That’s it, I’m putting my foot down. I’ve had it with the teen-vampire craze, particularly the Twilight novels and movies. I propose an immediate Madison police policy of threatening any eyeliner-sporting pale-skinned guy with a wooden stake to the heart.

Think my reaction’s a little extreme? I bet you the jogger in this Madison police report would agree with me:

You read it here first — either some member of the lunatic fringe is convinced he’s a character in one of these crappy vampire stories that are suddenly everywhere, or the daywalkers are really among us. Either way, sound public policy dictates that we hunt down anyone who looks suspiciously emo, whose skin is just a bit too pale or whose clothing is too strategically disheveled, and we stake ‘em.

As for this poor jogger’s mystery assailant, I’ve rounded up the usual suspects and put together this lineup. Male? White? Twenty-something? Slender? Spiky brown hair? Gray T-shirt? Propensity to hiss? I think we have our suspect.

Stake 'em. All of 'em.

The next time you encounter one of Madison’s finest out on the street (or get hauled off by one at the Mifflin Street Block Party), do yourself a favor. Ask the officer what he or she did in his or her past life.

You might raise the cop’s eyebrow, particularly if the officer assumes you’re referring to some sort of Buddhist thing, but more than likely you’ll be pleasantly surprised and a little taken aback. Depending on the officer you’re asking, the answers could run the gamut from basketball player to blackjack dealer, teacher to lawyer, or business owner to bus driver. One thing’s for certain — since Sergeant Mike Koval took over recruiting for the Madison Police, the department has an impressive number of officers who never expected they’d be wearing a badge for a living.

I was pleased to see in today’s State Journal an article by cops reporter Sandy Cullen detailing the diverse assortment of backgrounds many of our boys and gals in blue come from. It’s part of the department’s effort to reinvent policing, as they will tell you, and it makes sense.

The need for police is an unfortunate reality in society. It’s tough to argue against it. The question then becomes, who should a city entrust with the abilities to carry a gun and Taser in public, give orders in emergencies and cuff anyone to drag down to the station? Are we better served by a police force that grew up with dreams of kicking in doors and knocking out teeth, or squads of enforcers who use problem-solving and effective communication as their primary weapons, while keeping a can of whoop-ass in their back pocket as a fallback?

Surprisingly, Madison’s technique is as unique as it is.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Sergeant Koval about a year back by Public Information Officer Joel Despain, and he’s since proved to be a valuable font of information and the source of a few good chuckles. When we met, it was to talk about the city’s latest class of recruits. I was taken aback by the strange brew of backgrounds they brought to the table, but he explained that diversity is part of the department’s strength.

The logic makes sense. You can teach any trained ape to fire a gun and swing a a billy-club, but Koval told me the traits they’re interested in are level-headedness, intuition and a legitimate desire to help people. Coupled with the department’s incentivized plan to continue officers’ education, it almost hearkens back to the warrior-scholars of old.

Could it be that Koval isn’t building a police force, but a Jedi order?

After the interview I’d come for, our conversation turned to area high school basketball (which I confess, Koval — a local boy — has a better grasp on, in spite of the fact that I was doing color commentary on some games at the time), and then he tried to recruit me.

“Excuse me,” I spluttered like a female bar patron who’s just been told her dress would look better on some frat boy’s floor. If you had made a numbered list of things I was expecting when I walked into Koval’s office, a job pitch would have ranked somewhere in the neighborhood of ten-thousandth.

“You should apply to be a Madison Police Officer,” Koval repeated. “You know, I used to be a reporter, but here I am now.”

Guy could sell ice to the Inuit. If I hadn’t had another pressing appointment, he might have had me in a half hour’s time. The notion still crosses my mind, from time to time, though it’s usually followed in short order by a temporarily crippling bout of maniacal laughter.

As persuasive and vivacious as Sergeant Koval is, it’s no surprise the Madison Police Department gets more than a thousand applications for a dozen or so openings every year. I don’t envy him the task of sorting through those resumes, but in the end, it’s the city that’s benefiting from his dedication and his open-mindedness. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see him invited by some institution or another to spread his school of thought to other cities in years to come.

Oh dear God, here we go. I guess we’ll address tales from vacation another time, because there’s a whole mess about to blow up.

Seems Madison police got a call this weekend from a concerned Sconnie in the vicinity of State Street. What had this intrepid Madisonian so frazzled was that he or she had witnessed a young man out for a stroll sporting a holstered handgun hanging at his side.

