Monday, January 04, 2010

Police Trading Cards?




I was working on a vehicle at one of my regular car lots and found what appeared, at first, to be a baseball trading card; like the kind that used to come with a piece of flat pink bubble gum. Upon closer inspection, instead of being a baseball player; the picture was of a uniformed police officer. The back of the card had his statistics; not the number of times at bat, singles, doubles, triples, home runs or life time ERA. Check these out; Calls for Service, Incident Reports, Arrests, Accident Reports and Field Interviews.

I was hoping for other “stats”, number of Internal Affairs Complaints, type of weapon carried, short anecdotal story regarding his favorite crime scene or some other juicy tidbit. For all I know the card was fabricated as a novelty on a home computer since the card stock it was printed on lacked the quality of a Topps or Upper Deck styled trading card.

Maybe on future cop cards they could break those arrests down a bit; felonies, misdemeanors, DWI/DUI, red light violations, stop signs, speeding, driver’s license violations, no insurance, seat belt, cracked tail light lens all the way down to parking tickets issued. As far as the photo, maybe have him demonstrate his cuffing technique; similar to a ball player finishing his home run swing at the plate, only there would be a suspect spread eagle against the wall, a patrol car or down and dirty on the pavement.

What ever the reason for the chance opportunity of my running across this particular trading card; my hats off to a working cop, Christopher Kruppa, of the Palacios Police Department, card # 408. Y’all be careful out there.

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