Early in my career as a journalist, I was assigned as a “late night police reporter.” I worked for a big daily newspaper that came out in the mornings.

That shift typically was from 3 p.m. to midnight. The newspaper had three staggered editions and the last one – the one that went to people who lived within the city limits – was “put to bed” before midnight.

I didn’t enjoy police reporting but it was a good experience for the most part.

One night, late, a detective called me at the paper and said they had found a house near Lewis Avenue and Admiral Boulevard that was a major supplier of marijuana. He told me the address and I drove down a darkened street to the house.

Just as I parked, another policeman, with his gun drawn, rushed up to my car window and demanded to know what I was doing there. I nervously told him who I was and gave him the name of the detective who called.

They had been waiting for some of the “perpetrators” to return and this guy thought I might be one. They let me inside the house and there were dozens of large marijuana plants under lamps throughout the house.

I made friends with some of the policeman and I still know some of them.

During that time, I was sent to cover a drowning in the Arkansas River. A man had been missing and presumed drowned. His body had surfaced and I went with a photographer to the scene.

The body looked like it was blown up like a balloon. It’s not a scene that you easily forget.

During another police report, I went into a poor section of housing next to the Arkansas River during the Labor Day Great Raft Race. A little boy got too close to the river, slipped in and drowned.

His family was devastated. These were people that didn’t have any money and they were unsure how to pay for a funeral. It was a truly sad episode.

I got a call once from a detective who didn’t much like me or any reporters, for that matter. An elderly man had been missing for a few days but they finally found him dead, slumped over in his pickup in a clump of trees just off I-244 in East Tulsa.

He apparently had a heart attack and drove off the road. It was in the heat of summer and the detective wanted to make sure I saw the body. He opened the truck door and the smell was terrible. Flies swarmed and there were maggots on the bodyThat’s another scene that is hard to erase.

My late Uncle Jake Biggs served as a Tulsa police officer for Tulsa for more than 20 years about 40 years ago. He used to moonlight as a security guard on Brookside for a classic drive-in restaurant.

After retiring from the Tulsa Police Department, Uncle Jake worked as the police chief in Bixby and later in Jenks. They were much smaller cities back then and they didn’t have much crime. He never talked about his work to me much over the years I have run into people who knew him and they all admired his devotion to law and order.

Jake wanted my cousin Timmy to follow his footsteps in the police academy. Timmy, a graduate of Jenks High School, tragically became a quadriplegic in a swimming pool diving accident in Houston. He passed away a few years ago.

We don’t cover much crime news in the Tulsa Beacon for several reasons. We are a weekly newspaper and it takes a lot of manpower to cover the police beat. You have to be very accurate with crime reporting because it is so important to the victims and to those charged with crime.

I shake my head at some of the mistakes in police reporting in Tulsa these days.

There are some bad cops in Tulsa. I don’t think there are very many but there are some bad apples in any major city. One of the roles of the news media is to point out corruption in a police department when it surfaces.

The Tulsa police have been unduly criticized due to local and national events between white officers and minority suspects. Sometimes the police have been wrong and sometimes they have been unjustly vilified.

The bottom line is that our police stand between us and civil disobedience. Our lives would be a lot more unsettled without them.

They do risk their lives to protect us and our property. Policemen are under physical assault throughout America and that is just not right.