Busted (Another Sting)

I read the other day that a local police department busted 15 more people for participating in a prostitution ring. There were several articles algorithmically put in front of me, but I clicked on that one. Why? Is it schadenfreude? Maybe I just want to make sure it’s not someone I know.

You may have watched How to Catch a Predator or similar shows. I’ve seen bits and pieces, and would do admit I slightly cringe but enjoy it when they catch the kid-lover in the act. But I have also seen a hundred stings on ordinary police body cam, no commercials. It is hardly as dramatic. Mostly it’s just pathetic. I would have a hard time if I was doing the “catching.” I don’t like the confrontation of catching someone red-handed.

As I confronted the predator with his wrongdoing, there would be an awkwardness that stands between us, like this sticky slime that no human can go through, which for me is the feeling I have any time I’ve caught someone red-handed. And this particular act is especially slimy. Twenty dollars for a blow job? C’mon dude, have a little respect for yourself.

Most times when they catch these grown men looking to hook up with prostitutes, it is not nearly as sexy, so to speak, as what you’ll see on TV. I have viewed this from a police cam propped up on a hotel room nightstand as a female undercover officer has coaxed a horny middle-aged man to agree to pay a pittance for some outrageously vulgar sex act.

It goes something like this. The horny man is lured in by a message posted by an undercover female police officer. The message goes up on one of those sketchy websites where society’s dredges linger, a step or two down from Craig’s List, and one more step away from the full-on evil of the Dark Web.

The female officer posts something about wanting to hook up. Often the horny man will ask for a selfie in return, to prove it’s really her. And, believe it or not, the officers will send a selfie, which adds to the dangerousness of it.

Enter the VICE Operations Unit. Usually three to four burly dudes in tactical gear and armed with rifles, waiting in the hotel room that adjoins the room that the criminal will enter to make contact with the undercover officer.

Pro-tip: if you’ve responded to one of these messages and you go and there’s an adjoining hotel room, go ahead and turn around and run. Though that won’t always save you. Sometimes a member of the VICE unit is just hanging in the bathroom.

Either way, they’re ready to bust in as soon as the female officer gives the queue. She gives the queue when the man makes an overt act of agreeing to pay for a sexual act, e.g., “Yes ma’am, here is $20 for [insert sex act here].” When the man realizes he’s been tricked (it’s never not a man), the resignation appears on his face, and the four officers there to do the “take down” seems like overkill, so long as the resignation doesn’t turn into desperation.

“Hey! Hey. Dude. Get back here. We got you on video, man. Let’s do this the easy way.”

The messages that the undercover officer posts on the sites that elicit responses are meant to sound slangy. Rather than “Hey, I am a woman looking to have sex for money,” which might lure in a robot, she instead posts a message like “Lewking 4 meetup/hookup, txt me at ____. Xoxo.” Sure enough, like the sun rises in the morn, several men will fire back a message to this female undercover female officer, and it’s off to the races. Next thing he knows, the man is in a hotel room, on camera, with his pants down, wondering why he's such a sucker.

And a quick comment on the fact that these “sting” operations are conducted at hotels. These are not your seedy looking motels on the side of the highway where this luring is happening. No, this is happening at Holiday Inns, at Comfort Suites. I’ve seen officers do it out of a Sheraton. I imagine they’ve graduated to the Embassy Suites by now.

I always wonder how the hotel manager takes it when the local police sergeant walks up to the concierge desk and says, “Hey so I am going to set up four burly dudes in an adjoining hotel room, decked out in tactical SWAT gear and heavily armed, with a female officer in the other room dressed in civilian clothes. My female officer is going to try to coax horny men into her hotel room, and my officers are going to be waiting in the adjoining room to bust down the door at her signal. I promise, no one will get hurt. But now that I’m thinking about it, maybe put us in a corner room in case some gunfire breaks out.”

Hopefully your local PD compensates the hotels when they conduct “sting” operations like this. I would like to think that they do. After all, it’s not good for business when a guest has to call the front desk to report that she can't go to the ice machine down the hall because four guys in bulletproof vests are carrying a half-naked, diminutive man down the stairway.

“Sure” says the manager to the sergeant, “and will your officers be staying the night? The continental breakfast is $20 per person, but I’ll throw it in for free if you book another night’s stay.”

Second Son (Part 2)

If you have one cooking in the oven, a thing for Dad to know ahead of the baby’s arrival is that the bond between Dad and baby might not be there right away. For the second child especially. And that’s OK. I might even call it “normal”, whatever that means. This is how it’s gone for me.

The first baby makes you a father. And in that moment, that is life-changing. Even though baby number one can’t understand your off-color jokes in his first few months, the fact that you’re a dad now? That’s heavy.

The second baby is a miracle, sure, but it’s another baby.

We love our babies with all our hearts, but from the start they’re these little helpless things without much in the way of personality. Full of life they are—just check their diaper—but only literally.

After two months, however, things start to change for Dad. Baby number two might now respond to your voice—and if you’re lucky, to your singing—with a smile. Dean likes songs about Jesus, and he also likes “In Too Deep” by Sum 41. Now we’re getting somewhere. If you like my singing, captive audience or not, you have my heart.

