Friday in Mid City

“Dave, move out of there. You’re stepping in the blood.”

Whoops. Here I was, just moments into a ride-along with Sgt. Jeff Jordon of the San Diego Police Department’s Mid City Division, and already he was gently admonishing me for potentially fouling up an investigation by treading upon droplets of human blood in a City Heights alleyway.

It was about 10 p.m. Friday night. We’d barely cleared the police station’s driveway when Jordon heard the call from dispatch that there was a fight in the area and blood was discovered in the alley. On went the lights and through the intersections the patrol car sped. Minutes earlier, Jordon had told me about the citizen ride-along who’d been shot some 20 years ago by a suspect who’d gotten the drop on a cop—turns out that was the infamous case of Sagon Penn, who in 1985 killed an officer and a female ride-along [Correction: the citizen ride-along was shot but survived--sorry for the error.]. Adrenalin coursed through me as he accelerated toward the crime scene.

I didn’t know at the time, but that was the last jolt of excitement I’d feel that night.

The fact that I was in Jordon’s passenger seat was a direct result of something he said on Twitter two weeks ago, amid a debate over Prop. D: “Ride with me & ill show u people that will suffer w/o rev[enue].” Prop. D would raise sales tax in San Diego by a half-cent after a series of financial reforms are accomplished. Public-safety funding is a major issue as the November vote draws nearer. Jordan is the vice president of the union representing San Diego’s cops, which will be active in the Yes on D campaign. The No on D forces say that remarks about massive cuts to public safety amount to scare tactics.

Surely, none of that mattered to the victim of the alley fight, who was found by the police not long after Jordon told me that the blood I stepped in might wind up being a dead end, another score likely to be settled on the streets rather than in court. The victim was a young man just short of his 18th birthday, but he looked much older. He was stoic as an officer dabbed a 3-inch, open gash near his left temple, the likely result of a knife swipe from someone who didn’t appreciate his presence in the neighborhood. No one expected him to say who cut him, and he didn’t. Talking would upset the natural order of things.

Much of the remainder of my seven hours with Jordon was spent heading toward a whole lot of nothing (a called-off request for mutual aid on a large brawl in La Mesa, a false report of a 20-man, six-woman fight in the College Area, a perimeter established to snare a “rabbit”—a suspect on the run—who wasn’t found), a number license-plate checks (tip for those being followed by cops: When you immediately turn right, you arouse suspicion), lots of talk about gang warfare (both the street-crime type and the city-politics variety) and a 3:20 a.m. temporary stop of a seemingly aimless 26-year-old shuffling down Home Avenue who turned out to be under the influence of three different psych drugs.

But the evening also provided a quick glimpse of a semi-regular event— a coordinated curfew sweep whose base was at Cherokee Point Elementary School, a bustling operation in which kids are spotted by plain-clothes officers, scooped up by cops in uniform, processed, interviewed, counseled and seated in rows of chairs while awaiting parental pickup. A leader of the effort told me that the biggest obstacle sometimes is locating parents, who, when they finally show, are offered counseling of their own. The youngest kid there that night was 7 years old.

Jordon later told me in an e-mail that he wished it had been a typical Friday night, “so you would have been left with the impression that the department can’t handle even the hint of additional [budget] cuts. However, if the cuts come (and I believe they will if Prop D does not pass) we as an organization will make do with what we have, just as Oakland is doing now.”

During our ride-along, Jordon had given me an example of choices he has to make given the available resources: direct officers to a robbery in progress or a report of a shooting. In that case, he chose the robbery and left the shooting investigation for the next shift. “Without Prop D,” he said later, “I will just have to make more of the type of judgment calls that I explained to you on Friday.”

He said he believes crime is down in Mid City partly because of relationships forged in the communities—he cited Talmadge as a particular success—and partly because of the curfew operations, which he said help kids avoid becoming suspects or victims.

“Without the type of resources you saw on Friday, do you think we are going to focus on juvenile sweeps?” he added. “In reality, the seven year olds will probably be left to fend for themselves as other priorities take over.”

Write to davidr@sdcitybeat.com.