On the road with the men in blue

It has been raining for hours by the time Officer Thomas Mullen and I get into the car. He says, "This could be a slow night, because of the weather and all--but you never know." The digital clock on the dashboard reads 7:08 as the cruiser pulls away from the curb outside the Yale Police Park Street substation.

The Park Street substation

Mullen is one hour into his shift, the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. He patrols beat 786, which stretches roughly from Highland to Edwards Street, including Science Hill and the Divinity School. Mullen also makes rounds of the Mansfield Street and Orange Street areas, where many off-campus students live. "We're a community-based unit," Mullen says. "I drive from point A to point B, but I get out and walk quite a bit, and talk to the students and staff. They feel more confident knowing that we're walking in and around the buildings," he says.

At 7:23, we are turning left on Canner Street, and heading for the Celentano Elementary School parking lot, near the Div School. From here Mullen can observe the five apartment complexes across the street, including Whitehall and Ivy Manor. This tree-lined neighborhood with its slate sidewalks seems an unlikely place for street crime. Mullen is not deceived. "You see a little bit of everything in humanity. Basically anything can happen--suspicious people, burglary, theft, street robbery, larceny...and there are problems that are unique to the area. Up here, for example, you might have a domestic situation. That doesn't happen very often downtown," he says.

A neighborhood cop
Blasts of static and amplified dispatches from the radios interrupt Mullen while he is speaking, and he must continually adjust the volume. He points to the top radio on the console. "That one monitors the New Haven Police Department," he says. The lower radio is the source of the Yale Police dispatches. The Yale and New Haven police departments provide backup support for each other when necessary, Mullen says.

The two departments sometimes overlap in their case work around campus. "There are no walls around the University. It is not an island," Mullen says. Situations that originate on campus and progress off, or vice versa, draw the Yale police to the outlying areas. Yale police have jurisdiction throughout New Haven and carry the same badge as New Haven police. "It's a unique set-up," he explains. "We are sworn New Haven officers, but we are paid by Yale." The console sounds another blast of static and numbers, and Mullen grins. "That," he says, "was Long Island."

According to Mullen, the Yale police officers have a lighter caseload than municipal police, which allows them to become very familiar with their beats, and to take more preventative measures than they otherwise would. "It's the old-fashioned police-officer-knowing-his-beat," Mullen says. He usually patrols part of his beat on foot, and stops to secure apartment-complex doors and windows if he sees them ajar. He knows many residents by name, and has brief conversations with them as he goes. He says, "You get to know your beat, know the players. You'll see an individual who's cutting across a private parking lot, say. You'll recognize him, and you'll know that he just got off the bus and is heading home, because you see him everyday," Mullen says. "You develop a rapport."

On the beat
The clock reads 8:11 when the radio sounds again, calling 786. Mullen sits alert and listens. A security alarm has gone off on the 10th floor of Kline Biology Tower. Mullen grins again. "This could be the big one," he says.

The wind has picked up as we walk the slope of the KBT parking lot to the basement door. "One thing Yale police have is plenty of keys," Mullen says, prying apart a large ring spiked with keys. We reach the KBT elevator just as the researcher whose office alarm signaled the police is returning to his floor. Upstairs, Mullen determines it was a false alarm, as he expected. "Didn't I tell you that you should go home at 5 p.m.?" he says jokingly to the researcher. Mullen inspects the floor and says, "Everything looks fine here." By 8:25, we are back on Prospect, turning right on Sachem.

We drive past the other Yale Police substation on Mansfield, and cut through a parking lot to Prospect. A Buick and a Mazda are trying to turn into the lot as we roll into the street. Both freeze when they see the police car. Police cars have a magnetic effect on speeding vehicles, slowing them down to the speed limit on sight alone. They also draw blatant stares from many passersby. It is 8:31 as we pass Modern Head and the student sketching it.

When your day starts at night
We drive up and down streets, past the Whitney Humanities Center, up Grove until we turn onto Hillhouse at 8:49, when Mullen's beeper goes off. He glances at the number and says, "I have to call home." We pull up to Kline Geology lab, where Mullen uses the phone. Waiting in the car, I hear the radio dispatcher describe a 5' 5" gunman dressed in red who had headed up Willow Street. I am relieved when Mullen returns.

Although his work hours do not conform to the standard workday, Mullen says he is content with the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. "I have my whole day free," he says. "I'm there to see my wife off to work and my daughter to school. It was good while my daughter was growing up; I could attend events at school, bring her something she needed. You get used to working at night. When your family's home at night, you want to be there, but you get used to it."

At 9:17, we are on St. Ronan Street, heading back to the Div School. We drive to the end of the parking lot, which Mullen says is unusually crowded. As the car approaches a building, a figure in red steps back from the headlights into the shadows. I think of the Willow Street gunman, but Mullen glances over and says immediately, "cigarette break." In a few yards we overtake the person, a student in a red sweater, who is leaning against the building, smoking. Mullen looks away, parking the car. Inside the Div School we wind up stairways, through rooms and leaky hallways. Mullen greets several people by name before progressing into the courtyard. With no crises uncovered, we return to the car and head back down Prospect.

Busted!
We are just off Whitney Avenue at 9:44 when the radio dispatcher calls Mullen's number, among others. Researchers at Kline Chemistry Lab had called the police after confronting two suspected burglars in the building, one of whom carried a knife. They had been seen near a computer room where some Zip drives were found in a plastic bag on the floor. A detailed description of the two suspects follows, including their team baseball jackets and facial characteristics. Mullen is speeding up the Edwards Street hill to Prospect.

We pull into KCL just as another police car arrives. The officers enter the building. They have been gone for only a few minutes before I hear over the radio that two suspects have been caught at the corner of Sachem and Propect. The officers quickly emerge from the building with two more people, one of whom gets into the back seat of Mullen's cruiser. He is a post-doctoral student, one of the callers who had informed the police of the suspected burglars. The second caller gets into the car in front of us.

We exit onto Prospect Street and drive slowly down the hill. Several police cars are clustered at the corner of Sachem. As we inch by the crowd of cars and officers, Mullen and the officer ahead flash the cars' sidelights on the corner, where two young men are standing, handcuffed. The post-doc student identifies both men as the suspected burglars. Mullen double-parks and goes to the corner to confer with the arresting officers, Skip Klotsche, Jack Nettleton, and Elias Roman.

After some minutes I learn that Mullen must remain at the scene, so my tour has ended. On the way back to Park Street, past Woolsey Hall and the Crown Street bars, one of Mullen's comments about police work comes to mind: You see a little bit of everything in humanity.

In addition to the knife seen by witnesses, the burglary suspects were carrying burglary tools, drug paraphernalia, and crack cocaine. One suspect gave the arresting officers a false name, but was later positively identified and found to have four previous warrants for his arrest. Both suspects will be charged with burglary-3, a class D felony. Investigators are conducting fingerprint tests to determine whether the suspects were involved in any other recent burglaries in the area.