November 5: We weren't expecting the SWAT team today

Snoop Dogg

Melvin says the drug dealer 3 houses north of me -- we call him Snoop Dogg because Rock Dad thinks he looks like Snoop Dogg. I lean more toward Huggy Bear myself, if Huggy Bear had worn braids -- anyway, Huggy Snoop hates to see police cruisers on our street. He always thinks they're coming after him. We see cruisers on our block fairly regularly, at least a couple of times a month. And those are the ones I see, so I assume it could happen more often. In any case, the drug dealer must be just a little paranoid. (I introduced him last year in this Tiny Spoons post.)

Huggy Bear

Turns out he should have had an escape plan.

 I was unloading groceries from the back of my van late this afternoon. I had a half dozen plastic bags in one hand (Kroger was out of paper; don't judge), and I had set a box of glass storage containers on the curb so I could shut the hatch. As I bent over and reached for the box, I heard "This is the police! Open the door! Open the door! Open the door!"

I looked up to see a dozen helmeted and masked police officers, guns out, shields raised, on Snoop Dogg's porch.

Before I could straighten up, they started bashing his door in with a battering ram. It shattered with a crash, and they rushed into the house.

By then I'd figured out the street was the wrong place to be when the SWAT team is raiding the neighbor's house, so I ducked back behind my van. It seemed a lot safer than the stretch of sidewalk and steps between me and my house.

Two officers stayed in the front yard. One was a woman who repeated over and over through a bullhorn, "This is the police department! Open your door! This is the police department! Open your door!"
  

What Snoop saw when he looked up from bagging crack rocks on his coffee table and realized it really was his turn to host the local police department.

I'm not sure what she was looking at, but from where I stood peeking around the back of my van, I could see the fucking door was a pile of splinters. I don't think they even opened the screen door before they went through.

I waited behind my van until the bullhorn stopped blaring. I decided if Snoopy was going to make a run for it in a blaze of gunfire, he would already have made his move. Right? What the fuck do I know about drug dealers and SWAT teams? My only concern 30 seconds earlier was getting all my groceries in one trip.

Finally I made a run for my house. No, I'm not fucking kidding. I ran. Now that may have been stupid given there were lots of men with big guns down there who might be suspicious of a runner on the street, but I figured a middle-aged, redheaded white woman carrying Kroger bags with celery sticking out and a box of Corningware probably wasn't going to attract a lot of attention. Stray bullets, on the other hand, might catch me out there, and I'm not ready to die.

I won't lie (this is a phrase used often in my neighborhood). I was shaking when I got inside my house. I'm not sure how all those cops got up on that porch in the time it took me to stick my head in the back of the van and get out my groceries, but they fucking appeared out of nowhere. Not a cruiser in sight. And they were seriously scary.

I rushed to the kitchen to unload my hands, and headed straight for my living room window, where I could see everything going on.

Shit happened.  A couple of vans pulled up, and a woman dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans in a little SUV who seemed to be a police officer too. A guy in a sweater and jeans came from around the corner with a long, silver pole. He went inside with it and a few minutes later two of the cops came out with Snoop's big, old rottweiler trapped in the loop on the end. When they stopped on the porch, the rottie laid down. He's pretty decrepit. Not really what you'd expect from a drug dealer, but then again, neither was the pitbull named Grandma he had when I first moved in here.

Drug dealers aren't all that generic as it turns out.

After about 10 minutes of going in and out, looking at clipboards and putting on yellow rubber gloves, they brought Snoop Dogg out with his hands cuffed behind his back and made him kneel down on the concrete porch. He stayed there for a good 20 minutes.

The guy in the sweater talked to him, but I couldn't hear what they said. I was kicking myself for closing my storm windows when the weather got colder. No way I could open them without being noticed. And I sure as hell didn't want Snoopy to think I was in any way involved.

While Snoop was on his knees, a large young black man walked around the corner across the street from Snoop's house. He stopped and yelled something at the house, and kind of milled around on the sidewalk. Then I saw him step into the street and start taking photos on his phone.

After he finished, he started making calls. The cops yelled at him to go away. He argued and said he could stand there on that sidewalk if he wanted to. Something about the guns in the cops' hands might have persuaded him to move on.

Eventually a cruiser pulled up and the officers took Snoopy over there. By that time, his loud, obnoxious girlfriend had arrived in her Cadillac SUV. She wasn't being so loud for once. That woman can yell the same thing over and over and over again for hours,and the bitch doesn't even need a bullhorn.

 One time she yelled, "See what you did? See what you did? See what you did, nigger?" for 3 solid hours. The man can take some abuse. (I wrote about another of her tirades here.)

Before they put Snoop in the cruiser, one of the cops patted him down and searched his pockets. His pants were so baggy and low the cop was searching behind his knees, and he's a pretty tall guy. After he finished, another cop did the same thing. Neither of them were wearing gloves.

He probably looks more like this today

I'm not going to lie, I had to laugh as I watched Snoop Dogg trying to pull his pants back up with handcuffs on his wrists. They were so low, he could barely reach them, and then he could only grab them in the middle. That could all have been prevented if he'd just put on a belt though. That's on him.

I was surprised how calm everybody was. Snoop Dogg obviously had been taken by surprise, and he seems to be a pretty mellow guy anyway. Mellow like he uses too much of his own product. Or maybe that girlfriend has just beaten him down with her yelling and poking him in the chest with her finger. She must keep him up all night and I don't mean in a good way.

 But even the girlfriend was being all calm and reasonable while she was talking to the police.

 The poor rottie was taken away in a dog catcher's truck.

Melvin told me somebody bought the drug dealer's house for $3000 a couple of months ago. It's a big house, but I don't know condition it's in. Still, $3000 for a house. That's a deal. I told Melvin if I'd known I could buy that house for $3000, I would have bought it just so I could get rid of that fucking loud-mouthed girlfriend.

We speculated Snoop Huggy Dogg Bear might be evicted soon, now the somebody new owns the house. We just didn't expect it would take the SWAT team to do it.