The mother connects right away—indeed she literally does so if she’s nursing—which is a euphemism for you know what. If the mother does not connect, emotionally or literally, that is out of my purview and is another (serious) discussion altogether.

My point here is not to sound like a bad dad, like this is a cry for help. I can do both, entirely on my own, without a piece like this. My point here is that I am not—and you are not—a bad dad for not feeling that emotional connection early on.

I mean, what am I supposed to say to the guy? At least I’m doing the daily work to not become Don Draper. At least I’m not the man that Tracy Chapman’s protagonist married in her song “Fast Car”, the one that stays out drinking late at the bar and sees more of his friends than he does his kids.

I only bring this up because I have heard of dads who don’t feel much, if anything, when their child is born. This sounds horrible. Not for the baby; the baby has no idea. This sounds horrible for you, Dad. We each ache on different levels. Don’t hide that aching. Share it. You hear a some about post-partum depression for mothers, but I haven’t heard much of anything regarding similar depressive qualities in men.

I do not have depression over this, but I very much sympathize with the men who do. The only thing I can say to that is to check back in in about 3-6 months, when the child is smiling, laughing, starting to show his or her personality, smiling as a result of your singing, and not just from passing gas. It gets more fun the older they get, and the connection between dad and baby increases in tandem. At about a year old, all baby wants to do is be with daddy when daddy comes home from work, and they’ll run to your arms and say, “daddy, daddy, look at this dinosaur book I got at the library! Read it to me, daddy!”

Down you plop on the couch, and using your best T-Rex roar, you begin.

There it is, there’s the connection. Ride out the storm. A storm can be beautiful, and it can be frightening. Either way it goes, it will only get stronger from here.

Objection, Hearsay!

Lucy on the witness stand: “Robert said he saw the defendant murder the guy on the night in question.”

“Objection, hearsay!” What is the lawyer objecting to? He’s objecting that Lucy is testifying to what Robert said he saw on the night in question. Hey, the semi-competent lawyer says, why should Lucy be testifying about what Robert said?

Good question. Insert the “Rule Against Hearsay.” The Rule Against Hearsay, at its heart, is saying “drag Robert up out of bed and to the courthouse so that he, not Lucy, may answer for what he saw. That way Robert will be subject to the defense attorney’s cross-examination.”

I mean, if you’re going to say I killed someone, at least come here and say it to my face so that if I did do it, I can get a good look at you so that you might be next.

This rule against hearsay, although byzantine to follow at times, has good intentions, and it stems from our right under the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution to be confronted with the witnesses against us.

It used to be that, in days of old, tribunals would hear all kinds of statements from witnesses, written up outside of court and then brought into court to be read aloud. The person who said the statement was nowhere to be found, but that didn’t prevent the court from hearing the statement and using it against the defendant during the “trial.” That doesn’t sound very fair, does it?

After a few revolutions and several impromptu beheadings later, we finally came around to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t decapitate someone based on what someone else said, without that someone else being brought to court to be questioned.

“Hey, Pat, so they’re going to hang Rupert in the town square for what you said you saw Rupert do to that lady. You remember, Rupert, right? Yeah, he’s got a wife and three kids. Well anyway, he’s scheduled to get the rope tomorrow, right in the middle of lunch. Do you want to go talk to the king about how you said to me after your 5th goblet of mead that maybe it wasn’t Rupert who you saw that night? That maybe your horse-and-buggy was moving too fast, that it was midnight so it was pitch dark, and that maybe it was another guy with brown hair and a feathered cap? I mean they’re going to execute him, Pat, shouldn’t you say something?”

I can’t help but think of My Cousin Vinny when Vinny, the defense attorney in the case played by Joe Pesci, holds up two fingers (twice) in the courtroom for the sweet old lady (“Mrs. Riley, and ONLY Mrs. Riley…”) to correctly guess the amount of fingers he’s holding up. Mrs. Riley, who is wearing coke-bottle glasses, says she saw the two boys (the two defendants) from 100 feet away as the exact same boys who left the Sack-O’-Suds at the time the victim was shot and killed.

Turns out the Mrs. Riley’s vision was that of a bat, the flying kind, and maybe, just maybe, it’d be a good idea to gather more evidence than just her eyewitness testimony that she saw the two boys from a distance with glasses that look like two separate goldfish bowls held together.

So that’s what cross-examination is for. And that’s how it ties into hearsay. That’s why Mrs. Riley needed to be there in court. The weaknesses of eyewitness testimony—let alone from a distance of 100 feet—have been well-documented by now, and it’s a good thing Vinny was hitting his stride as a defense attorney at about this point in the trial. Without Mrs. Riley there to display her lack of vision—and without the help of Marisa Tomei’s expert testimony—those two boys would’ve gotten the chair.

Unfortunately, we’ve executed millions of people over the course of history based on circumstances like this. Whether they did it or not, we’ll never know, but at least we’ve advanced far enough to have laws and rules that compel a witness to come in and testify in court as to what they saw.

I agree, Pat should go talk to the king, but then he will probably get the rope himself for trying to deprive the king’s people of some wholesome family entertainment during lunchtime.