is also very common. A big part of our job as law enforcement officers involves fighting with drunks. If you want to be a police officer, you have to face that. It's reality. And when we arrest a guy for that, he's quite often going to get unruly with us, and we have to subdue him there, show him what the Mace is like, blast of that stuff in the face, get his mind off fighting us. And what you will then see is that when the cruisers pull up at the back door of the station, right on Lannan Street, with everybody passing by, you will have both your pedestrian and your vehicular traffic there as well. And this is where my men have to come to discharge their passengers, and not only the officers of the police department but also the State Police if this happens to be one of their arrests that they have made and they are bringing him to us. Or her, could be a woman; we do have to arrest the women sometimes too, although nowhere near as many. To be secured in our lock-up until someone can come and get this man or woman out.
'And the very first thing that you will instantly observe in virtually every single case, and virtually without exception, is that every suspect who gets out, he's got his hands behind his back account of how he's cuffed and all, the first thing that he always does, and I don't care he's drunk or sober, or he's on some controlled substance and he's higher'n a kite, but the first thing he does before he does another thing is: He takes a look around. And we all know what he is thinkin', every single time, no matter who it is. He's thinkin': 'How can I get out of here?' How can he escape?'
The chief always stressed the sibilance of the initial syllable of the verb, relentlessly telling officers who mispronounced the word that 'when people hear you sayin' ex-cape like there was an X in it, which there is not, and which you just did, they think you are stupid or else ignorant, which you do not want. So therefore don't let me hear you doing it around here.'
'Now of course this makes no sense at all, no question about that.
Usually the charge that we have got against you, when we bring you in, well, the fact is that you may've gotten everybody good and mad at you, doing what you did, may've even hurt someone, but the fact is still that usually it's a fairly minor charge.
'Now when I say that I don't mean you think that it's minor, that it's a minor thing. That if it's operatin' under for example, so you stand to lose your license, sixty, ninety days, a year, whatever it may be; or this time you're gonna have to take that course they give you if you've been caught for doing this, and it's therefore gonna cost you.
You not only have to go to all those lecture-sessions that they have so there goes your evenings free and you are gonna have to sit now with a bunch ah drunks that you now belong with; which you don't like thinkin' either, but you haven't got no choice now; you have proved it, you belong and look at all those awful bloody pictures that they show. As many nights as that takes, and you're gonna have to pay for them, the cost of going to them, and that's no small amount, you find. Four, five hundred bucks I guess, is what they're getting for it now. You don't like that at all.
'And we don't blame you. But just the same, it isn't like this has to be the end of the whole world for you now. You're embarrassed, sure you are, and you ought to be, whatever it is you've done. But you're not the first one, done it. You're not gonna be the last. So what you want to do is take your medicine and learn from it, learn something from this bad event. Then put it all behind you and act like a normal person, and see that from now on you behave yourself so that you don't have no more trouble, which of course is what you want. That's what we all want, all of us, just to be left alone. And if you do like you're supposed to, chances are, that's how this will all turn out.
'But if you actually do it, if you actually try to escape, get away from the officers there that've gone to all the trouble of arresting you and don't think they like doin' that, all the paperwork that that entails, and the court appearances and everything like that; they're not gonna do this unless they think they have to but now they've done
