A fleet of Dodge Chargers make up the patrol division of the Dallas Police Department. (Hawaii 24/7 photo by Karin Stanton)

(Editor’s Note: This is the second of two stories recounting an evening on patrol with a Dallas Police Department officer. Part II focuses on a neighborly spat and what it takes to do the job. Part I appeared Monday.)

Karin Stanton | Hawaii 24/7 Editor

Talaya Allen-Carswell is about ready for dinner. Halfway through her Tuesday evening shift, she has plans to join two fellow officers at Red Hot and Blue restaurant for some BBQ, but dispatch asks her to handle a report of a major disturbance.

Allen-Carswell is patrolling the streets of Dallas’ northeast division and, with almost three years on the beat, is ready to handle whatever situation comes her way.

The laptop flashes and the disturbance may have spilled from an apartment complex onto the street. However, when we arrive, it appears one woman is at the center of the commotion.

She is busily explaining, for the third time, exactly what happened to an officer already on the scene. We can hear it from the parking lot.

I follow Allen-Carswell up the stairs to the second floor and along a dark breezeway to an apartment in the back. The door is open and several voices compete for the officer’s attention.

“OK,” he asks calmly and patiently, “so then what happened?”

A woman’s voice isn’t so calm: “And then he said, ‘Did you call me bitch, bitch?’ I said ‘No, I ain’t called no-one nothin’.’ And then he chest-bumped me and he’s really tall.”

According to one version of her story, the woman and her son Dominique were heading down the stairs to go pick up her fiance, when a couple of neighbors from upstairs started the whole thing.

The verbal confrontation escalated into a fist fight in the breezeway that involved the woman, Dominique, her other son Marques and at least three men who live upstairs.

The neighbors are long gone and Dominique slipped off to pick up the fiance. He did scold his mother before leaving, saying she shouldn’t have called the cops and he’d take care of it.

Three medics trudge up the stairs, called in because Marques said he felt something pop in his knee.

Allen-Carswell flicks her flashlight beam along the hallway and it rests on a clump of wavy black hair about 6-8 inches long on the floor. She brings it to the attention of the other officer.

Meanwhile, the mom is still telling her side of the story. “Ever since I moved in, I just stay inside and I don’t cause no trouble or nothing. It’s like I say, I mind my own business.”

“Well, we’ll get you an MIR (Miscellaneous Incident Report). I know it will be real difficult, but stay inside tonight and if they come back around, call us and give the dispatcher the case number,” the officer said. “That way we’ll have all the information before we get here. But stay inside. That’s real important.”

On his way downstairs to get the paperwork, the officer said, “I’ll talk to this son. He just got out of the military. He won’t lie to me.”

The mom is now rapidly pacing the hallway, waving a cigarette around and loudly re-telling her story into a cellphone. “And then …”

Later, over a beef brisket plate at Red Hot and Blue restaurant, Allen-Carswell predicted how the neighborly rift would progress.

“We’ll definitely be back there. Probably tonight. It’s all about ego now,” she said. “There’s definitely something already going on between Dominique and the upstairs neighbors. But, of course, her son is innocent. Once he gets back with the fiance and the neighbors come home, we’ll get the call.”

The conversation turns to police-media relations. Allen-Carswell has been trained to deal with media and has no problem working with journalists.

“It’s fine. Mostly they are good people,” she said. “In fact, lots of times people will tell you way more stuff than they will tell us. They’re just more comfortable. That’s just the way it works. We find out more information through you.”

However, with the advances in technology, the department has drawn a distinction between working journalists and ‘citizen journalists.’ It can get dangerous when drivers try to snap cellphone photos of accidents or crime scenes, or when untrained people try to report on police matters.

“Bloggers aren’t journalists. A third-grader can have a blog, but that doesn’t make him a journalist,” she said. “There’s a big difference.”

The lighter side

Just like on the streets of the Big Island, people sometimes play out their dramas in public. Whether suffering from a psychiatric problem or under the influence of drugs or alcohol, other community members call police to deal with it.

“I like drunks better,” she said. “Drunk people I can have a little fun with. The mentally ill can’t help it. It’s not their choice so I feel kind of sorry for them. They wake up the next day and they still have their problems.”

While drunk people generally have a logic all of their own and can be unpredictable, people suffering from mental breaks can see the world with a certain clarity that escapes others.

Allen-Carswell recalled one young man who had taken too many pills. His mother called police and emergency medical crews for help.

In trying to assess whether the young man was attempting suicide or just trying to have a good time, one officer began questioning him, while his mother and two other officers stood by.

The man suddenly looked up. “Whoa, dude, you look like a Muppet.”

For the first time, Allen-Carswell really looked at her colleague.

“And he really does look like one. You know the two old guys who go to the opera (Waldorf and Statler). I just lost it, totally lost my police face,” she said. “The kid couldn’t see me, but the mom sure could. It was unprofessional, but I couldn’t help it. And he still looks like a Muppet.”

Allen-Carswell is still chuckling about it and can’t help but repeat the observation: ‘Whoa, dude, you look like a Muppet.’

