You would be amazed at the criminal element which ran on

Posted on: August 8, 2019 at 19:04:40 CT

Mizzou's campus.

There were active criminals nickel and dime-ing the campus for the most part and some others making a serious attempt to steal whatever wasn't nailed down.

One gang of juveniles who were ALWAYS around committing crimes (they once broke into the manager's room at Hearnes and stole as many bball jerseys (Stipo, Dressler, Sundvold) as they could WEAR--their downfall was it was like trying to run in dresses).

Those same kids are adults now. They were raised by their grandmothers because their moms were never around and dads were long gone. I can still find them in Casenet and see they had a life of mostly petty crimes but one, Charles Anthony, served time in MO DOC.

But a few years ago one of the newspapers ran a story about the serious drug trade in COMO. It was the kids of those same kids who used to steal the campus blind. And they were driving it up a notch and were serious badasses you didn't want to mess with. The article said they had absentee parents and were raised by their grandmothers. The irony, right?

Even working at the park, we served more warrants on weekends than any other agency in Johnson County. It was a result of pro-active patrol. The other thing was running into people on probation who were caught being stupid and that required preparing a Field Interview Form to forward to their probation/parole officer. I once stopped a kid for doing something on a boat dock with friends and realized I'd arrested him for burglary when I worked for a city agency. He was still on probation for the burglary charge.

And as a Training Officer, I taught my trainees to always save their pocket notebooks when they got full. Wrap a rubber band around the pages and toss them in your locker. Had a guy thumbing through an old collection of notes and he'd had Richard Grissom's name & DOB from where he'd stopped him in the park. Richard Grissom was a serial killer who killed 3 women in Johnson County.

And we didn't see a lot of inner city youts in that setting, but we did see a lot of other folks. One highlight was a stripper hanging out of a car who was on parole for armed robbery. "Place of employment" "AB's Lounge" "Um, isn't that a strip joint?" "Why yes, that's exactly what it is!" Now I knew of AB's from it's frequent mentions in the Star as a place for shootings and stabbings. It was a biker hangout and they had frequent disagreements with others.