GOVERNMENT
Maricopa Police Department is no foreign place to me. I show up daily to check the latest police reports. This morning was different — I was not there to look at a binder, but to board a police cruiser (thankfully, not in the suspect transport enclosure) and catch some speeders with Sgt. Hal Koozer of the traffic unit. Koozer beckoned me to the passenger seat of his unmarked Chevrolet Impala. He laid down the ground rules — don’t get out of the car and don’t take photos of his computer screen. They were reasonable requests. It was only a few minutes after we left the police station when we busted our first speeder with the car’s built-in radar detector. The dashboard-mounted device measures the speed of cars going the opposite way, best used on lone cars and less effective against a herd. The man we pulled over was driving past Saddleback Elementary School on Porter Road at about 45 miles per hour, 10 over the limit. Koozer let me decide whether to give the man a ticket or a warning. I chose leniency. Lucky for me, that was Koozer’s first choice, too. “Even if I give a ticket, if they don’t say thank you, I didn’t do my job right.” Koozer said. “I don’t think there’s any reason to be crummy to people just because they made a mistake,” he added. “You can’t show me one person whose driven who hasn’t made a mistake.” Next came a speeding, swerving snowbird on the John Wayne Parkway overpass, and a man in a hurry to get home because he left his RV running. We left them both with warnings. The covert car was working as intended, as no one seemed to realize we weren’t just normal drivers. Koozer and I then stationed ourselves off Honeycutt Road near Rancho Mirage, where the sergeant pulled out his LiDAR gun and let me give it a shot. I held the detector up to my eye, locked the crosshairs on an oncoming car and pulled the trigger. It beeped and told me how fast the guy was going. Koozer reclaimed his detector and aimed it at an oncoming Buick, which clocked in at 57 in a 45. When dispatchers ran the plate, it came back to a Ford Fusion. The driver pleaded that the discrepancy was a dealership error, and we let her off with a warning. The last traffic stop of the day was a BMW zooming at 60 miles per hour in a 45 zone. The driver told Koozer she was simply “jamming out” to music. She got a ticket but thanked Koozer on the way out. Mission accomplished. “I got my ‘thank you,’ and ‘Nice to meet you, too’,” he told me. Before Koozer dropped me back off at HQ, he introduced me to the traffic unit’s pair of motorcycle cops: Pedro Torres and Sebastian Sanchez. Torres and I met once before at a crash I photographed, but it was nice rendezvous under more casual circumstances. Koozer said the two men are “the heart of the traffic unit.” Brian Petersheim Jr.
Sharing a shift with Maricopa Police Department
Sharing a shift with Maricopa Fire Department
Pictured: Fire engineer John Campanaro
Walking into Maricopa Fire and Medical Station 575, I was greeted with an immediate sense of family. Engineer John Campanaro, firefighters Connor Dignan and James Olderbak, and then-cadet Emily Colhour had gathered in the kitchen to enjoy a hardy lunch. Captain Josh Eades greeted me and gave me a rundown of what to expect during our ride-along. It was a flexible schedule. Eades told me not to take photos during medical calls and to be smart about HIPAA laws. If we were called to a crash, I was to stay in the firetruck until I was told otherwise. The first stop was the engine bay, where Eades, Dignan and Colhour gave me a tour of their toolbox on wheels. “The thing that we do mostly is EMS, so we run all of the medical calls,” Eades said, “which account for roughly 80% of call volume.” The truck was filled with tools — some as small as rolls of gauze, others as big as hydraulic clippers. Dignan and Colhour showed off a few gadgets they use to open an unconscious person’s windpipe. The CPR machine “performs perfect compressions and tracks data,” Eades said. “We’re good at compressions, but this machine, it’s perfect at its job and frees up hands.” Next came the fire tools, where I got the chance to hold the “jaws of life” — used to remove people from a car crash — and handle firemen’s axes, hoses and fire hydrant adapters, used to connect to neighboring cities’ hydrants because there is no universal thread. After the tour, the Engine 575 crew jumped into their fire suits and started training. It was a 90-degree day; naturally, they broke quite the sweat as they simulated pulling people out of buildings,
sledgehammering and scaling walls, in their 45-pound suits. They were about to start a hydrant exercise when we were interrupted by our first call of the day. Eades and I, the only two not already in the firetruck, booked it and hopped in. We put on our headsets and Eades explained we were headed to a reported seizure at Fry’s Marketplace on John Wayne Parkway. We arrived and filed through the front doors. The firefighters carried large boxes filled with medical equipment up the staircase to the employee breakroom. The injured man complained of back pain, so they called an ambulance, and he was transported to Exceptional Community Hospital. After the ambulance arrived, we headed back to the fire station — but we didn’t make it far before another call came in. An elderly woman was suffering chest pain in Glennwilde. We arrived at the home and hurried inside. The woman sat on her couch as firefighters did an electrocardiogram test to see if there were any irregularities in her cardiac cycle. She was transported to a Chandler hospital as a precaution. Leaving the woman’s home was trickier than I would have predicted. The coolant line split under the truck when we got there, so coolant gushed out of the engine and spilled all over the road. Engine 575 was immobile until city services arrived and gave us a temporary replacement to get back to the station 30 minutes later. Eades gave me a final tour of the firehouse, showing me around the dorms and dispatch system, as well as their gym, before I headed back to the InMaricopa office. Brian Petersheim Jr.
Pictured: Sgt. Hal Koozer
InMaricopa.com | July 2024
July 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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