This isn’t a regular sight in any city, especially in Madison, but in recent months it has become more common. You see, while Wisconsin is one of two states that bans its residents from carrying concealed weapons, there’s no law on the books barring residents from strapping some iron to their hip and openly flaunting it for all the world to see, as long as they don’t use it to raise a ruckus. 

Last April, his honor the Attorney General, JB Van Hollen, inexplicably released a memo stating that it is, in fact, legal to wear an openly visible firearm. Uh, thanks, we knew that.

Now, that right to carry a sidearm in plain view isn’t bulletproof. There are plenty of places where both the law and common sense dictate it would be inadvisable to allow just anyone to pack heat. Schools, taverns and a handful of public buildings are all off limits. Wearing a gun is an automatic grounds for police to stop you and ask you what you’re up to, though they can’t haul you away without further cause. And if you’ve tired yourself out after an afternoon of hefting that .357 all up and down State Street, you’ve got to take the bullets out and put the gun in a case before you get into your car and drive home.

But while AG JB’s memo that the sky was blue shouldn’t have turned a lot of heads, it somehow became a rallying cry for Wisconsin’s pro-gun crowd. Over the course of the summer, open carry advocates started getting giddy with the sheer number of options they had at their disposal to celebrate Van Hollen’s opinion. Some have even gone so far as to host open-carry picnics, which my old WSUM buddy Lou Hillman had a chance to document in Green Bay this weekend.

I’ll tell you one thing. While I’d have been inclined to check out the grub and meet the folk, you couldn’t have paid me to be the poor sap that tried to start a friendly game of Frisbee at that picnic.

As with any sort of activists, what these open carry folks are really gunning for is attention. For frig’s sake, they have a web forum dedicated to discussing their experiences carrying firearms openly.

And now, you can probably expect to read 28-year-old Travis Yates’s account there, about how he was out for a stroll on a fine Saturday evening, sporting his sidearm, when he was accosted by Madison’s finest, detained and written up for disorderly conduct.

Yes, when police responded to the concerned citizen’s call in the State Street area Saturday, they found Yates proudly “celebrating” Van Hollen’s memo just a few short blocks away from where most of our state’s elected and appointed leaders make their living. Instead of asking Yates a few questions, hearing he was “making a political point” and letting him go on his merry way, the officer loaded the nutter into his car and drove Yates to his own house, where he was instructed to put the gun away.

And then the officer damned us all by writing Yates a disorderly conduct ticket because “his actions disturbed other citizens.”

If I may: Madison General Ordinances 24.02: Disorderly Conduct. (1) (applies to anyone who) “In a public or private place, engages in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, unreasonably loud or otherwise disorderly conduct under circumstances in which such conduct tends to cause or provoke a disturbance.”

While it’s a broad definition, trying to make the argument that Yates commited disorderly conduct by “disturbing” passersby on the street would never stand up in court. I see more disturbing things than a guy with a holstered gun almost every time I walk down State Street. It’s why I keep coming back.

The city needs to drop the municipal ticket immediately, or they’re giving Yates exactly what he wants. They’re making him a “martyr of the movement,” a moth crushed against the wheel of the liberal machine, Madison.  

Full disclosure: I’m a gun owner (and a decent shot), I sit the fence on concealed carry and hesitantly support open carry. I look at a gun as a tool, and as a former boy scout, it’s my duty to “be prepared” for anything. When it comes to carrying in public, I figure if somebody’s really interested in self-protection and not secretly hoping they get mugged so they can pull their piece and gak the bad guy, they’ll be tough enough to wear the weapon where it’s obvious. After all, when it comes to protecting one’s self from violence, what’s more likely to scare off the bad guys: a tool that’s plainly visible, or one that’s tucked into a shoulder holster?

I’ve certainly never felt the need to carry a firearm in Madison.

So if dopes like Yates want to tote their rods about town in some imagined act of defiance, why do people like the initial complainant and the police officer give them just what they want — someone to defy? What would have just been one harmless nutter on the street who thought he was making some sort of point will now be a crowd of armed, angry people with a legitimate grievance.

If you don’t think it will happen, it’s already started. The readers of that very forum I linked to are already discussing an open-carry rally to protest Yates’s ticket. ”Persecute” one of their herd, and the pro-gun crowd will show up in force.

