POLICEMAN

POLICEMAN

My uncle, Earl Jacobs, was a Cincinnati Police Department patrolman. One of the neat things I did as a kid was spend a shift with him in his patrol car. I was about 12 at the time. This day he was on the 3 to 11 shift and I rode with him for a few hours of his shift. He picked me up at his house and dropped me off there. I'm not sure this was a thing you were supposed to do. Earl was a no nonsense type of cop. He supposedly had a reputation for not letting anyone off. He was on traffic duty most of his career.

The night I was with him we were on the west side of Cincinnati. We gave a ticket or two for traffic violations - nothing really exciting. The one event I will never forget was when we saw a bunch of young guys, say 16 to 20 year olds, gathering in an empty lot at the foot of Westwood Northern Blvd. They looked kind of threatening to me. He pulled right up in there and told me to stay in the car. There were about 10 or 15 of them. He walked up in the middle of them and asked what was going on. They told him they were meeting there to go to a movie together or some such lie. He just told them that he would be keeping an eye on them and to stay out of trouble.

If he was trying to get me to join the force when I grew up, it didn't work. I didn't want any part of that life.