Art of the Moniker

Maybe it's a goofy thing to get excited about, but when I saw the Cap Times headline today that read, "Parka Bandit Hits Again," I let out a whoop, then nearly fell out of my chair in a fit of maniacal chuckling.

No, I was not delighted at the news that some low life had held up his sixth, seventh or even eighth convenience store in a week. And no, I am not in fact, as some have suggested, moonlighting on the side as the Parka Bandit myself, though in my darker, broker hours... Well, we'll just leave it at that.

But I was excited to see the Parka Bandit in the headlines because I coined the term "Parka Bandit" on-air in the middle of last week when I first found out some goon was knocking over gas stations with a black coat's hood cinched down tight over his face. Police spokesman Joel Despain heard it and loved it and ran with it in one of his press releases, and Channel 3 and the Cap Times took it from there.

I had no idea the term would end up being this persistent, but with every store the Parka Bandit hits, it becomes more clear a term is needed to refer to this thug, and I'm pleased mine made the cut.

Again, it seems like a silly thing to get excited over, but I feel like I've achieved some legitimate accomplishment, some rite of passage.

Before I go on, it sounds like this slimeball hit a convenience store again tonight, though a little earlier than he usually strikes. It's the same MO all up and down, though. The suspect walks into a gas station in a black coat, his face covered by the hood, and makes to order a pack of smokes. When he has the clerk's attention, he flashes his piece, they throw money on the counter and he walks away.

It isn't brain surgery. It isn't rocket science. In fact, it's so simple-minded and myopic that this guy has all but guaranteed he's going to be caught eventually. Let's face it. All it would take is an enterprising bystander who realizes that hood cinched down so tight really limits this guy's peripheral vision to bash him over the head with a heavy jar of salsa, and the Parka Bandit's reign of terror would be over.

I've talked to a few police officials about the case, and they all say the same thing: he's not the brightest crayon in the box, and he's probably trying to feed some kind of drug habit.

That's part of the reason I felt coining a moniker for the Parka Bandit was appropriate. Right now, this guy thinks he's walking away with easy money, night in and night out, and he thinks he's pretty tough getting it with a handgun. Others could see his example, and in their own simple, short-sighted ways think they've found a great way to earn a few bucks themselves.

In the long-term, the Parka Bandit will be caught, and he will be locked up in jail for a very long time. But until that happens, we as a society need to make it clear that the bandit's behavior is simply unacceptable. It will not be tolerated. While jail time will make an example of the Parka Bandit eventually, until then he deserves every ounce of our collective derision, accumulated disdain and outright mockery.

Potential copycats need to see that there is nothing glamorous about being a two-bit thug with a handgun, a goofy disguise and delusions of grandeur. Who knows? The Parka Bandit may be a victim of his own circumstances, stealing money to pay off a dangerous debtor or fund his own sick mom's cancer treatment, but he lost any claim for sympathy when he carried a firearm into public and used it to endanger the lives of his fellow Madisonians.

Because as easy as he is to mock, the Parka Bandit and his ilk are two things above all else: dangerous menaces and timebombs waiting to go off. Every time I see a press release come down the pipe about this guy, I hold my breath and hope this wasn't the time the clerk wasn't quick enough with the cash for his liking.

While 95 percent of this sleeze only carries a weapon for show and would never actually use it on an innocent, there's always that dangerous element that's too drugged up or too disconnected from reality or just too nasty to let something like decency stop them from crossing that final line.

Helluva Bender

When an official with the Middleton Police Department told me it was going to be a while before they knew more details about a string of arsons because the suspects were "still sobering up" at ten in the morning, I knew it was going to be a good story.

Of course, that was more than a week ago on February 13, and as the tale of 23-year-old Christopher Ripp and 19-year-old Collin Tubbs's (alleged) bender has emerged since, I've been proved more right with each detail.

A wise, albeit fictional, man once said, "If you can't do something smart, do something right." While there's certainly nothing intelligent (or admirable, for that matter) about what these two braniacs did, when it comes to history's great nights of mayhem, their (alleged) actions in the wee hours of February 13, 2009 certainly deserve a page in the book.

Of course, Ripp and Tubbs are presumed innocent until they stand trial for their actions, but here's the story as I've been able to piece it together, mostly through conversations with the Middleton Police Department.

It was Thirsty Thursday, and Ripp and Tubbs were throwing a few back at a house party in Middleton. We may never know what started it, and frankly it doesn't matter, but in the course of their carousing, a brawl erupted with some other partiers, words were exchanged, fists were thrown, and feelings were hurt.

After a brief breather, the fighters decided to "take it outside," where the perceived insult became so egregious as to necessitate the introduction of knifeplay into the fray. But stabbing one of the other brawling parties in the hand was only the beginning for Ripp and Tubbs, who then jumped into their car and went tearing through the sleepy, residential streets of Middleton exchanging gunfire with other cars full of window-lickers.