And much to my chagrin, in this case they’ll be in the right.

I find it a little disheartening when Madison lives up to its supposed “reputation” – ”Madistan” and “eighty square miles surrounded by reality” and ” the People’s Republic of Madison” and all the other spiteful cliches we hear the city called.

Because of this event, which is likely to escalate, those of us who just want to call Madison “home” — who don’t like it when peaceable citizens doing nothing illegal are detained and don’t care for armed angry mobs with a point to prove — we’ll never hear the end of it.

It’s not often, but there are times when I finish reading a press release from the Madison Police Department and I just have to throw my head back and laugh.

We’re lucky here in Madison to have a former reporter of Joel Despain’s caliber working as a spokesman for our police force. One of Joel’s greatest strengths is his knack as a story teller, and there are times when it shines through in something like a police press release, which is generally intended to be bland and to the point at best. I’ve seen some from other departments come across my desk that almost require a cryptographer to decipher.

But the Madison press corps got a good chuckler from Joel today. As with most of them, you have to read between the lines to get the joke.

Incident report for Case#2009-182844
Released 06/24/2009 at 11:51 AM by PIO
Joel DeSpain
Incident Type
Injured Person
Incident Date
06/23/2009 -
3:08 AM
Address
400 block West Doty Street
Suspect(s)
Female, white,
5′6″, 115 lbs., with curly, red shoulder-length hair, slender build, wearing a red sundress.
Victim
Male, age 21, MadisonVictim suffered multiple
abrasions to his back, including two cuts requiring 11 stitches. He also had a bruised chest, a cut lip, and a sore nose.
Details
On Tuesday, a 21-year old Madison man came into the Central District to report a battery that happened around 3:00 a.m. that morning. He said he was at a downtown house party, sitting on a porch, when a woman started dancing and taking her clothes off. The victim said he – and others – laughed as they watched the disrobing. As he chuckled, another woman, clad in a red sundress, slapped him across the face, saying, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” The man backed up, sat on a railing, and continued to guffaw at the striptease. Suddenly, the woman responsible for the slap “rushed” the victim – knocking him off the railing. He says he fell more than six-feet onto concrete. The woman descended with him, landing on his chest. Friends cleaned him up, and he discovered his back was bleeding profusely. He ended up in the emergency room, and wishes to pursue charges against the assailant. She has not been located.

By the time I finished reading this story, I had nearly fallen out of my chair. I have no idea how the police officer that took this report was able to keep a straight face.

If this 21-year-old “victim” has any motive other than getting a phone number in wanting to file charges against this “assailant,” I’d like to sit him down and have a talk about finding him a decent pair of man pants. I mean that. I don’t know any self-respecting member of the male gender that would come forward to police to admit he’d had the crap kicked out of him by a girl.

Based on the “victim’s” description, we’re not talking about a bruiser here. Girls that are 5′ 6″ and 115 pounds don’t play for the women’s hockey team. With the red hair and sundress, guys should have been lining up around the block to get cracked in the jaw by this young lady.

Let’s face it, there’s a fair chance this guy got exactly what was coming to him. As a member of the male gender, I’m realistic enough to admit that 3 AM at a house party is not when most guys are at their most gentlemanly, and I find it hard to believe this guy was half the “victim” he makes himself out to be. I say good on this mysterious red-clad firebrand for being able to lay down the law with the punk.

But for this guy to take his pitiful, fabricated story to police is an unprecedented level of weak. There are certain unspoken rules all men should abide by. You never hit, push or otherwise lay an ungentle hand on a woman. If a woman takes a swing at you, you get out of the way or you take the hit. There’s no excuse for fighting back. And if a woman gets the upper hand and bloodies you up a bit, you sure as hell don’t tell anyone!

That’s what I find so baffling about this story. So the guy needed a few stitches and will probably be the butt of a running joke among his buddies for a while. Dragging police in the matter won’t solve either of those problems. In fact, it will likely prolong the humiliation, first when his buddies see the police report, then when some media attention is paid to it. If they actually catch the young woman, that will reopen the wound, as will any court appearances to follow.

I can just picture this guy, tears streaming down his face, describing to a jury the “brutal beating” he sustained at the hands of the five-foot-six pixie in a red sundress. Call protective services! He’s going to need protection from this monster!

