The gun seems to be made of plastic rather than steel.
“You hope you never need it,” Chris Carabajal, UNMPD officer, said while checking that the laser sights were activated. “But you need to be under the impression that you might.”
He then closes the truck and starts his shift.
His day starts at 3 p.m., when the traffic and pedestrians are still out, and ends at 11 p.m. when the homeless and drunks start passing out. By the end of the shift he says he’s exhausted. He said its hard working when the sun’s up and then seeing it go down. However, he doesn’t show any signs of physical exhaustion at the end of his shift.
This day, he said, was pretty slow. It starts simply enough. He patrols the winding and twisted streets around UNM, guiding the car in between passing vehicles with something akin to a sixth sense, always in the right lane for the turns he needs to take and seldom missing green lights. This grace through traffic might be thanks to the cars around him hanging back, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
Instead, he goes through the route, eyes peeled for anything that might happen as he drives by the South Golf Course, the UNM Business Center, the building for Disaster Medicine and Greek row.
“You always ‘What if’ everything,” he said while parking the car outside Centennial Library.
Then he begins his foot patrol. He said he likes to be on foot better because it helps to deter crime in ways being inside the cop car can’t. By seeing him, people are less likely to break the law. As he walks, passersbys on campus cast him a wary eye. It doesn’t seem to matter that they aren’t doing anything. Everyone seems to be unnerved by his presence.
“I feel like the city’s a little bit more saturated with the criminal element, but here you’re trying to protect and help the citizens rather than just going out looking for bad guys,” he said. “You really feel like this is a place where you can mold young minds and help younger
people out. It’s just one of those places where, the people you deal with all the time, you really want to do your best to help them out.”
Back in the car, he drives around for a while longer, waiting and watching for anything that might happen. The radio crackles and spews out some numbers and other information that no one but a cop would understand. Carabajal responds in a similar manner and flips a U-turn. He switches the lights on, and the slow meandering careful eye that he had before is gone as he guides his car through the lanes of traffic. He explains that a fellow cop is bringing in a wanted woman and needs some backup.
Upon arriving, the fellow cop is talking to a middle-aged woman. Her car is parked in the lot near the Times Square Deli Mart across from UNM with two children in the backseat. The other officer explains that either she gets arrested or that she needs to go downtown to pay her bonds. Carabajal keeps an eye on the woman and children. He notices the ignition hanging out of its socket. He knocks on the front window; the child in the front seat, a boy around the age of 12, doesn’t respond at first. Carabajal persists and the boy rolls down his window. Carabajal asks if the car’s been broken into recently. Maybe he needs help. The kid shakes his head and doesn’t say a whole lot more.
Eventually, the mother is guided to the fellow officer’s car. She’s off to pay her fines, but can’t take along her children, seeing as she’s in handcuffs. She tells them to wait for their aunt. Carabajal offers to give the kids a ride and the woman’s face lights up. She tells her children the cop’s going to help them out, but they refuse, and walk inside the deli and wait there instead.
“You try to contact everybody with respect and you try to contact them all the same,” he said. “It’s part of the job.”
After that incident the rest of the night’s quiet. Carabajal listens to sports radio and occasionally talks about police protocol. During conversation, he mentions that everyone on the force does something special. Some can catch DWI offenders best, others bust drug dealers better. He said he works with the suicides best.
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“I want to make sure (students) are safe even if they have a mental disability,” he said. “It’s something that you don’t take lightly when you hear the words, ‘I don’t know if it’s worth living.’ Most of the time you’re trying to reach out to that person because they are obviously reaching out to you in a sense.”
Through the night a couple of other calls come up. A janitor sets off an alarm that Carabajal has to check. A sweating man nearly walks in front of the car, and Carabajal tracks him down to make sure he’s not going to hurt himself from being too drunk. He sits on back up again for an officer who’s talking to a group of students with an unregistered and uninsured motorcycle, but the biggest adventure of the night comes when he encounters a “down and out,” or severely inebriated female in an alley behind greek row.
After calling the paramedics, who determine she’s not too drunk, Carabajal and another officer determine she needs to go to “MATS,” a place for drunk people to sober up before the night’s over. She says, “Thank you,” when he offers her the ride. Driving there, she’s quiet in the back, occasionally muttering something undecipherable. At the clinic, she exits the car quickly, happy to be back, it seems. As she enters the building and the worker there takes care of her, she looks back at Carabajal and asks, “Hey, where are you going? Aren’t you coming, too?”
He just smiles and says no. She tells him how handsome he is, but she’s already in the building by that point. He gets back in the car and heads toward UNM again to finish up his shift patrolling the streets.
