Tricks O' the Trade

This morning I took a call from a domestic disturbance in progress. The wife was calling and said her husband was high and throwing things out of the house etc. A lot of domestic calls start out like this.

So I get the address, her name, and start asking questions about what specifically is happening at the house. She's starts to tell a story about her husband coming home last night high on something (meth was her guess, though he sometimes "popped pills") and they got in an argument.

She left for the night--which was actually very responsible and probably the best thing she could have done to diffuse the situation. But, the sad fact of the matter was that she left because of the arguement and seemed to be completely fine with the drug use.

We do get lots of calls from households where drugs and alcohol are abused by both parties, so it was beginning to sound like this was one of those instances.

The husband takes off in his car and she starts screaming the license plate and the make and model of the car. I'm trying to ask for the direction he is headed when I hear him yelling "Whore!" in the background. This, it sounded like, was in retaliation for her giving his license plate number to the cops.

So a few seconds go by with me furiously typing the notes into the call and I hear her whisper to someone, "I don't want them to find..." I could also hear someone in the background moving around and it sounded like picking things up.

The caller knows I'm on the line still, so she keeps the phone covered and is whispering instructions to this unidentified third person. So I decided to see if she'd talk a little more freely to this person if she though she was on hold.

So I ask her to hold on for one moment, I needed to type some notes and I hit the mute button on my phone system. I was hoping that killing all the noise (even the white/background noise on my end) that she'd think she was on hold and would talk outloud to the person in the room with her.

I didn't get anything really good out of it, but I did hear her grunt loudly as if the person was going for something that she thought could wait a little longer than whatever it was she didn't want us to find.

Even though it wasn't very successful this time, I do look forward to employing this particular tactic again at a later time.