 Patrol Officer Sonia Lopez |
Austin Substation for sure, because here I am, sitting in her police car. “It’s
going to be a busy night,” she warns me. I laugh to myself that Lopez is just
trying to scare me. After all, I thought, riding with a police officer in
Central East Austin on a Monday night shift is bound to be just plain boring. I
mean, everyone knows all the police do is sit around together with their car
windows rolled down, talking trash and munching on Yo-Yo’s until some sucker
wanders past, and gets busted for looking guilty. As we pull away, she says —
for the third time — that I’m on my own tonight, she’s not responsible for me,
okay? Perfectly okay with me, I lie. I look over, checking to see if her face
matches the seriousness of her voice. Yep.
The night starts out slow, with a couple of burglary calls, but by 5pm, about
an hour into her ten-hour shift, Lopez answers the first of several domestic
disturbance calls. We pull into the “fenced community” of Mason Manor — the
most problem-ridden housing project in the city — and the residents in the
complex are visibly tense at the sight of police cars. Lopez negotiates a rare
peace between a woman and the father of her three kids. The whole thing started
over money owed on the furniture — and ended with a call to the police. She’s
called before, Lopez reminds the woman, a not-so-subtle point that using the
police to settle family arguments is not an officer’s job. Yet, for the
majority of the calls she answers, Lopez is social worker, counselor, peace
officer, detective, even judge and jury — and her size (about 5′ 5″, 120
pounds) says nothing of her strength in diffusing violent situations and skill
at dispensing wisdom.
Two minutes later, we arrive at a house on East 11th Street where a man has
been stabbed in the hand by a woman with whom he’s having an affair. The woman
fled, and EMS is treating the victim when we arrive, so Lopez goes to find her,
but can’t. “It’s much worse for her now that I can’t hear her side of the
story,” Lopez says. “Plus, her husband apparently doesn’t know about this guy.”
Later, aggravated assault charges were filed against the woman, and she’s
arrested at her home.
It’s 5:30pm. The dispatcher assigns us two burglary calls. Lopez is pissed —
she’s the only officer available, or “10A,” in the entire sector, during the
time when domestic disturbance calls are rampant. They are, Lopez explains, the
most potentially violent situations.
By 7:30pm, Lopez is called to the Greentree Apartments — another fenced
community for low-income families — for yet another domestic abuse call. The
couple speaks only Spanish, and Lopez needs to translate. Inside, the wife is
sobbing, and turns her face away from us momentarily, but Lopez asks her where
her husband hit her. She puts her hand on the right side of her face where her
cheekbone and mouth are swollen and red. She’s shaking while she explains that
they fought about needing groceries for their two little girls. Within minutes,
her husband returns with the children, groceries in hand. He’s handcuffed and
placed on the couch while his wife fills out a police incident form. When he
begins to cry, the youngest child runs between his knees and hugs him. Lopez
explains to him that, in this country, you cannot hit your wife, ever. He
interrupts, but she tells him to be quiet and firmly continues. “Even if she
does call you a son of a bitch.” A social worker arrives to advise the woman
and take pictures of her face.
Lopez answers more burglary calls, and arrests a man who violated probation.
By 9:30pm, I stop asking her when she will have time for “community policing”
activities like visiting with neighbors, or standing guard in a crime-ridden
area. There simply isn’t any time for that. Lopez made it clear from minute one
that she would not talk politics, but over the course of the evening, she
confides that she hardly ever does anything that constitutes community
policing. More importantly, it’s clear that her definition of it comes under
the heading “time to spare,” of which she has none. “Almost every night, we’re
short on police officers on my shift,” she explains. We’re sitting at the IHOP
for a quick dinner, during which Lopez watches the clock, checks in with her
shoulder radio, and grants me tidbits about her personal life. She’s 29, never
married, has a longtime boyfriend who is sometimes jealous of her devotion to
her work but she loves him a lot, she grew up in Uvalde, and wanted to be a
police officer because she wanted to help people. And she feels like she
does.
There is this sense I get from the officers I spoke to for this story,
including Sonia, that resignation and fatigue is just below the surface. Daily
contact with criminals and victims makes it harder to tell them apart. Along
with the constant exposure to the squalid side of Austin’s poorer
neighborhoods, the parents selling drugs in front of their little kids, the
teenagers with stone cold attitude, the women with bruises on their faces — it
all leads to a desperate responsibility cops feel to provide more and more of
themselves until they have nothing left to give. The sanity is in limited
supply, you know? All this is written on Sonia’s face. “Someone wants to vent,
and you’d like to sit there and listen to them, but you’ve got calls,” she
explains. “You feel bad, you’d like to say, `another day, another time,’ but
you don’t know if that day will ever come.” We get back in the car — the
dispatcher has four calls waiting, and Sonia’s back on line. — L.C.B.
This article appears in March 21 • 1997 and March 21 • 1997 (Cover).