Q&A: Old Town Cop Talks About Working Friday and Saturday Nights
Sergeant Kyle Bendzsa of the Fort Collins Police said one of his favorite quotes from a coworker was this: “To work downtown, you have to have no ego, or you have to be able to put your ego aside.”
A former Marine, Bendzsa worked his way up to become the Sergeant and therefore manager of the seven other officers who work the late shift in Old Town.
Bendzsa sat down this week in his office in Old Town, off of Mason and Laporte, to talk about what it’s like to be in charge of keeping Old Town safe on weekends.
Trujillo: Do you drink out ever? Do you have a favorite bar?
Bendzsa: I hardly ever drink out. If I do drink out it’s absolutely not at a bar. I’m old and I have kids so I usually have a drink with dinner.
Trujillo: Did you back in the days when you were at CSU ever go out and drink?
Bendzsa: Back in those days, “Washingtons” was big. Back when it wasn’t a concert venue but just a bar. The one right across the street over here. That used to be a big bar. I’ve been to “Lucky Joes” a couple times.
My young years, my drinking years, I was in the Marine Corps. By the time I got to CSU I was a non-traditional student, so I was married, lived in a house, had a job, and was a full-time student.
Trujillo: So what bars do you usually see issues outside of?
Bendzsa: it’s all based on capacity. The busy (bars) are the ones we’re going to go to, and that can fluctuate. The busy ones are “Rec Room,” “Bondi Beach Bar,” “Tony’s,” “The Aggie” when they have shows sometimes, depending on the shows. And then “Drunken Monkey.”
If you look at their capacity, their occupancy level that they’re allowed to have by the fire department- which correlates directly to the number of people they’re allowed to have in, and problems, typically. Every once in a while, activity at a bar can be driven by marketing or the type or music or the type of act that comes, and any issues that act might bring.
So if you’ve got, the new “Wash bar” has very high-brow acts that come in that people my age or even older might be interested in watching. Versus country music or, you know, hip hop, rock and roll that might attract a younger crowd, who might make poorer decisions or might not handle alcohol as well.
Trujillo: You said something about capacity, so do you think that general belligerence has more to do with capacity?
Bendzsa: It’s a probability factor. If you have 600 people, what’s the probability you’re going to have one bad actor versus 50 people in that bar? Also, smaller hole-in-the-wall bars probably have a specific clientele so a lot of people who go there know each other, so there’s less conflict.
In another bar, you might have every Friday and Saturday- depending on what music is playing and whether college is out for the summer or Spring Break or Christmas and it’s a different crowd and nobody knows anybody. There’s less discretion with how you treat people versus a tight bar like “Town Pump” which is very small, hole-in-the-wall. People who go there might know each other and it’s more of a community. I think it has more to do with the probability and anonymity inside the bar and lack of community of the bar.
Trujillo: So places like that, you’re talking about “the Artery” and “Surfside 7” and some of the bars off of Linden Street.
Bendzsa: For sure, yeah, but they also have lower attendance, not capacity, because they could probably put more people there, but people just go there in less numbers.
Trujillo: Could you talk a little bit about Uber, how influential it’s been?
Bendzsa: So when I was down here [during the time between becoming an officer and becoming the Sergeant of this unit] there was no Uber or Lyft, it wasn’t a thing. It’s a pretty recent business model/technology.
One of the big problems we have, especially when it’s warm, but you’d be surprised that even when it’s cold out, but people don’t want to go home. They leave the bars and they stand around outside the bars in the cold and they want to continue socializing, and that leads to all kinds of problems. Because that’s probably the peak of everyone’s level of intoxication and if there’s any issues going on with anyone in the crowd, it’s just going to get worse if people don’t go home.
One of the problems we used to have was just getting people to leave and if they didn’t plan well or whatever they’re not going to have a ride and we had limited cabs. The cab company was small and they didn’t have the capacity and definitely the technology of having an app versus the phone call makes it easier.
We ended up working with Transfort and CSU and RamRide and all of these things to try to bring in resources to get people out.
And since I’ve been back, (Lyft and Uber are) obviously a thing and it’s been really big.
Uber and Lyft has been instrumental in a free market way versus the police department trying to organize and throw out ideas to people and say “yeah we have a problem, who wants to come help?” The free market did it by itself, which is great.
Trujillo: Speaking of people getting picked up, do you have a lot of people driving home drunk or are you stopping people from getting in cars and that kind of stuff?
Bendzsa: We do a lot of- and more than stopping people from driving drunk, because if you’re drunk and you’re going to drive, the last thing you’re going to do is be anywhere near me, so they’re usually pretty hard. And we’re usually busy with the bar disturbance stuff.
So if you walk to your car parked on a dark street or a parking garage and leave, the probability is that there’s not going to be a cop there to see that, because Friday, Saturday nights are really busy.