Allen-Carswell shares another of her favorite stories, complete with a quote she will never forget.

Police were called in after medical crews had cleared the scene.

“When I got there, there was a 300-lb. woman rolling around on the sidewalk moaning and a 400-lb. woman leaning over her,” she said. “She was screaming, ‘She’s havin’ seizures. She’s havin’ seizures.'”

After Allen-Carswell assured the women it was unlikely the medical crew had left a woman having seizures on the sidewalk, she asked what the real problem was.

The woman suddenly stopped having seizures and yelled, “ELVIS IS IN THE HOUSE.”

“What?”

“Elvis is in the house and he won’t let me in. He’s on the couch and he won’t let me in.”

“That doesn’t really seem like a police matter.”

“Can’t you kick the door down?”

“Well, the Dallas Police Department is not in the business of kicking down people’s doors.”

“It ain’t people’s doors. It’s my door.”

“Perhaps you could call the manager and have him open the door. Or perhaps one of your neighbors has the spare key?”

“Elvis is in the house and he won’t let me in. Make him let me in.”

Allen-Carswell finally got Elvis to come to the door. It turned out the 5-foot-6, 120-lb. man was just trying to have some quiet time and watch his TV show.

“I did study psychology in college. I have a degree in psychology,” she said. “But, I tell you, that psychology is a totally different psychology than this psychology out here.”

Training and life experience

Allen-Carswell was a loan officer who grew weary of a desk job.

“I woke up every morning hating that job. I didn’t want to go and have the same damn conversation over and over,” she said. “We had a script to follow, although they never called it a script, but it was killing me.”

Following advice from her father, Allen-Carswell made the leap to police work.

“I love this job. I’m submersing myself into somebody’s life and trying to figure out how to affect their life, hopefully in a positive way,” she said. “I took a big pay cut, but it makes up for it by giving me my sanity back. Every single day is different and I only wish I’d done it 10 years ago.”

She said she likes to respond to abuse and sexual assault calls, cases in which people are in dire need of help and she can draw on her own life experiences.

“I grew up around drugs and alcohol and abuse and all that B.S.,” she said. “So when I deal with it, I’m not talking out the side of my head.”

After years of abuse from her second husband, Allen-Carswell’s mother died after a fall at home. Allen-Carswell still blames her step-father.

She was 14 when her mother, after a day drinking at a Fourth of July party, fell and hit her head. An aneurysm caused her death the following day.

“She’d been to the hospital so many times with concussions and the doctors aren’t stupid,” she said. “After the last one, the doctor told her ‘one more and it could kill you.’ And it did.”

Allen-Carswell said she is grateful Texas has a mandatory reporting law in cases of domestic violence.

“It takes all the pressure and blame off the woman,” she said. “I wish there had been that law when my step-father was abusing my mother.”

Her mother’s death has become one of her most powerful tools.

“I try to talk to them more from the child’s point of view,” she said. “I went though it and I don’t want other people to go through it.”

One case sticks out.

A woman ran, half-naked and hysterical, from her home to escape the father of three of her children. By the time Allen-Carswell stopped her, welts and bruises were evident from her chest to her chin.

“She was absolutely covered in bruises and you could plainly see fingerprints on her neck where he had been choking her,” she said. “She didn’t want to press charges. That when I said, ‘What’s it going take for you to leave him? For him to literally choke the life out of you in front of the kids? For him to choke you unconscious and then beat the kids?’

“Sometimes that gets through,” she said. “And that guy? He’s in prison now.”

On the streets

Although she bought a lifetime of experience with her, Allen-Carswell started at the police academy just like any other raw recruit.

“We spent at least half our time driving, right from the beginning,” she said. “That and learning how to multi-task.”

Not only must patrol officers concentrate on driving their cars, but they are constantly monitoring the laptop, checking their surroundings and paying attention to every detail within their field of view.

“You get used to it, but at first it was hard to keep an eye on everything,” she said. “It used to take me 40 minutes to fill out one report. Now I spend about 1 hour each shift on paperwork.”

Training included four phases, each increasingly rigorous and realistic. The first three supervised by different training officers; the final phase overseen by the same officer as the first, to gauge whether the recruit has learned the necessary skills.

The final phase includes drills based on real incidents and run at real-life speed. Only when recruits have successfully resolved those exercises are they deemed ready for the street.

With academy training over, Allen-Carswell spent some time on patrol with her sergeant.

One of the steepest parts of the learning curve was knowing instantly the quickest way to get anywhere in her sector.

“I had a hard time with that at first,” she admitted. “We would pull over and he would shut the laptop and ask me how we’d get there. I’d say ‘go south on …’ and he’d say ‘nope.’ I’d try east and west, and then I’d finally get it right. But it took awhile.”

Today, Allen-Carswell cruises the streets alone in her patrol car and relies on every second of her training each shift.

“They prepare you. You are prepared for absolutely the worst case scenario every time,” she said. “When that first call came in, I remember thinking, ‘OK, now the bullets are real.'”

— Find out more:
www.dallaspolice.net