I’ve got to think that this guy was just a little concussed when he made the decision to take his story to police, and didn’t think ahead to the guffaws that would follow any time one of his buddies mentions “that time Jimmy got his ass kicked by a girl.”

So let that be a cautionary tale to any young men who haven’t learned these lessons yet. Fiery things can come in small packages, and while there are times they will bruise your pride, you’re just going to have to man up and get over it.

I know the Dane County 911 Center has become the political kickball de jure over the past year, and I’m very glad of the shortcomings that have been exposed and addressed to some degree. But I’d like to take a moment to try and draw a line between what constitutes a legitimate gripe and what’s just piling on.

By now you’ve read the tragic story of Farrell Kurlish, the 32-year-old man who was found dead in his car last March, poisoned by a carbon monoxide leak. The story has generated quite a bit of controversy, because the vehicle sat out on the street idling for seven hours after a neighbor phoned in a complaint to the 911 center’s non-emergency line.

Mind you, this was a call to the center’s non-emergency line, and if you read the transcript of the call, at no point does the caller indicate there was any kind of problem that required police intervention.

Call taker: “Police and fire.”
Caller: “Yeah, there’s a pickup truck that’s
been idling in front of my house for one half-hour. Is that legal?”
Call taker: “Sure.”
Caller: “Hmm?”
Call taker: “Yeah, sure.”
Caller: “In the street?”
Call taker: “Uh-huh.”
Caller: “Holy (expletive), what’s the town
coming to?”

And at that point, without any further ado, the caller hangs up. With that 20-20 hindsight we always hear about, yeah, it might have helped to have dispatched police officers to the scene immediately. But what the 911 Center’s biggest critics are trying to say is that, based on those 35 syllables of information from the caller, the 911 operator should have sent help, or at least followed up on the call.

Now, none of the news stories that I’ve seen so far (that I haven’t written myself) make note of the fact that this same 911 operator, Nathan Waite, was in fact commended for his performance in the line of duty as recently as January, when he gave instructions on birthing a premature child to a father parked on the side of a snowy road near McFarland. At the time, county officials hailed Waite as the hero who saved the day by keeping his head, making sure the panicked mother and father on the other end kept their heads, and calmly talking the husband through procedures as delicate as using a shoe lace to tie off an umbilical cord.

I myself covered the press conference that was thrown together by County Executive Kathleen Falk’s staff as an election loomed against a foe who had made the 911 center a key issue. While I’m not surprised that the County Executive has not arranged a press conference in his defense, I did get a chance to meet Mr. Waite and chat with him briefly.

Nathan Waite is competent, humble, young and kind of quiet. I certainly don’t see him as being “complacent,” or lacking “the appropriate attitude of concern,” to quote the internal investigation into the matter. In fact, I posit he reacted in exactly the right way.

My tax dollars pay Nathan Waite’s salary, just the same as they pay for the police officers that patrol our streets. As such, in no way do I want either 911 operators or police officers wasting time responding to calls about every vehicle left running in the street. Following that logic, there should be a police response every time a garden hose is left running, a door is left ajar or a dog is heard barking in the distance.

Nathan Waite is a very busy man with a lot of important duties on his plate who was reacting to a stupid question from a person who was at best lazy and at worst an imbecile. The caller to the non-emergency line didn’t say anything was wrong. She didn’t sound like she was under duress. She certainly didn’t open her front door and walk the thirty feet to the idling car and peer inside to see if everything was all right, which could potentially have saved a life.

The caller simply peered out a slat in the blinds and did what misanthropic old ladies are prone to do — she complained to the first person who would listen. You can ask any 911 operator, and they will tell you the non-emergency line is a source of more useless complaints than Charter Communications’ customer service.

Now I agree with Police Captain Carl Gloede that some kind of written procedures should be implemented to sort out non-emergency calls that might have some kind of urgent nature to them. It certainly could have helped in the Lake’s Edge Park murder last fall.

But trying to link Farrell Kurlish’s death to a failure on the part of the 911 Center is akin to kicking an opponent when they’re down. Whatever political point or progress critics of the 911 Center are trying to make gets lost, especially when hard working civil servants like Nathan Waite get dragged into the fray to have their reputations tarnished.

I hope Waite sticks it out through the coming weeks of punishment and retraining he’s going to be put through, then goes on to become a supervisor at the 911 Center. Maybe we can even talk him into running for County Exec.