3F3: Crack Anyone? Nothing like a little bacon to take the edge off.
3W3: Ummm… what?
3F3: Jack in the Box. It’s Sunday.

This is how the screen reads on the patrol car computer of Officer Josh Ziemer as he exchanges messages with a fellow officer about their meal plans for the evening. 3W3, or “3-William-3” when spoken, denotes Ziemer’s specific watch, sector, and district in the Seattle Police Department. The first 3 represents third watch, which runs from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. The W stands for the “W” sector of the Southwest Precinct, which covers West Seattle and White Center. The second 3 corresponds to the third district of the W sector, which runs from North White Center, through High Point, to about halfway up California Avenue.

“You picked a pretty boring night to ride along,” Ziemer says to me, “It’s usually pretty slow, especially in West Seattle. You can usually find most of the cops either eating or back at the precinct doing paperwork.”

Having already given me the full tour of the Southwest precinct, Ziemer decides to take me on a ride through West Seattle and wait for any calls to come in from the dispatch center. It is 10:30 on a Sunday night, the streets are deserted and we drive for at least 20 minutes before I see a single person.

“People think that cop work is a lot more exciting than it really is,” Ziemer says. “A lot of people come into the force wanting to make a difference, and then become completely disillusioned.”

A different path

Like many people, Josh Ziemer’s life did not follow that path that he planned. The 29-year-old was born in Tucson, Arizona but moved to Washington with his parents when he was in fourth grade. He describes his childhood as pretty ordinary; he was a good student who succeeded in most aspects of his life.

He developed an interest in science during high school and majored in biotechnology at the University of Washington, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree. By the time he graduated college, however, he found that his desire to pursue a career in science had diminished.

“All of a sudden, I just lost interest,” says Ziemer, “and I started wondering, is this really what I want to do with my life?”

His parents had a friend in Tucson who worked as a detective – a job that Josh had always thought would be interesting. He arranged some ride-alongs with the detective and decided to take a risk and pursue a career in law enforcement. He completed the eight-week police academy in Seattle and became a patrol officer in 2001, a step he has never regretted.

“Being a cop looked like fun,” Ziemer says, “and it is.”

Staying out of trouble

Fun looked like the last thing we would be having at the Munson Motel on East Marginal Way in Georgetown. The area is filled with budget motels and all-night diners and sits directly under the deafening path of planes ascending from SeaTac Airport. The Munson Motel is a mustard yellow building consisting of two rows of rooms and a main office, run by an elderly Asian man who nods familiarly to Josh as we pull into the parking lot. On my right, the two patrolmen in car 3F3 pull up beside us, Jack in the Box shakes in hand.

A woman walks by wearing red pajama pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt that hides her face, but not well enough. The officers recognize her as a local prostitute, Amy, (a pseudonym) and step out of the car to talk to her.

“We’ve known (Amy) for awhile,” Ziemer tells me. “She is actually really a nice woman, just mixed up with drugs and the wrong people.”

“What are you doing out here, (Amy)? It’s late,” one of the cops asks.

“Just going to a friend’s house on Beacon Hill,” she replies, glancing from the ground to the officer, nervously stamping her heel against the gravel. She has heavy bags underneath her eyes, her teeth are yellowed, and she cannot keep her hands or her head still.

“You staying out of trouble?”

“Sure am, officer.”

“I guess we’ll let you get along, then.”

Amy hurriedly brushes past us and disappears into the darkness of the alley, perhaps towards her stated destination of Beacon Hill, but most likely not.

Ziemer says Amy was attacked and beaten about four months ago: “They beat her in the face with a chain and stabbed her nine times, just a couple blocks away from here. She almost died.”

A delicate balance exists between street people and police officers, a mixture of respect and loathing, an alternation of compassion and detachment. In a strangely parental sort of way, these cops care about Amy, while she seems to depend on them to protect her. The criminal world is not black and white, good and evil, guilty and innocent; it is a brutal mixture of contradictions and circumstances.

“It’s so sad to watch people throw their lives away like that,” Ziemer says of Amy as we get back into his car. “People think that cops are heartless or detached, but it’s just hard to keep caring when you see the same people make the same mistakes over and over again. Sometimes it feels like we’re not making any difference at all.”

One of the bad guys

“3 William 3,” the dispatcher calls over the intercom, “Request for assistance from 3F3 at 17th and Roxbury.”

Ziemer turns the car around, switches on the emergency lights, and takes off speeding 60 mph down Roxbury Street, a White Center arterial. We pull onto a residential street and park behind three other patrol cars and a red Ford Explorer. Five teenagers sit on the curb to my right, looking cold and scared. Ziemer immediately recognizes one of the young men as a local drug dealer who has been evading the police for months.

“We’ve been trying to bust him for a while,” Ziemer says. “He got his brother killed because of drugs about four months ago.”

The dealer looks as if he couldn’t be more than 20 years old. He wears baggy blue jeans and a white sports jacket; his hair is neatly braided in cornrows.

The five suspects are searched and handcuffed, and then a narcotics dog is brought in to search the car. The teenagers quietly answer the police’s questions, except for the dealer, who stares angrily at the pavement.

“Check out what we found on him,” says another officer, a member of the department’s Anti-Crime Team (ACT) that oversees drug stings and busts. In his hand is a small bag of crack-cocaine. According to the arresting officers, the tiny bag holds about $1500 worth of crack, enough to put the dealer in prison for up to 15 years.

“I can’t believe he just pulled over,” the ACT officer says of the dealer. “He should’ve ran.”

“Look at him,” Ziemer says, pointing to the dealer as he is put in the back of the patrol car. “He’s one of the bad guys.”

A slow night

Ziemer and I head back to the station. The young dealer heads for prison. Amy heads for Beacon Hill or somewhere unknown. Officer Josh Ziemer may not see himself as a hero, he may encounter people that he can’t help, and he may spend most Sunday nights doing paperwork and eating fast food, but because of him there is one “bad guy” in jail and one less bag of crack on the streets. That’s making a difference.

The dashboard clock reads 2:30 a.m. as we ride in silence through the empty streets of West Seattle. I yawn; Ziemer laughs and offers to drive me back to my car. “I’ll probably just go back to the station and do paperwork anyway,” he explains to me.
“It’s been a pretty slow night.”