Cop’s shift won’t make news, but it helps me sleep

By Kubeshini Naicker
Irvine World News - 8/7/2003

This column is about the most important police story you’ve probably never heard of.

I witnessed six hours of the story last Friday night. And none of what I saw made news. Nor will it ever make a movie or a TV cop show.

But anyone who realizes that police make the difference between community and chaos — between, say, Irvine and today’s Iraq — should understand that this story needs telling.

At the invitation of Acting Police Chief David L. Maggard Jr., I rode from 6 to midnight in a patrol car driven by Officer John Sabino, a husband and father of two children who 11 months ago came to Irvine from the police department in Salinas.

And though Officer Sabino has the equipment, training and willingness to deal with a movie-style marathon of mayhem, he showed me the quiet reality of what he usually does to honor his sworn duty to protect and serve.

What Officer Sabino and his uniformed colleagues do is ensure our freedom from fear by serving 12-hour shifts of what usually turn out to be mind-numbing routine.

During my ride-along, Sabino mostly drove around his beat in circles — so much so that I became dizzy. I asked him why he kept retracing his route when there was obviously no activity there. He responded: “Gotta make sure the residents feel assured that they can go to bed at night feeling safe.”

Of course, over a period of hours, Sabino did find reasons to use his flashing lights and, sometimes, his sirens. But I’m sure the incidents would be classified as trivial pursuits by media moguls who package police stories for entertainment.

In the first incident, Sabino responded to a dispatcher’s call about a group of children throwing pinecones at passing cars near the intersection of Culver and Warner. When we arrived at the scene, the perpetrators had fled. There was nothing for Sabino to do but remove the pinecones from the street.

I must confess here that, the following day, an acquaintance laughed when I told him about the pinecones. My acquaintance, a whodunit fan, mockingly referred to the incident as the Case of the Projectile Pinecones. He joked that Sabino should have called for backup and then should have dusted the pinecones for fingerprints.

But police rightfully take such pranks quite seriously. They know that any objects thrown at moving vehicles can cause fatal accidents, and the victims would not die laughing.

I witnessed three other incidents involving common forms of juvenile misbehavior, all prompting warnings rather than charges.

One was initiated by a neighbor’s complaint of a loud late-night party. The party was instantly quieted when Officer Sabino and a second officer informed the jolly juveniles that a repeat police visit could result in arrests and heavy fines for violation of the city’s noise-abatement ordinance.

The other two juvenile cases arose from Sabino’s vigilant use of his patrol-car spotlight.

In Harvard Community Athletic Park, he found and hastily dispersed a couple of loving couples who were violating Irvine’s curfew-for-kids law.

Elsewhere, in the parking lot of an apartment complex, he found four curfew-violating teens sitting on a curb next to an opened bottle of beer. Sabino personally escorted one of the teens to his car, minus the bottle of beer, after the police dispatcher relayed the information that the teen had a record for driving under the influence of alcohol.

The remainder of the activity that night involved four adult motorists.

Two were driving without displaying current registration stickers on their rear license plates. But one showed proof that the new sticker was in the mail. And the other was driving a new car in which the registration information was affixed to the windshield.

Boring, you say? But Sabino explained to me: "One way police sometimes remove dangerous people from the street is to stop all cars that seem to be in violation for any reason."

Sabino caught one driver rolling past a stop sign. But he let the driver go with a warning after the man apologized and explained that his carelessness was due to fatigue from a just-completed flight from New York. Sabino explained his leniency: “If I think a warning will do the job, I’m allowed to use my judgment.”

Sabino extended no leniency, however, to a woman he pulled over near Heritage Plaza.

The woman, who had three children in her compact car, had recklessly darted across three lanes and nearly collided with a truck. The woman asked to be excused on the ground that she was unfamiliar with the area. “But her excuse didn’t impress me.” Sabino told me after he cited her. “What did impress me was that she had clearly jeopardized human life.”

Officer John Sabino had another six hours to complete his shift. But I went home to a peaceful sleep, comforted by my first-hand knowledge that dedicated professionals like him were always out there, ready for mischief or mayhem, for the sake of all the rest of us.

Kubeshini Naicker covers the education beat for the Irvine World News. She can be reached at knaicker@ocregister.com.