Behind the Thin Blue Linesquare. Leffler inventoried the vehi-cle before the tow truck took it away, and as I watched him pull open the door, we were both hit by the smell of alcohol pouring invisibly out of the SUV.

There was a domestic dispute call that also looked like it involved alcohol, as the man on the front lawn could barely stand. There were two other cars on the scene, and after checking with the officers, we went on our way. Another call came in about a man seemingly asleep behind the wheel of a parked car, and we drove up in time to see one of the patrol officers stepping back from the man as he bent over and lost his din-ner. “At least he had the good sense to not start his car,” said Leffler, after he confirmed the officer didn’t need his help and we moved on.

The dispatcher called us to back up one of the officers who had stopped a car with a handgun in it. Protocol requires backup in such cases, even for licensed guns. As the officer put the driver through a sobriety field test, Leffler removed the handgun from the car. “There’s a passenger,” he told me, so they couldn’t leave the gun in the car in that case. It occurred to me that much of police protocol was based in the common sense adage, better safe than sorry.

And then it was after 3 a.m. and

we were being called, along with an ambulance, onto Caroline Street.

Leffler was assessing the situa-tion well before he stopped the vehi-cle, and he decided he could allow me to get out. There was a crowd of about 30 people on the south side of the street, and a few onlookers on the north side, where I first went to find out what was going on.

The temperature had dropped considerably, and angry voices bounced like a thousand ping pongs through the cold night air, mingled with the lower but firm responses of the officers.

“He’s bleeding, can’t you see he’s bleeding?”

“You get your hands off me – don’t you tell me what to do!”

“Ma’am, I need you to stand back.”

I counted five police offi-cers, including Leffler, and two first responders from the ambulance that had arrived. The officers were try-ing to separate the crowd, asking the onlookers to disburse so they could get to the heart of the problem, which appeared to be a group of women of various ages who were angry about the treatment of a young man who was sitting on the steps of a vestibule holding his head. He appeared to be okay except for something on his head that I couldn’t see because his hand was over it.

The onlookers on the north side of the street told me they hadn’t

seen a thing, so I moved back across the street to see and hear better. The young man was taken to the back of the ambulance and when next I saw him, he was holding a square white bandage to his head and yelling at the EMT who had a clipboard, “I’m only 17. I’m not signing nothing!”

The group looked like family and friends dressed to celebrate something, and the party got out of hand. One of the bouncers at a nearby bar told me that the group had tried to get into one of the bars and the bouncer refused to let the young man in, and got punched in the face for his trou-ble. Another bouncer pulled

the kid off the first bouncer, and somehow the youth ended up on the ground. It wasn’t clear if he was pushed, thrown, or fell, but he hit his head on the way down.

The crowd had grown as people were leaving the bars either to find out what was going on or to end their evenings. I was shivering and had to put my gloves on to keep writing, but the crowd didn’t seem to notice the cold. Men and women with varying degrees of delight or disgust on their faces passed by, watching as the offi-cers continued to move the original party further down the street away from the spectators, who weren’t making things any easier for them.

One sandy-blonde haired man of about 30 years old was practi-cally skipping through the crowd, laughing and shouting something in slurred words with his arms out for balance, weaving in and out among the onlookers and the angry par-tiers. I could see the officers looking at each other to see who could get a handle on this guy, but there wasn’t one to spare – they each had their hands full with an angry person in their faces, refusing to go home or calmly explain what happened.

Another onlooker, who smelled strongly of stale beer, began jeering and chanting at the top of his voice. The way the sound bounced between the buildings on the narrow street, I’m not sure people could really hear him above all the other voices crowding the night, but it suddenly occurred to me that there were not enough police officers to handle all these people if things did get ugly by something like the incendiary words this drunk was throwing. Looking at the officers’ faces again, it was clear they knew that, too, and I could see all their energies were concentrated on keeping the crowd calm.

The scene appeared to be a les-son in the consequences of too much to drink. Caroline Street at 4 in the morning was filled with people stum-bling, designated drivers supporting them out the doors, bouncers stand-ing firmly with their arms crossed but ready, people shouting for cabs that couldn’t get through because of the police cars and ambulance, and the original group of about seven or eight women who would not disburse after the officers arrested and took away their young suspect.

I glanced down at my notes for a second and looked back up to see an officer had pinned one of the women against the trunk of a police vehicle,

having cuffed one hand and was try-ing to cuff the other. She was yelling and fighting with all her strength, and it took three officers to hold her down and get her cuffed.

The bouncer near me said the officer who had initially tried to handcuff her had the patience of a saint. It was hard to see much beyond their shadowed forms with the bright, flashing police lights behind them, but it looked to me like they were just trying to hold her still to get the cuffs on, but she used her whole body to fight them off. It was a far cry from the drunk driver earlier who ruefully smiled and gave himself up easily.

I would later speak with Police Chief Gregory Veitch, who told me that it was standard procedure to hold an internal investigation with every use of force to assure that those incidents were being conducted appropriately. “I’m very proud of the officers and how we handle things,” said Veitch. “They could lose their tempers, and we train them not to. I’m very proud at how well they han-dle themselves in these situations.”

Once the cuffs finally fastened, the middle-aged woman slipped between the officers down to the ground and huddled there, laying at the edge of the cold sidewalk next to the police car. At least four smart-phones appeared in the crowd and began shooting video. The officers tried to help her to her feet, but she refused, saying she couldn’t breathe and had asthma. They immediately signaled for the EMTs to step forward and the ambulance rolled up closer so she could be placed in a stretcher and taken to the hospital.

The street began to clear, then. It was as if it were the end of a movie, with all the tension sud-denly drained as people walked away in different directions, chatting about what they’d seen. I was so cold my teeth were chat-tering, but I didn’t want to get back in the car just yet. Caroline Street had changed. Officers were getting into their cars or usher-ing onlookers on their way, bars were shutting doors and locking up, and the noise and smell were beginning to fade in the pre-dawn. This was the street that hours earlier was filled with peo-ple taking a break from everyday life to enjoy each other’s com-pany, the same street that became a tinderbox waiting for a match by 4 a.m., a match that never lit because of a thin blue line.

10 NEWS Week of March 11 – March 17, 2016

Continued from page 7.

Aaron Deuel and Aneisha Liska are part of the small team of local dispatchers that route and research 911 and other calls. Photo provided.