Posted 19 December 1999

My wife, Jennifer, smokes cigarettes, as does Mitch Brush, my 21 year-old stepson, whom, hereafter, I will refer to as my son.  However, at our house, we have a policy.  “No smoking in the house.”   For the twelve years that Jennifer and I have been together, she has never smoked a single cigarette in the house, and none have been allowed for anyone else, either.

My son is a night owl, tending to late nights, and he found that, as these fall nights worsened into winter, it was better to smoke in the garage than to smoke in the front yard, for it was slightly warmer, partly due to wind resistance.  So, he pulled out his dead Nova, upon which he’d been working, and set up a small den in the garage.  He also pulled electrical out there, using an outdoor extension cord, as well as setting up his car stereo with a 12 volt converter.  In this way, he could listen to music, which sometimes becomes rather loud, and sit in comfort and smoke.

When his friends found the comfort of the garage better for parties, word went around to friends of the friends that this was a party spot.  At that point, my wife and I began to deal with problems which climaxed to the extreme where we flatly put our foot down, for at all hours of the night, people, of whom neither my son nor we had ever met, started showing up here.  I went ballistic when some of them began just walking into the house, unannounced.

It took about three weeks to undo the behaviors of others so that only those in a select group of friends of my son actually come here.  The rest may call first, but if they just show up, the answer is “GO AWAY!”

Now, we have neighbors of whom are strongly religious and their religious beliefs seems to fuel their fertile imaginations, especially since one of their kids is in law enforcement classes at the college.  They have made it clear, in talking with one of their sons, that they do not tolerate tobacco, alcohol, or caffeine drug use.  Apparently, according to the police scanner, the neighbor called in a report on my son as “selling and using hard drugs.”  When I ran into the neighbors at Safeway (a local grocery store), their eyebrows shot up into their head, and, without saying anything, they quickly moved past me with a "what are you still doing in public" expression on their faces, a most unusual behavior for them since they typically are extremely friendly and talkative.  As you can see from my website, I'm deeply involved in psychology.

An off-duty member of the Tri-City Metro Drug Task Force came to see my son this last week (on 16 December 1999, in the late afternoon/early evening); Officer Nash.  He came to this house (I talked to him myself before he talked to Mitch) in his street clothes and his own car. (Male Cauc ~6’ Brown hair, mustache, Blue jacket, White shirt, Brown shoes.)What he told my son was that he, Nash, was going to give money to my son and have my son buy him, the officer, some hard drugs (specifically Methamphetamines).  Nash further said that he was going to pay my son $75 to be an informant. He told my son that he didn’t have enough evidence to prove anything yet, but he will arrest Mitch when he can. After he left, my son promptly tore up Officer Nash’es card, and expounded everything to us, as my wife and I went ballistic, for the implication also means that the police do not believe that Jennifer and I keep control of our own household.

What can I do to make Officer Nash behave?  His conduct on this matter is deceptive.  Yet his motives were clear; entrapment.

The concept of an “Agent Provocateur” is that if you are asked to do something of which is against your grain, by the powers of the government, and are being set up for entrapment, that person of whom is entrapping you is doing so against the ethics of the system.  “It is a terrible, nasty concept for a terrible, nasty thing,” as author John Mortimer wrote in his book, Rumpole of the Bailey.  How true.

After appraising real estate for some thirteen years, I was educated to the fact that if a house has hard drug use in it, the ventilation systems and other passages will have traces of the stuff in the dust particulate matter.  Since I make it a point to know what’s happening in my house, I know damned well the only time I ever found anyone using hard drugs in this house was some years ago when I let my brother-in-law stay here for some time.  His stay abruptly ended when I found “Snow Seals,” small white-and-blue envelopes of about the size of a postage stamp, all over his room.  I was seething with rage on how he'd put my life, family, and freedom in jeopardy, and thus kicked his druggy ass out the door, flushing the remnants down the toilet.

I know what to look to find, partly due to my months of training with the Richland Police Junior Cadet Corps (circa. ~1975).  I have searched the house over, studied Mitch and his room, and find that there is no supporting data; no traces of behavioral shifts in Mitch, no signs of financial gains, no traces of snow seals, or any other signs of hard drug abuse.

Mitch has actually been doing rather well.  He changed his peer group, losing contact with the “hoodlums of the night” crowd (who got their jollies out of adrenaline rushes from breaking the law), to a really nice group of guys and gals, most of whom have steady jobs and are making plans and doing the things we’d hoped Mitch would do.  They come over and play cards and dominoes until all hours of the night.  As it is, Mitch was just hired at Jack in the Box and is working on dreams of moving out in the next year or so, which is a reasonable sign of maturity.

I don’t expect the police to stop checking and seeing if Mitch is behaving or not.  His record spanned a couple years.  However, I never expected to see an officer work so hard as to try to get him to do something dangerous to his life, my life, and felonious for $75.  This is outrageous!

Good cops make Richland a nice place to live.  Now, it seems, Officer Nash, who uses his ego to predicate his actions as a police officer, is destroying the faith I've had in the department.  I believe that this conduct on the part of Officer Nash is unacceptable, and I fully intend to make this known as loud and as public as it seems necessary.  I have found that to open oneself up totally to scrutiny is far safer than to hide and be afraid.  Of course, I can’t hide from bullets.

Officer Nash has a pistol.  I don’t.  There are no firearms on this property.  Just four shotgun shells, which I found while cleaning out a closet, and a crossbow pistol.  If Nash is willing to do this sort of stuff off-duty, I wonder if it is beneath him to plant drugs on the scene or to take other liberties with his role.  Therefore, I will be seeing what I can do to get a restraining order on him, in any capacity, so that he cannot come on this property.  I no longer trust him to be an honest person.

This is the problem.  Nash is not doing the job of police officer as much as he’s playing the role of “Cop.”  The difference lies in that the role player often demands respect, but doesn’t give any.  And most often, the role player doesn’t deserve any either.

Communication and diplomacy are the keys to winning modern battles, but only when the terms of honesty and trust can be achieved.  I fight with the pen, the word processor, and, when necessary, my own voice.   I do not believe that Officer Nash has respect for what he is doing to the department, to my son, or to me.  Therefore, I take this mission very personally.

What's your idea on this?  Please write to me...David Brager

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