Lock-’em-up Lou

Lou Gorman and I go back a long way, back to those scorching, blue-sky days of summer when we played pick-up baseball on the dried-out diamond at Grimley Elementary. Only a few people knew that about us. That’s the way we wanted to keep it.

I’m Joseph Rizzo, the mayor of Avondale. Lou is the interim sheriff. I appointed Lou after our previous sheriff, Randall “Randy” Cunningham got caught taking advantage of several of his boy scouts while on an overnight camping trip. The rumors went on for years until officers from the state prosecutor’s officer finally came to investigate. Truth be told, we were ultimately all complicit, but it was always so hard to make a case when it was one of your own.

Lou had been sheriff for a little more than a year, and he’s facing an election when his term is up. There’s no one around who wants the job, not with crime seemingly on the rise.

With another year and a half until the election, Lou approached me about trying something new. He wanted to keep our discussion informal, out of the office, so we met for a late breakfast at the Capital Diner.

“Listen, Joe,” he began, after we pushed aside our empty plates. “I’ve got an idea. How ’bout if we locked up everyone?”

I laughed, of course. Couldn’t help it. The image of our whole village holed up in the town jail was just too funny.

“No … I mean we lock up anyone who’s stopped for anything, from speeding to petty theft, from jaywalking to stealing a bicycle. Anything. Already we have a state law that mandates that if there’s a domestic call, someone’s going to be put in jail – husband, wife, significant other. What if we made it policy here in Avondale that if you commit any kind of crime, you’re going to get locked up?”

“I always thought you were tough on crime, but this sounds crazy. Hey … wait a minute. You’re not kidding, are you?”

“Before I moved back down here, you know I was a detective up north. I did my twenty and out. Even though I had major philosophical disagreements with Rudy Giuliani, I thought that the broken windows policing put in place by Bill Bratton, his Police Commissioner, prevented more serious crime. If you deal with the small problems like public intoxication and jumping turnstiles, you begin to prevent the larger problems, like armed robbery and rape and murder. It’s not a fail safe, but I think the concept works.

“And what you didn’t know is that I’m working on my doctorate in criminal justice up at State, and I want to write my thesis based on putting into place such a plan for Avondale.”

I took a long sip from my coffee cup, signaled for more, and said, “But if we do something like this, aren’t we going to have the ACLU breathing down our backs?”

“I think the ACLU goes nuts if a specific population is targeted. You know, because there’s always been a disproportionate crackdown on poor blacks and Hispanics – people of color. But here we don’t have much poverty. Sure, we have small pocket of “welfare families,” as we used to call them, but mostly everyone here is employed at the chicken-processing plant, the furniture factory, the grain silo, the three schools … even at Walmart and the stores surrounding it. Joe, it’s an ideal population to test out the theory.”

We sat quietly for several minutes. I had a lot to digest, and it wasn’t only the runny eggs and the greasy sausages.

“All right, Lou. I know you’ve thought this through. Educate me. How’s this thing going to work?”

“Okay. Suppose Office Mathers clocks someone doing eighty out on route 306. He pulls him over. But instead of only writing him a ticket and letting him go, he arrests him and brings him in. Locks him up. Makes him stay the night to get arraigned in the morning. And here’s the good part. Ready for it? He has to pay for his own lockup.”

“Yup. But we’re not looking to extort anyone. That wouldn’t be fair. We’re not going to charge him Hilton rates. Think Motel 6 or a boarding house. And we’re not going to charge him King’s Steak House prices. Think more like the Come ’n’ Eat. I’ve already spoken to Octavia about pricing out box lunches and dinners. It’s just to meet expenses.”

“Suppose we answer a call at Roosevelt High because two fools were fighting. They both get locked up. We find a jerk painting graffiti. He gets locked up. A meth-head gets caught shoplifting and instead of a warning, and a ban from the store, she gets locked up.”

“I have, Joe. And I think it’ll work. It won’t take long before word gets around. If you do something stupid and illegal, if you act like a knucklehead, you’re going to get locked up. And you’re even going to pay for the privilege.”

“I don’t know, Lou. You know I’m no lawyer, but it doesn’t sound entirely kosher.”

“I thought about that, too. I’ve spoken to a couple of lawyers who are in our program. They all agree that it’s mostly legal and aboveboard. At least in the short term, anyway.”

“Well I don’t think anyone’s actually tried it long term. Maybe it would be too much trouble. Maybe it would take too much work, too much commitment. Maybe it would cost too much. I’m sure there’d be a certain amount of grumbling, but when the public sees how people in our town are becoming more civil, more orderly, they’ll come around to our side.”

“Well people might actually under-report. Maybe a parent might not call it in if his son takes Mom’s van out joy-riding, knowing that when he gets caught, he’s going to spend a night in jail, at his or her expense. Maybe the principal won’t call us in if something happens, deciding that they’d rather settle it in house. Maybe a dumbass won’t serve underage kids alcohol if she knows she’s going to be arrested.

“And that’s the beauty of it. That’s actually one of the positive side effects. People will start solving problems on their own or perhaps not starting them in the first place. If a kid knows that he’s going to be arrested for drunk driving and his mother or his friend’s mother will also be brought in for serving him alcohol, and that they’re all going to be spending a night in the pokey and have to pay for it, then he and they might just think twice.”

“Well, we have the ideal type of town for our experiment. People generally get along. There’s almost no racial animosity. There’s low unemployment. As I mentioned, there’s little poverty. But, still, shit happens. That seems to be one immutable law.

