In the Line of Duty

The dog in the photo is K9 Officer Kane, with the Ocean County Sheriff's Office in New Jersey.  As of this writing, K9 Kane is recovering in a veterinary hospital from a stab wound inflicted by a man who was subsequently shot and killed by police.

It all happened this week in a small oceanfront community of multi-million-dollar homes and fewer than 300 year-round residents.

The man, wanted by authorities on charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault, theft and weapons offenses, was found to be holed up in a house in the beachfront town.  Confronted by the police, the man was holding a knife and ignored orders to drop it.  That’s when K9 Kane was released.

Unfortunately, rather than dropping the knife at that point the man used it to stab the dog, and that’s when the officers fired.  Happily, the dog is expected to recover, and justifiably, the man was killed by the gunfire.

That may sound harsh – “justifiably, the man was killed” – but if you are wanted by the cops, brandish a knife, refuse to obey orders to drop the knife, and stab a dog, we do not have sympathy for you.

True, there could be underlying emotional or mental issues that contributed to the man’s behavior.  Public information in this case does not yet address such questions.  But we still cannot think charitably when a K9 is stabbed.

K9 officers are just that, officers.  We make badges for them.  But where a human officer has a full understanding of the risks of the job, the K9 only knows his mission is to subdue the suspect, without an intellectual appreciation of the risks.  This is why we and most people are appalled when a K9 is injured (or worse) on the job.

We hope that K9 Kane recovers fully, and that the small beach town can return to its quiet normalcy.

Show Me The Money! Um, No...

We are of the opinion that this story should be added to the Stupid Criminals file.

Earlier this month, a would-be bank robber entered a northern New Jersey bank and handed one of the tellers a note specifying the denominations of cash he was demanding.  The problem with his plan was that it was 6:45 PM, the bank was preparing to close, and all the money had already been locked in the vault.

The guy didn’t believe the tellers, so he leapt over the counter and saw for himself that all the cash drawers were empty.  So he fled -- his hands just as empty as the cash drawers.

What did he think, that banks simply lock the doors at night?

While he got away before police arrived, security video and the assistance of police in neighboring towns enabled his capture four days later.

The county jail is open all night.

It Can Be A Small World

With more than nine million people living in New Jersey, what are the odds of this happening?

Recently, New Jersey State Trooper Michael Patterson pulled over a car for a minor infraction.  The interaction between the trooper and the driver was cordial, and the driver, a gentleman named Matthew Bailly, identified himself as a retired police officer from the town of Piscataway.

Trooper Patterson remarked that he was a Piscataway native, and the two men continued to compare notes.  Bially recalled that when he was a rookie on the job, he responded to a call on the same street on which the Trooper was raised.  On that call, which took place 27 years earlier, he helped deliver a baby.

At this point Trooper Patterson reintroduced himself, saying, "My name is Michael Patterson, sir. Thank you for delivering me."

Yes, Trooper Patterson had stopped the man who delivered him.

As a follow-up, Trooper Patterson and his mother later visited Bailly and his wife to further commemorate the unique circumstances that brought them together on two occasions, 27 years apart.

Snake Charmer

We all know that police officers are trained for dealing with hazardous situations.  But the training does not include a specific course on python-wrangling.

Yet wrangling a python was exactly what New Jersey State Trooper Steven Vallejo found himself doing this past Friday, when the New Jersey State Police received a call in the morning that there was a rather large snake on the Garden State Parkway, a bustling multi-lane toll road.

To judge by the photo posted by the agency, Trooper Vallejo found this to be simply all in a days’ work.  Calmly he used his baton to handle the snake.  More power to him.  We think we might have preferred facing an armed assailant.

Reportedly, a highway maintenance worker found the snake in a broken aquarium alongside the road, not far from one of the highway’s toll booths in densely-populated Essex County.  Although clearly abandoned, it was the snake’s lucky day: The weather was unusually warm for January in New Jersey, and the python was relocated to an exotic pet store a few miles away, where perhaps it will find a new owner more caring than the one who dumped it on a highway.

The Badge Company of New Jersey is proud to be a supplier to the New Jersey State Police.