The police dispatcher relayed some worrisome news over the radio: Gunshots were fired on the 1900 block of Dempster Street.
Sitting in his squad car a few blocks east on Asbury Avenue, Evanston Police Department Officer Jeff Slabas, 23, dropped the report he was working on and drove to the scene.
It was early Saturday morning and still dark as Slabas drove up to the shopping strip where the shots were reported. A few laughing teenage girls ran across Dempster in front of his car.
Slabas pulled into the KFC parking lot. He walked around with a flashlight and drove through the plaza across the street but found nothing out of the ordinary.
“I think this was a hoax,” Slabas said.
False alarms account for about half of the calls he responds to, he said.
Slabas works the midnight shift, and although he is assigned to cover the downtown area, he spends much of his time in outer neighborhoods of the city. As he drove down Sherman Avenue, he noted how little there is for police to do there during the night.
“Underage drinking doesn’t bother me until everyone starts fighting outside The Keg,” Slabas said. “That hasn’t been happening much this year.”
Soon after he said that, at about 1:15 a.m., the dispatcher came through with a report of a drunk Northwestern student who left Bar Louie and got lost. She called her friends and told them she was near a RE/MAX sign.
Slabas drove around downtown looking for her until the dispatcher told him University Police found her and brought her back to her dorm.
“That’s not good, when you drink that much,” he said. “Not at all.”
Hunting for fictional bullets and drunk women is not all that kept Slabas busy during his shift. A traffic accident at Cleveland Street and Barton Avenue, in south Evanston, led to a stabbing. When Slabas arrived at the crash site, other officers were already there.
Slabas searched the neighborhood for a blue Honda that was seen leaving the crash, but he did not find it. Witnesses did not see in what direction the Honda fled, he said.
Slabas was then dispatched to Lee Street, where a woman was said to have locked herself in her bathroom with a knife. Her worried husband called police, Slabas said.
“Crazy night,” he said. “We’ve had somebody stabbed, we’ve got another person with a knife.”
The craziness continued as Slabas drove west to Grey Avenue. A woman was lying in a car, and neighbors said she appeared unconscious.
“She was fine,” Slabas said after he left the scene. “She just fell asleep.”
Slabas has only been on the force for a year and a half. He said he became a policeman because he didn’t want a “desk job.”
“I figured I’d give it a shot,” he said. “I watched too many police shows when I was a kid.”
Being a police officer is the ultimate in multitasking, he said. While speeding down poorly lighted streets and running red lights, Slabas talked on the radio and typed victims’ names on his computer.
“The hardest part is talking on the radio when you’re at a traffic stop and people are screaming and acting the fool,” he said.
By the time he returned the police station for a short break at 2 a.m., Slabas had reported a handful of incidents, both real and imagined, but he hadn’t arrested anyone. He would stay on the shift until 6:30 a.m., his third day of work in a row.
“I haven’t had a lot of sleep in the last couple days,” he said. “I’ve been working too much.”
Reach Greg Hafkin at [email protected].