It's no small miracle an innocent bystander wasn't wounded in the ensuing firefight, although I'm sure a few of Middleton's citizenry found perforated mailboxes, garage doors and lawn ornaments the next morning.

After some time, cops say the chase ended without blood, and Ripp and Tubbs returned to their home. That's where a normal night of mayhem might have ended, as they staggered into the living room and passed out cold, only to awake the next morning with Jaeger on their breath, bulletholes in their car and no idea what connection there was between the two.

But what set Ripp and Tubbs apart from your average drunken losers was the decision they made next. Apparently none-too-thrilled with the new "speed holes" in their automobile, they took to the streets again with a gas can, delusions of revenge and not a thread of common sense or decency.

They threw a burning propane cylinder through the window of a house in Middleton, where a guy who had spent the night trying to mediate between the warring parties resides with his wife, who's eight months pregnant. To get back at one of the guys they were fighting, they set fire to a five-unit apartment building in Madison, where four other people with no involvement whatsoever lived. For their coup de grace, they tried to get back at another one of the brawlers by torching the outside of a house in Cross Plains.

Right block, wrong house. I don't envy the family that woke up in the dead of night with no idea why their house was on fire.

All tuckered out, Ripp and Tubbs returned home to sleep the sleep of angels... that is, until they awoke at 7:30 in the morning to find Middleton Police poking around the bullet-riddled car they'd left parked in plain view on the street.

Still drunk, they went charging out the front door yelling at the police, who were in the process of impounding the vehicle as evidence. You have to credit the officers on scene for being able to catch the scent of gasoline on Tubbs and Ripp over the booze they must have reeked of.

If anything, we should be grateful these two menaces made themselves so easy to catch. They've been banged up in the Dane County jail since the thirteenth, and the DA's office is weighing a laundry list of 32 charges against them that include arson and attempted murder.

Personally, I hope they're charged too with Mayhem, which actually is an imprisonable, if vague, offense in Wisconsin, for no other reason than the morning of the thirteenth is a definition of the term worthy of Webster's.

I've also got some healthy respect for Tubbs's dad, Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs, for leaving his no-good kid to rot in jail this long. Bail was set at 40-grand in cash, and while I'm sure posting it or making other arrangements to get the punk out of lockup are not outside Chief Tubbs's means, it doesn't sound like he's made any effort.

The scope of this little crime spree goes well beyond the realm of poor choices and crosses the line of recklessly endangering innocent lives. If Christopher Ripp and Collin Tubbs are ever to become productive members of society, it's tough love that's going to do the job -- the kind of tough love that drops like a hammer.

Theirs is the behavior of dangerous children with no connection to the reality they live in, only a simplistic perception of themselves as the stars in their own private television crime drama.

The Crazies Come Out

Okay, I resent being right about that heat making people crazy thing within 15 hours of writing it. Right now the forecast calls for the temperature to peak out on Sunday, but we've already got nutters like David Floyd coming out of the woodwork trying to blow things up on Capitol Square or scare the bajesus out of people or whatever he was trying to accomplish. I hate to think what this weekend will bring.

But as busy as the alleged bomberman kept us today, I would still rather touch on the meeting between the Madison press corps and the Madison Police that took place this morning. Given the mood of late, I was expecting something akin to a Conference of the Five Families. Eerily, 911 Center Director Joe Norwick could easily have gassed the studio the gathering took place in and eliminated a hearty majority of his critics among the police and press.

Instead, I was reminded more of a massive, gloves off counselling session between a married couple that hasn't spoken in months. Even though there was a neatly-typed agenda outlining a variety of topics, both sides leapt straight for the throat and spent the entire two hour session griping on the crux of the relationship problem: communication.

There were certainly some heated exchanges between the press and the police that would have made any marriage counsellor wince. Overall, I felt just facilitating the face to face communication was a huge positive step toward bridging the gulf that's developed between this side and that side of the thin blue line. But we're certainly a long way away from the crazy make-up sex that follows the resolution of any serious conflict.

Uh... that last part was purely in keeping with the metaphor...

There was little consensus reached, but at least we're talking. The press still maintains the police are playing their hands too close to the vest. The police maintain the constraints of convicting the perpetrators of these crimes are such that the fact lockdown is appropriate. The old tug-of-war between full disclosure and utter information blackout will probably go on forever, when the optimum solution always lies somewhere elusive in the middle.

It's gone all the way up to this point, but the problem now is it's become too impersonal. Until today, I could only put faces to a few of the names on the force I read and write about every day. In today's Modern American Mediascape (***see footnote***), being competitive means every passing minute is another deadline, and that doesn't leave a lot of time to sit down over a coffee or a brew and catch up. That doesn't leave time for personal understanding. That doesn't leave time for trust.

So the police don't trust the press enough to share more details about these sensitive crimes, and the press don't trust the police when they say the information they're squelching is for the good of the investigation.

