What it was like to cover the police beat in South Florida

It was no secret to the Fort Lauderdale police department spokeswoman that I liked odd stories. Quirky, weird - true Florida stories - made my job as a clerk-reporter at the Miami Herald all the more enjoyable.Every morning, I called every police and fire department in the county to find out if anything of interest had happened overnight. One morning, Sonya (I think that's how she spelled it; it's been more than a few years since I last saw her name) told me, "I've got one for you."Did she ever.It all started out very simple, a run-of-the-mill crime story. This guy stopped at the supermarket parking lot the night before to drop off some clothes in the collection bin they had there. Some no-goodnik pulled a gun on him. It was a stickup.Before our victim could react, someone else spoke up from a few yards away in the lot. A Korean War veteran, in his 70s, had pulled out his gun and shouted at the crook to drop his. In the moment of confusion, our original victim, a Vietnam veteran in his 50s, pulled out his gun.Our criminal did what any sane person would have done at that point: He ran like the devil was on his heels.Our story, however, did not end there. He led the police on a chase (someone in the supermarket had, by this time, called the cops), and it all ended in a shootout at a nearby tire store.The name of the store? The O.K. Tire Corral.Sonya was extremely proud of herself for saving that tidbit for the end.Though that's probably my favorite story from years covering the police beat in Broward County, it wasn't the only "only in South Florida" story I covered.There was the Stinky Bandit, a bank robber who'd been tied to multiple robberies because he had really bad body odor. Of course, the story behind the man was sad. All his family had died or deserted him; he was homeless. He'd worked as a mechanic before, and his employers had mostly positive things to say about him.There was Crime Boy, who I think was 11 years old (though maybe he was 12?) and had been arrested something like 65 times already. Fortunately, some in the community recognized there was something else going on here and took him in to try to help him go straight. It's been so many years; I wish I knew what happened to him.My other favorite story started out simply enough.A woman, in her 50s, went to pick up her friend to go to a church function, I think it was a ladies' brunch or something. Her friend, in her 70s, was a bit frail and needed help getting out of her house and into this woman's van. So she left the van door open as she went to the door to help her friend.In that moment, a teen dived into the van, grabbed the woman's purse and took off down the road. She was on a small street, but it was off a main thoroughfare that was in the midst of a major construction project. Traffic was a mess, lanes were closed and cars were bumper to bumper.Our heroine took off after the kid. She was no track runner, but she simply wasn't going to lose her purse. You see, she'd just come from the DMV - Department of Motor Vehicles. Going to the DMV took hours upon hours, and she'd just gotten the new license plates for her car. The thought of having to go through it all again with the DMV, nevermind all her credit cards she'd have to cancel and more, was what spurred her to chase after our young crook.As she got to the main road, the teen was impossibly far ahead of her. She thought all hope was lost.But then something odd happened. A man had gotten out of his pickup truck and the teen had dropped the purse and ran off. The man picked up the purse and waited for the woman to catch up.He handed it to her, nodded his head, and said, "Here's your purse and here's a bullet. I'm outta here."She looked in her hand, and there was a bronze-tipped bullet he'd dropped there. He got in his truck and drove off, as traffic had started to move again in the time all this had transpired.She never found out who he was, that Lone Ranger in the South Florida sun.Photo by niclas via Flickr Creative Commons.