Andy Thibault

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Cool Justice 
Perps Say The Darndest Things
By ANDY THIBAULT, Columnist
Law Tribune Newspapers
September 5, 2005

   Linda Kleinschmidt, like many entrepreneurs on the road, frequented coffee shops and read newspapers that had been through many hands and would go through many more.

   One particular coffee shop, in Hartford, was also a popular spot for Hartford police officers. They, too, would read the paper and remark on what certain stories were missing. They seemed to know what they were talking about because the subjects of those stories were people they had arrested.

   Kleinschmidt was involved in her career, selling and designing advertising, but she became even more intrigued with the world of police work. She sought out cops for interviews, going around roadblocks set up by their bosses. Eventually, she published two books: "Police On Patrol - The Other Side Of The Story" and "More Police On Patrol."

   Over the past 10 years she has interviewed more than 3,000 officers for her books and local cable and radio shows in cities including Waterbury and Middletown.

   She founded an organization, policeonpatrol.org, that gives bicycle helmets to police departments for distribution to youngsters and raises money for bullet-proof vests.

   Kleinschmidt's books have chapters featuring anecdotes about actual incidents, the difficulties of relating to civilians off the job and my favorite, "Excuses." Here's a sampling of what citizens say when they are caught violating the law:

· I arrested a husband for assaulting his wife. He said, "Officer, I just snapped. I was tired of coming home every single night and finding my wife in bed with my uncle."

· I stopped her for speeding and she had an interesting excuse: "Officer, the play was so bad that I had to get away from the theater as fast as I possibly could."

· I stopped this woman for speeding. She said she was on the way to the hospital, with internal bleeding. I let her go, but decided to follow her to the emergency room. I found her just sitting there in her car. So I went over the help her, whereupon, she said she had a confession to make. She had lied, there was nothing wrong. She hadn't expected me to follow her to the hospital. She was an attorney. I gave her a ticket.

· I stopped a man going down a one-way street. His response: "I was only going one way."

· I pulled a drunk over and lectured him about causing an accident while being intoxicated and speeding. He replied politely, "You're so very correct, officer, I could have spilled my beer."

· A man told me, "My wife just phoned me at work and she's ovulating. We're really trying to have a child and I'm hurrying home to try and get her pregnant."
   And this one, from a civilian:

· A bunch of us guys told the officer we had just seen a Jeep driven by four females, all of which were topless. We were trying to catch up to them and see if we could get their phone numbers. Just as the cop started to say we'd have to come up with a better excuse, he hears over his radio a report of topless women driving down Main Street in a Jeep. He let us go. We never did get their numbers.

   Kleinschmidt and her husband, an East Hartford detective, live with their daughter in a small town by the Connecticut River. She's at work on a third volume of police stories.

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