And as I pointed out during the meeting today, that negativity is bad for all of us. Being a police detective, a reporter or any kind of public servant is a thankless job. 95% of the time, if you're in the spotlight, it's because you screwed up in a major way.

And yes, I lump reporters in with public servants. Trust me when I tell you I could be making a lot more money in another, less stressful line of work.

The due credit, the kind the public owes the police for their hard work solving the Joel Marino homicide, gets lost in the darkness. And for every time some loose-lipped jackass of a reporter violates someone's trust -- police officer, victim or otherwise -- there are a thousand instances when a journalist's conscience outweighed the potential for self-gain.

I don't have the answers, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to try and figure them out with the Madison Police. Everybody involved probably needs to adjust their expectations and learn to communicate a little better, but that's needed in any dysfunctional relationship. And that's what I hope to see happen if we're able to meet regularly with the police.



(***I would just like to make it known that I am claiming the term "Modern American Mediascape" as my own. I coined it, and I'm staking my claim, damnit. I used the term extensively on "Slightly Off Kilter," the radio show I hosted from 2005 to 2007 on Madison's Student Radio Station, 91.7 FM WSUM, as a means of describing the increasingly convoluted and polluted excuse for discourse bred by sweeping media deregulation and the massive corporate ownership it spawned, as well as the growth of the 24-hour news cycle and the decline of the American attention span. I consulted the Google Gods, and it looks like I was the first. Having dibs on the term may seem petty now, but it'll come in handy some day when I'm publishing a book on what the hell happened to our country... if we still have books, that is.***)

The Quick Fix

It's hot. And it's going to get hotter.

This week is going to be the kind of hot that pulp fiction writers open their stories with. The kind of hot that settles in over the late summer darkness, and can only be cut through by a police siren. The kind of hot that simmers tempers, boils away consciences and melts perspective to its warping point.

It's a little bizarre, because as I was percolating that introduction, the part about a siren, all of the sudden I heard a siren come screaming down my street. The ambulance ended up parking right next to my house.

At any rate, it's the kind of hot that makes people crazy, and that means my work week stands to get a little more interesting. But before that happens and I have to get all serious, let's take a moment to celebrate someone who was crazy of his own right before the heat set in.

By now, I'm sure most of Wisconsin has heard of Keith Walendowski. If not, let me assure you this man is worthy of your hero worship. Someday, amid the annals of battle cry history, Walendowski's inspiring words will ring as true as any ever shouted in the heated throes of battle. "Viva la republic!" and "Remember the Alamo!" and "Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!" all pale in comparison to "It's my lawn mower and it's my yard so I can shoot it if I want!"

If you're one of the few who hasn't heard the story yet, I'll try and summarize. There's really not much to it. Walendowski was out in his backyard, like any good hard working Sconnie, trying to get some yard work done. And when his lawn tractor wouldn't start, he did the logical thing.

He went into his house, grabbed his illegal sawed off 12-gauge shotgun and blasted the holy hell out of the belligerent piece of equipment. And from the sound of it ("It's my lawn mower and it's my yard so I can shoot it if I want!"), Walendowski would do it again, too, if given the chance.

Oh, sure, you'll have buzzkills like Walendowski's neighbor, who called the police on account of one little, teensy bit of reckless endangerment that runs contrary to everything an educated sportsman or sportswoman learns about firearm safety. A few nervous nellies will point out that the gun he was plunking away at the Lawn Boy with was really illegal under United States law. And there are those who will point out that Walendowski was thoroughly, groin-grabbingly intoxicated at the time of the whole incident, but they're mostly out-of-staters who don't know that Wisconsinites do their yard work drunk 98% of the time.

But I, for one, recognize Walendowski for the true American hero he is. In spite of safety concerns, thumbing his nose at legal issues, leaving sobriety in the dust of common sense and AT THE RISK OF VOIDING HIS WARRANTY, Walendowski had the courage to deal with his problems like one would deal with a pesky gopher in the garden: with a widely scattered hail of white hot buck shot.

And when some schlub with a badge was impertinent enough to suggest Walendowski was out of line, this Modern Day Richard Lionheart uttered the bold words that will inspire me in my darkest moments for years to come: "It's my lawn mower and it's my yard so I can shoot it if I want!"

These are the kinds of problem-solving skills you can't teach in any school. Sure, blasting the lawnmower did nothing to better his situation, and actually landed him in a significantly worse one. But, damnit, it was loud and fiery and satisfying and, above all, really damn COOL.

This man doesn't belong behind bars. We need to appoint him the head of a task force to address partisan gridlock, an ailing social security system or a deeply troubling growing national debt.

...

Actually, with a 482-billion dollar deficit forecast for the United States' books this year on account of a "National Stimulus Package" that spurred little more than the sale of Excedrin to thinking people everywhere, maybe we've already appointed a Walendowski to lead our country and we didn't even know it.