What we do a lot more of is if we see a guy carrying a girl that’s highly intoxicated to a car, we’ll always intervene and make sure there’s a known relationship there so that we don’t have a suspect taking a drunk female home. She doesn’t know who he is. She’s not able to make decisions or even aware of her situation, make sure that there’s some type of relationship there: friend, family, boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever. We’ll offer help, to maybe call an ambulance to check on them.
As far as DUI’s, this unit down here is usually walking. When it’s cold or when circumstances dictate it, we will drive a lot from bar to bar because it just speeds things up, you know? If you’re at the south end of old town and you have a fight at the north end, it’s just quicker, but a lot of times we’re walking, so making a traffic stop is possible on foot, but not really probable.
Trujillo: Do you deal with confrontational people a lot? And how so?
Bendzsa: Yes, you probably have gone to plenty of bars in your life and you know how people change when they drink.
Trujillo: Yes I do.
Bendzsa: Everybody kind of has a little bit of a different reaction to it but there’s aggressive drunks or whatever. Maybe there’s people just having bad days, so for sure.
Whatever their personality type is, you add the alcohol and you’re starting to have problems. There’s also the young alcohol-fueled drama that happens down here. Where “you’re talking to my girlfriend” or “I like that girl and you like that guy.” Whatever is going on, that dynamic is going on with young people and there’s people that are using fake ID’s to get into bars.
Any of those things can cause, and when we get inserted into that situation where there’s an ID check at the bars and we go to check and the person doesn’t want to get in trouble for it so they may try to grab their ID and run or most people will just sit there and “yeah it’s fake.” They take their ticket or whatever and go away, but you know there’s just that certain segment of society who isn’t going to comply no matter what you do, right?
And that’s the people we run into down here and going back to the probability situation is you have all of these liquor-licensed establishments down here on Friday and Saturday night. You got a college in town, plus you got everybody that’s not in college that might want to come down and grab a drink, or they’re from Cheyenne or Greeley, Denver, whatever and are here for a concert.
You put all of those people together and now your probability of one of those people out of a thousand or a hundred or however many you have down there, now all of the sudden, your probability is higher and you add the alcohol.
So yeah, we deal with a lot of verbally uncooperative people, for sure, and a lot of times the bars will kick somebody out because they’re visibly intoxicated, which they have to by their liquor license- because if I walked through a bar and saw somebody slumped over a bar stool, passed out drunk, that could be a violation on the bar. It could make them close down, lose money, revenue, they could even lose their liquor license depending on how many problems they’ve had, regarding their license.
So they’ll tap people on the shoulder and say “hey you need to leave.” And you can imagine that if we’re together and I’m too drunk and they ask me to leave, and I don’t want to leave yet, and they are saying “but you have to,” that could end up being a physical altercation.
So then we get there and they’re already fighting with bar staff or whatever. We deal with a lot of that stuff, the verbal stuff as well, it’s mos-all verbal as well, for sure, but then there’s that certain percentage of people that think it’s a good idea to fight one way or another. Whether it’s resistive in trying to get away or pull away, or actively fighting with the police, which is thankfully very rare.
I’m too old to be fighting with too many people, right? I want to go home, right? I have to be here tomorrow night. I can’t fight every night. My body just won’t handle it. Luckily it’s very rare.
Trujillo: So how do you deal with those situations, the verbal and physical ones? What’s your protocol for it?
Bendzsa: Ninety-percent of it, you flat out ignore it.
Trujillo: Stone-faced?
Bendzsa: Stone-faced, ignore it, push through. Every once in a while, quite honestly, if somebody’s cursing at a cop, you’re probably not going to talk them out of it. You’re going to say “Hey, you’re being disrespectful. We’re not treating you that way. There’s no reason to be cursing. We’re going to get you out of here with a ticket. You are going to get a ticket, but you’re not going to jail.” That’s usually the spiel.
The jail won’t take 99-percent of the stuff we have down here. The only way they’ll take a “ground-ball” thing is a person too drunk to be in a bar, refuses to leave, has to be physically removed by staff and fights with staff. We usually have a trespass because they wouldn’t leave a private business. We have usually a harassment or disorderly conduct because they pushed or argued with staff. Every once in a while, it’s a third-degree assault because they may punch staff or staff may actually have an injury.
But typically a lot of that stuff, even a third-degree assault, we write a ticket and allow them to go home for the night, for a lot of reasons. Back in the day, you roll up on somebody peeing on the side of a building and they could go to jail for peeing on a building.
