It was the best of the police, and it was the worst of the police.
I’m doing some work in Milwaukee, and I am staying at a hotel in the western suburbs. Just as I was getting ready for bed a couple of nights ago, I got a call from the hotel front desk. It was explained to me that the interior dome light of my car was still on. I thanked the caller, got clothes back on, and rode the elevator downstairs before I realized that there was no way the hotel knew which car was mine. I wondered how they knew who to call.
It became clearer as I walked out the lobby door. There was an unmarked police car (in my youth it would have been called “smokey in a plain brown wrapper”) idling at the curb. Apparently the policeman, who was on evening patrol, saw the light on in my car, called the license tag in to dispatch to get my name, and went into the hotel to let them know they had a guest with a light left on.
Here was public service at its shining best, on a very cold (10° F) night.
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Shift the viewpoint to Detroit and the point-in-time to last night.
My sweetheart’s son was on his way home from work while freezing rain fell. There was no evidence of salt having been laid on the road, so the boy was driving with a bit of extra care. He lost control of his car on a large patch of ice and he swerved into the curb, which he hit rather hard.
While he sat gathering his wits about him, a passing car rear-ended him. In the next 30 minutes while his car sat still at the curb, he was rear-ended by 
another car (which failed to stop to exchange insurance information), he was hit by a bus, and then hit by another bus (which jammed up against his car), and then that bus was struck by two more buses (neither of which stopped to render assistance as required by law).
The police showed up over an hour later (and we’re talking about the middle of downtown Detroit). The boy tried to explain that he was waiting for AAA’s tow truck (which was on the way). He was told that the entire affair was his fault. He offered the license plate numbers of the hit-and-runs he’d experienced. His mother, with whom he was talking on his cell phone, tried to explain the situation to the officer, including the bad road conditions and lack of salt which caused her son to swerve in the first place.
The cop’s reaction? He told her to shut up, hung up on her, impounded the now-destroyed car, issued him a ticket for “having caused the entire incident”, and forced him into the impound tow truck. (The boy was told he’d be arrested if he waited at the accident site for a ride.) The cop also would not give the boy an accident report number, although he then turned around and gave it to the driver of the immobilized bus.
At this point his mother, who lives across the river in Windsor, Ontario, was feeling a wrath that could have cowered a demon. She ended up having to cross into the U.S. (on horrifically slick roads), discovered that she couldn’t get to him herself, called a cab for her son (the impound lot attendant claimed to have done so, but didn’t), and waited for him patiently at the border crossing. The only bright spot of the evening occurred when a tow truck operator came into the lot, asked the boy how long he’d been waiting for a cab (over 30 minutes, with no result), and then took him to a cab stand.
All this during freezing rain and snow.
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Remind me why anyone would want to live in such a pesthole.
