Communications Breakdown

The conversation started, as so many do, with a communications breakdown between me and Monte, the young teenager I’ve been mentoring since I moved into my apartment in Southeast.

He came over to TV and popcorn with me and my girl Cindy. He had convinced me to try the new Blade series, and I agreed mostly because Blade and I wear the same Oakley sunglasses when we work. Cindy snuggled under my left arm. Instead of taking the recliner, Monte filled the far third of the sofa so he could reach the food. When the second commercial started, Monte hopped to his feet, yelled, “Fives,” and sprinted for the bathroom.

“Fives?” I ask.

Cindy smiled up at me. “He means his seat. He’s reserving it for five minutes while he’s gone.”

When Monte got back I commented, “When I was a kid I’d have called dibs on the seat.”

“Dib?” Monte asked. “The little guy in the Invader Zim ‘toon?”

Cindy was in hysterics. “You boys are so out of sync in the slang department. Hannibal you need to catch up or soon you won’t be able to talk to anyone on the street, or at least not anyone under twenty-one.”

“You up to date, huh Cindy?” Monte asked. I could hear the skepticism in his voice. “What would you do if I said your dad was zaback?”

“Slap the crap out of you,” she said. “Even if it is kind of true.” When I raised an eyebrow she told me, “He’s saying my pop is fat, old and bald. It’s the kind of thing a B-funk would say.”

“Yo!” That almost brought Monte to his feet.

“I’m going to guess that was insulting,” I said through a mouthful of popcorn, “but what the hell is a B-funk?”

Monte looked at Cindy, then at me. “Hard to say without... you know... you don’t like me to curse.”

Cindy sat up straighter, straightened her shoulders and pressed her lips together. Her eyes went up and to the left while she assembled her words. I had to pause the TIVO, not wanting to miss another vampire getting ashed.

“Without profanity,” she finally said, accepting the challenge, “A B-funk would be a nonsense-talking, sexually confused, douche-loving, Jimmy Page worshipping, cheap, gullible, lying sack of target property who thinks he is a trainspotter, claims he is a 'casual gamer,' and is very, very lonely. What do you think, Monte?”

“Whoa. I think you just about covered it, girl.” He raised his palm to accept her high five. “I never knew you were so up on the street talk.”

“I like to stay plugged in,” Cindy said, aiming an index finger at Monte. “That’s how come I was the only one who got it when we caught you and your buddy talking the other day about gaming shorty for some P9.”

“That was him, not me,” Monte said, but it was the first time I’d ever seen him blush and his eyes flashed to me to confirm that the code was intact.

“P9?” I looked only at Cindy, who kissed my cheek and sat back in her corner.

“You need to at least know a little of how the young folks talk today, handsome. I suggest you check out urbandictionary.com. But right now, can we get back to the vampire slaying?”

We did. But the next day I did check out www.urbandictionary.com because I think every adult needs to be able to communicate with teenagers. Of course, that led to another long conversation between me and Monte. As it turns out, a shorty is no longer a cigarette, and P9 isn’t always a handgun.

Independence Day STILL means freedom

I’ve posted my feelings here before about the war on terrorism even though I’m not a counter-terrorism expert. I feel like I can spout off because my resume says patrolman and police detective and Secret Service special agent and I figure I know a little about law enforcement. And yeah, I figure this to be more a law enforcement issue than a military issue.

Reading about the FBI's capture in Florida of the would-be al Qaeda bombers of the Sears Tower a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about this whole controversy over civil liberty - versus - national security. Some of my neighbors are afraid that Bush and Cheney and the boys are crazy and they’re willing to do anything even put a tap on every phone in the country, to catch the bad guys. But trust me, the FBI is only maintaining surveillance on people when there’s what we call a "criminal predicate." For you non-law enforcement types, that means there’s information to establish sufficient facts to give an investigator reasonable suspicion that a particular individual is a serious threat. In other words, despite the patriot act, probable cause is still the gold standard for watching. That’s the way us law enforcement types are trained from jump street, and we can’t just blow it off. So, unless you’re doing something shady, nobody wants to know what you’re talking about.

Of course, it’s more of a challenge now. Plain old crooks start small and move up and eventually work their way into a police database. But the recruits to Islamic fanaticism, suicide bombers and such, are mostly first-timers. And the smart ones, the leaders, fly below the radar of probable cause, below the threshold for FBI curiosity. That’s why we have conspiracy laws. Because this is really organized crime we’re talking about.

Now, anybody who knows me knows I support the current national leadership. But from the beginning I’ve disagreed on one big point. We need to define the enemy. We need to stop fighting “terrorism” and declare open season on “terrorists.” We need to define the threat, and use all the stuff we already have that was designed to fight the Mafia, and to fight communists. Because we are a tolerant, freedom loving people, nobody wants to say out loud that our enemies are Islamic terrorist, but folks, that’s who’s threatening us. And if you don’t narrow it down like that, people are justified in thinking the surveillance powers are too broad. But we need to make it clear that we aren’t tapping everybody’s phones, and beyond that, that wiretaps on revolutionary Islamic fanatics is not the same as wiretaps on patriotic citizens, war protestors or civil rights workers - all mistakes that I know were made in the past.

One other thing: nobody is really LISTENING to these conversations anyway. It’s not like a couple of cops with headphones are sitting in a hotel listening to the people in the next room. Actually, we’re talking about computers applying transaction analytics to telephone traffic, looking for patterns that add up to probable terrorist activity. You don’t want to make that list? Quit calling your cousin in Syria asking him where you should send money.

When I was growing up in Berlin the Polizei never had a problem stopping a fight, because everybody believed they were crazy and would do whatever it took. I never saw it happen, but they maintained that image and it kept them from having to bust too many heads. Now, if the bad guys slow down and back off because they think Bush and Cheney and the boys are like the German polizei, well, maybe I don’t want to convince them otherwise.