by Derek Snow

Created on: February 19, 2007   Last Updated: May 15, 2007

At the end of a late night police shift where the officers had been "clicking" each other with their radio mics, we were all called back to the briefing room by Lieutenant Cawyer, the guy in charge of communications. "Clicking" is the way that police officers laugh at someone else over the air by simply pushing and releasing their transmit button without actually saying anything. It is a common but potentially dangerous activity because the channel is blocked from emergency transmissions for the duration of the "applause."

Cawyer had been at home and as is not uncommon someone gave him a call with a heads up like, "Hey Lieutenant, you have to listen to channel 2!" He turned on his scanner in time to hear the majority of the "clicking" that some rookie officer had received and he was furious.

So half an hour before our shift ended the fire eyed Lieutenant showed up at the station and ordered everyone to a post shift de-briefing which mostly consisted of him telling us how unprofessional and unsafe clicking was. "What if someone needed help" and you had the channel blocked he asked, not expecting an answer and none of us willing to reply, "They should switch to the other channel, duh" so we just sat there and took it.

Cawyer was noted for having a quick pen and we knew that as mad as he was he wanted to send the entire shift to Internal Affairs but as a practical matter he could not.

Oh yes, he spent months trying to investigate the prank to find out who had initiated the prank that led to the lengthy "clicking" episode.. Who had stuck a knife into a manequin's back and poured about a gallon of ketchup around the "crime scene" for the rookie to find was the question that no one was going to answer and he knew it but that morning he was getting his pound of flesh from us all.

The very last thing that he said almost caused the room to burst out laughing because as soon as he said it we all knew it was a lie. Out of deference to his temper, only a slight murmur drifted about the room when he said that the department had just bought a new "directional finder" and he was going to be out in his car and could identify anyone who clicked in the future.

"Yeah," I thought, and hogs grew wings and were flying around the barnyard as well. The city barely bought us the stuff to complete our jobs so we knew that they didn't invest in a toy for him to track "clickers" but we held ourselves together until the final "dismissed."

A group of about 10 of us, mostly the younger guys headed

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