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A night on the town with Presque Isle County deputies

News Photo by Julie Riddle Officers David Whitfield and James Leedy, of the Presque Isle County Sheriff’s Office, investigate power lines taken down by a runaway driver in rural Presque Isle County in the early morning hours of Sept. 29.

ROGERS CITY — A single beam of light swept across the back of a brick building, doors and windows startling into view and then sliding away again into the darkness.

The car eased forward, around the building and back toward the quiet road.

The officer at the wheel looked right and left before turning, but nobody else was about. Under the streetlight’s yellow glow, there wasn’t much happening in the middle of the small-town night.

Nothing much, other than the police cruiser, gliding through the dark.

The midnight shift, as officers call it, runs from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. at the Presque Isle County Sheriff’s Office.

Working separately for the first part of their shift, officers team up around 10 p.m., travelling two to a squad car as the day turns to deep night.

On a recent Saturday night, Deputy James Leedy and Sgt. David Whitford headed out for their overnight patrol. The two have worked together since Leedy joined the department in July, a recruit from the Petoskey police force.

Richard Hanson, the night dispatcher, offered his signature candy bar-stuffed cookies for the road. There’s nothing open in the middle of the night, he said. Better take food while you can get it.

The night shift partners chatted comfortably as the cruiser motored down a dark country road toward one of many small towns on the officers’ beat.

In a county of 600 square miles, it can be difficult to be a presence everywhere in one shift, but the officers spend hours each night roaming roads, their eyes scanning.

“We try to be at the right place at the right time,” Whitford said.

A Shell Oil station flashes by. It used to be open all night, but those days are gone.

“The only thing that’s open 24 hours now is us,” Whitford said.

The cruiser patrols back lots of schools, banks, construction companies. Business checks are a regular part of the midnight shift, officer eyes alert for anything out of the ordinary.

As a cop, part of your job is sticking your nose in other people’s business, Whitford used to tell his Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) students. After working in local schools for nine years, Whitford accepted a promotion to sergeant in January, giving up his day job in exchange for late nights that melt into early mornings.

A man on a sidewalk nods as the officers pass.

“Most people see us as the good guys,” Whitford said.

When they’re out in public, officers often hear words of thanks — from older couples, toughs in biker jackets, and even people they’ve arrested.

No hard feelings, people will tell the officers. You’re just doing your job.

The officers try to treat everyone they meet with dignity and respect. In a small town, there’s a good chance you’re going to see them again, Whitford said.

The cruiser passes a small-town bar, one of few buildings with lights on. Through the windows, people are talking, smiling, dancing.

Night people are different, Leedy said.

On midnights, officers encounter night clerks, delivery people, couples arriving home from the casino on the other side of the state. Later, roads are dotted with the headlights of commuters to Tube Fab or the early shift at Alpena workplaces.

‘MOST ADULTS ARE JUST WINGING IT’

At the wheel, Leedy turns abruptly into a lot. An unfamiliar truck is pulled up next to a chain-link fence. Something out of the ordinary. Worth a look, but nothing to it.

Leedy, 27, has known he wanted to work in law enforcement since he was 4 years old, running around the house in undersized police uniforms and fake badges with dreams of driving fast and catching bad guys.

Aware of his youth and singleness, Leedy says it’s strange, during domestic violence calls, to offer marriage advice to people twice his age. The nighttime glimpses into other people’s lives have changed his view of people he once thought had it all together.

“This job is where I figured out most adults are just winging it,” Leedy said.

Night police work is never dull, Whitford said. Warrant arrests. Drunk driving stops. The naked man with mental health issues who had to be wrestled into submission, an awkward situation at best. Cars in ditches, loose cow complaints in the middle of winter. You never know what will happen in the dark.

“I never thought in a million years, going through police academy, that I would be a cattle hand,” Whitford said, reminiscing about shooing cows off a road in the wee hours under the glare of one particularly menacing bull.

Before joining the police force, Whitford was a preschool teacher downstate.

Policing, he said, is not all that different from his previous job. It’s all about learning to share, settling differences, getting along.

Some of the things that happen in the dark are hard to bear and harder to forget. Deadly crashes. Fires. Suicides. Shootings. Heartache pouring from the eyes of people suffering sudden, wrenching loss.

“We get to see a lot of things so that everybody else doesn’t have to,” Whitford said somberly, gazing at the dark outside the windshield.

SOMETIMES, A WARNING

After hours on the road, midnight long past, the cruiser comes to rest in a wayside near a well-travelled road to watch for speeders. Whitford, at his turn behind the wheel, will sometimes wait and watch for as much as an hour. Leedy, eager for action, is not so patient.

The radar picks up a driver doing 69 in a 55. Pedal to the metal, Leedy streaks forward, siren breaking the silence.

In less than five minutes, the cruiser is once again tucked into its hiding spot, the speeding driver sent on her way with a warning.

Officers are trusted to use their judgement about traffic citations. Sometimes, the stop is enough, the officers’ gut tells them. Other times, Whitfield said, instinct says a warning is not going to be enough.

“I don’t want to be the guy knocking on your mom’s door, telling her you won’t be coming home tonight becuase you were stupid,” Whitfield says, rehearsing a soapbox speech he hopes will keep the roads just a little safer.

The car still, the stars bright, the officers wait.

SNAKE ROAD

The radio crackles. A 911 call has come in. Help is needed.

The car lurches forward, siren ripping through the night. Blinding blue and red lights reflect off the windows as the engine growls the speedometer up to 73, 78, 82 miles per hour.

A slam of the brakes, and the car veers onto a winding back county road, nicknamed Snake Road for good reason. Wailing a warning, the car careens around curves, back, again, back, roadside trees flashing in and out of view.

Ahead, wires are suspended eight feet above the road, a power pole at roadside sheared off by a runaway vehicle. The cruiser slams to a stop. Leedy and Whitford leap from the car, surging forward into the nearby undergrowth, where black tire marks disappear.

Approaching lights flash from the opposite direction as the officers emerge from the trees and stride down the road, flashlights beaming into the black of the trees.

The driver who downed the pole has fled the scene, probably too intoxicated to be caught there, the officers surmise.

Pickup truck pieces dot the road.

Sliding back into the cruiser, they inch under the low-hanging wires, leaving the scene in the hands of volunteer firefighters, to follow a trail of leaked fluids down the highway.

Somewhere, a smashed-front truck is lurking, ready to point to a driver who is now a criminal for failure to report property damage — on paper, an innocuous crime, until power lines cross a road, ready to ensnare an unsuspecting motorist in the night.

The bright-beam light flicks to life.

In a 3 a.m. silence, the cruiser surfs back alleys and small roads of a county town, the uniformed night watchmen inside peering into driveways and behind sheds.

Behind curtained windows, the town sleeps, trusting the dark won’t hurt it.

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