Now, a third-degree assault we can’t even take them to jail, unless we call up the jail and say “hey, this person is dangerous. They’re either going to hurt somebody or if we take him out of handcuffs, we’re in danger, and then they’re in danger because we have to use force to defend ourselves. They’re just so out of control of themselves that, we got them in handcuffs, and the only place safe to take them out of handcuffs is in a controlled environment.
We sometimes try to take them down here to the office, sit them in our little mini-detention room and just let them lose steam and calm down, also to get them out of the environment and away from their friends.
There may be something there driving them. Maybe it’s being tough for their friends or being cool for a girl, or just being cool for the crowd. They don’t want to lose face for the crowd. Who knows what it is, right?
It’s really tough in those scenarios, if we could pinpoint “it” we would counteract it with whatever, right? But it’s human interaction. Humans are a great variable. You just can’t sometimes know what to do to get them to cooperate, which is why we wear all of this stuff, right? Otherwise we wouldn’t need it. It’s definitely one of the greatest challenges.
One of the quotes- it’s not my quote, but somebody said, which is true- “to work downtown, you have to have no ego, or you have to be able to put your ego aside.”
Because if somebody says something to you and you have a chip on your shoulder and it starts talking about “Hey, maybe I’ll say something back.” And then you’re just taking it up a notch, and that’s not our goal.
Our goal ultimately is public safety so it doesn’t matter whether or not I get personally offended because somebody says they want to find out where I live and hurt my family, because that’s an example of extreme things people will say: “I’ll find out where you live and I’m going to hurt your family.” They could, it’s true, but I’m probably not going to talk that person out of that line of thought, so it’s just that stoic, stone-faced, very professional, “Here’s your ticket. Here’s your court date. Have a nice night.”
We have a guy the other night who we cited, he said he was cold. We walked him inside the bar to keep him warmer, because it was really cold. Staff had held him on the ground, he had snow on his legs, so it was legit. He was cold. I was cold, so I’m all good taking him inside to keep him warm, because it will keep us warm. Took him inside, kept him warm. He found out he was getting a ticket, started cursing at us, started calling us names. He started spitting on the floor in the establishment. We cut him his ticket, got him out of handcuffs, and as he’s walking away, he turned around and pantomimed like he had a gun in his hand. He went “pop, pop” at us.
Trujillo: WOW.
Bendzsa: So he’s simulating shooting a gun at us, which, is probably bravado, right? But it’s an example of no matter how well you treat somebody, no matter how much you meet anyone’s expectations of treating somebody, it’s still the great variable, which is the person. It’s their decision. We always like to say in cop work, “at the end of the day, the suspect always gets a say.”
Trujillo: So you mentioned earlier all the gear you have. Could you give me a little rundown?
Bendzsa: Sure. Obviously, we carry a handgun with two full-loaded magazines for reloading, a taser, pepper spray and then a baton. This is a wooden baton, some of the officers carry an expandable baton, and some carry both.
Trujillo: How often do you use all that?
Bendzsa: I’ve never used this (the handgun), never used this- these are new for us though, the taser- and pepper spray is the most common one. It has a lot of benefits and a lot of negatives. All of them have negatives.
Trujillo: Pepper spray hurts.
Bendzsa: It hurts, it smells, it marks people.
One time, one of my partners who no longer works down here was first on scene of a fight, in that alleyway near Tony’s. Big fight, he couldn’t handle everybody.
Pepper spraying stops a large crowd from fighting. When walking into the crowd as one person, you could pick one person and maybe you win that, get that person in handcuffs, but you can’t control anyone else and you also can’t defend yourself because you’re focused on that one person.
Pepper spray ends a lot of stuff. He sprayed the group and as I was walking into the area, I smelled oranges, which is what (pepper spray) smells like and as I smelled that, I’m listening on the radio and he’s giving a description. I look and the guy that matches that description is walking by me and he smells like pepper spray so I was able to detain him, and bring him back for the investigation.
So (pepper spray) is good for marking people for investigation, like “why do you have pepper spray if you weren’t in the fight?” There’s still investigation to be done there. It doesn’t mean anything. You could be randomly standing by a fight and catch a little.
We get it. I’ve been pepper sprayed during a fight before. I heard on the radio one time, “the suspect has pepper spray” and it was one of the officers that was involved in the fight. It wasn’t downtown. It was somewhere else, but I thought, “that’s weird, how did the suspect get pepper spray?” And about that time I got sprayed right across the eyes with pepper spray. He had gotten it off of one of the officers’ belts during a fight.
The baton, used it several times. Same thing, positives and negatives.
Trujillo: So last thing. What advice would you have for people going out?
Bendzsa: Typical old guy giving a young guy advice or old guy giving young gal advice: go out with your friends. Don’t drink to excess, to where you can’t make good decisions. If you have a problem with somebody, walk away, you know, be an adult. Have a plan to get home safely. Those would be the four primary things I would say.
