Things got a little exciting in the neighborhood the other morning when, shortly before 9 a.m., there was a loud bang outside, which caught the attention of my wife and two granddaughters.
I dismissed it as the prevalent modus operandi of delivery people, who insist on slamming shut sliding doors with so much force it’s like they are trying to send them to China.
Not willing to accept my theory, the wife ran to a window in the living room and discovered a pickup truck resting on my next-door neighbor’s front lawn, having taken out a large bush before coming to a stop.
I rushed out on this brisk December morning, sans coat and wearing only slippers, to find a neighbor from across the street already checking on the driver, who remained sitting behind the wheel with the motor still running, and the driver looking properly dazed.
I pried open the driver’s side door and, as the guy inside shut off the car at the suggestion of the other neighbor, I took stock of his situation.
He wasn’t hurt, he assured. He also didn’t seem to be particularly coherent.
My wife had called 911 and then came out to hand me the cell phone, thereby giving the operator the opportunity to quiz me on several topics, including whether anyone here was suffering from COVID-19. I am not making this up.
Police and medical personal were on the way, I was assured. Neighbor one asked me if I had this under control and went back to his home across the street. Another neighbor wandered over to take his place and we waited.
It eventually came out that the guy who created this mess had slammed into a parked car four houses up and in the process, the pickup truck had shed its driver’s side front wheel and suspension. That missing assembly was still on the pavement, four houses up the street.
The pickup truck next had veered left, scraping one small tree and narrowly avoiding a massive one – oak, I believe – digging up grass in multiple yards and knocking off the neighbor’s bush, which had a trunk about six inches in diameter.
He had gone a long way, maybe 150 feet, after losing the wheel before stopping. No tire skid marks from serious braking were to be found on the neighbor’s concrete driveway. Curious.
We left everything as it was, including the driver sitting in his seat right up until the time when four police cars, from multiple jurisdictions, showed up, along with an ambulance, a fire truck and another emergency response vehicle.
It strikes me that the defund-the-police types should consider things such as this, occurring in a relatively quiet residential borough, when they call for the end of policing as we know it.
If there are no police, who becomes the official source to sort out such a mess? Although I cannot confirm it, I was told by a guy who had been talking with the police that the driver registered well above the cutoff for driving drunk.
The same person who relayed the alcohol result told me that earlier he had helped the guy into his car at a nearby deli, thinking he was ill. When this person went inside to make his purchase, the help there told him the guy was drunk.
Our truck driver did have a submarine sandwich and drink (coffee?) in the cab of his vehicle.
I’m not sure how this witness from the deli made it to the accident scene, about one-half mile away from the store, but I’m speculating he had heard the sirens and curiosity took over. I know he told me he did tell all this to the police – about seeing the guy at the deli, etc.
Since we do have a police force, the neighbor whose car was smashed, and the neighbor whose bush got a fatal trimming, had someone to go to for official accident reports to begin the insurance process.
Because we have police, I’m presuming our driver is going to be held to account for his alleged impaired state, presuming what I was told was accurate and I’d made the correct assessment based on what I’d seen.
With no police, this sort of thing would turn into a free-for-all; vigilante justice at its best.
It’s not just murders, rapes, assaults, robberies and other assorted major crimes that require the police. It’s mundane things like auto accidents, trespassing, petty theft and so many other infractions that take place in society and require a neutral, credentialed third party to resolve.
Instead of defunding the police, let us defund the political activists who curry favor with far-left groups with such outrageous demands, and encounter too many weak-kneed politicians who either are unwilling or unable to resist their insanity.
Sam Ross Jr's site 