“And there’s one thing we have to thank Randy Cunningham for. He used federal money to fund a CompStat program modeled after the ones that were operational in several major cities, though I understand at the time, many people were upset that the funds could be better spent hiring more officers. That was probably the last thing Cunningham would have wanted – to hire new officers who might have been gung ho enough to look into alleged complaints against their pedophile boss.”

“And this CompStat system provides us raw data for tracking and responding to crime – by the day, by the week and by the month. By location and by time of day. By sector and by officer. We can see right away if we’re making a difference almost in real time. If we are, then I, Doctor Louis Gorman will be your next elected sheriff of Avondale, and you, Joseph Rizzo, will continue to be our beloved native-son mayor.”

“You and me, buddy – we’ll be kicked out on our asses. But at least we could say we gave it the old college try. And we can’t be faulted for trying, can we?”

Henry Perkins, the village attorney, and the Honorable David Kellum, who had to sign off on Lou’s grand scheme, became an integral part of our team. It was Perkins and his assistant who had to prosecute each case and it was Kellum who had to preside over arraignment court early each morning, and who was tasked with dispensing justice with fairness and integrity. If our plan was to work, they couldn’t be seen as cruel or discriminatory. They couldn’t be seen as playing favorites. They couldn’t be seen as taking advantage of the offenders – emotionally or financially. They had to be seen as benevolent, open-minded and tolerant, for they had to get the people of Avondale on board as well.

Every month, the Justice League, as the Avondale Herald nicknamed us, and who also christened Sheriff Gorman with the Lock-’em-up-Lou moniker, sat down in my conference room to scrutinize the latest CompStat data. Lou helped us to analyze the data for types of crimes committed, for demographics such as age and sex, and race and location then compare the statistics to the previous several months’ and years’ arrests, fines and prison sentences. We took an especially close look at recidivism. We figured that if the same morons were still engaging in the same kinds of crime, then what we were doing wasn’t working, and had to be revamped.

After seven or eight months, we saw that crime was, indeed, dropping – glacially at first, but soon, double-digit decreases began to appear. During the summer, in particular, there were fewer arrests for underage drinking, which delighted us because drunk teenagers do stupid and often harmful things – especially when they get behind the wheel of a car. There were fewer break-ins and fewer robberies. There were fewer calls from the mall about shoplifting. There were sizable reductions in almost every major and minor crime category.

With good behavior and decorum on the rise, I even had time to take a creative writing course at the community college. I was told to stay away from clichés, but I’ll throw a couple your way. In every cloud there’s a silver lining. But every rose has its thorn.

There was one intractable criminal problem in Avondale, and it had to do with methamphetamine – a.k.a., speed, crank, glass, ice. It was common knowledge that there might have been several meth labs operating nearby, but nobody knew exactly where. Locking up speeders heading to the interstate was one thing, but breaking down peoples’ doors without probable cause and a warrant was quite another.

One evening, the sheriff’s office got a call from a farmer living with his family on the outskirts of Avondale. The farmer said that there was a powerful odor of cat piss or rotten eggs coming from the south. He said it was so strong, he and his kids were coughing and gagging. Worse, his youngest daughter, who suffered from asthma, had to constantly use her nebulizer to keep her lungs clear, and the farmer was afraid she was going to die. He was about to drive her to the E R at County General to have her looked at. Lou said he’d drive right over to check it out.

When he got to the farm, Lou knew immediately what it was: the unmistakable ammonia and ether odor of methamphetamine being cooked in a lab. So Lou called for backup and began to work his way through the grid of rutted farm roads and paths until he came upon an abandoned-looking cabin in the middle of the woods, where the stench was so thick and suffocating that he, himself, was starting to feel high – and not in a good way.

Lou unholstered his Glock and started to approach the cabin. Without warning, he was hit by the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire and he went down.

Backups arrived within minutes, and during a firefight, shot-gunned everyone in the cabin. The cabin caught on fire – perhaps from the overheated stoves and volatile chemicals – and then the whole place exploded and burned down within minutes.

Lou’s deputy, Seargeant Wallace, rode with Lou in the ambulance and tape-recorded, between gasps for air, what Lou had been telling him. Several miles and just minutes before they got to County General, with Wallace holding his hand, Lou Gorman took his final breath.

Hundreds of Avondale residents, friends and family thronged Woodfield Cemetery as Rabbi Schneider presided over Lou’s graveside service. I even recognized some of the miscreants who had once been locked up overnight – and who had not been back since.

Lou had shown that his grand experiment could work, provided that we all worked together to at the same time solve the societal problem of a lack of decency and discipline. All anyone had to do was to follow the law and be a good citizen.

We’re all too familiar with the phenomenon that occurs when the main mover and shaker has moved on. Lou Gorman had the drive, the stamina – the focus – to make our thing – actually his thing – work. And so the experiment, like a pricked balloon, ever-so-slowly began to run out of steam.

Lou’s doctoral thesis had been completed, but he hadn’t yet defended it. We drove over to the university with a trove of print-outs and a PowerPoint presentation, and with Kellum’s and Perkins’s help, we sat down with the members of his dissertation committee to go over the data with a combination of pride and utter sadness.

Lou Gorman, once a beat cop and a detective, and later the sheriff of our humble town, was awarded his doctorate posthumously.

Rev 7 / April 3, 2017

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April 2017…Copyright © 2017, Lloyd B. Abrams

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 42, May 2017

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