Mr. Cage

My cable was out this afternoon when my grandson was about to watch Harry Potter. I happened to have it on DVD and so we ordered pizza and got to watch Harry and all the magic that went along with it. Near the front of the movie Harry gets on a bus, not your average ordinary bus mind you. Driving through the streets at break neck pace, stopping on a dime and watching Harry’s face flatten out on the window reminded me of some old police techniques.

I should preface this by saying that patrol cars didn’t always have a partition to separate the bad guys from the police. One of the nice things to come along at the beginning of my police career was the “cage”; a rigid heavy wire screen that was bolted onto the car between the front and back seats. It had inch and a half square openings where we could hang things and it did offer some degree of separation when hauling off a bad guy.

Some of the more nasty ones would try to poke us by sticking their fingers through the cage, not a really sharp move because fingers poked through the cage made for an easy target when a clip board could be applied. Even worse were the ones who would try to spit on us. Since we would pay close attention to these creeps all the way to the station, we could figure out their intentions. At the moment that they would attempt to “hark up one” we would apply the brakes, full out. The momentum of objects in the back seat would then come crashing into the cage at which time the jerk would have a funny looking checker board pattern on his forehead. “Meet Mr. Cage”, we would say and plead for the jerk to try it again. Most of these idiots figured it out by the second attempt and would sit back and behave. Several years went by before police cars came with the Plexiglas partitions.

A variation on “Meet Mr. Cage” worked when going up and down stair steps. My own favorite location was down at the old Allen’s Landing next to the bayou. It had been turned into an informal park with several tiers of steps. The unruly prisoners would soon find that the laws of gravity and objects in motion are loads of fun as they bounced around in the back. This worked much better in the transfer van, commonly referred to as the Paddy Wagon. Some of the winos would attempt to urinate on the driver while the van was in motion. A simple tap on the brakes followed by rapid acceleration would have him bouncing like a ping pong ball in his own pool of pee. I should add that I only heard of things like this from other officers, hahahaha.