“Sector 1, go ahead.”
“OPD is en route to South 28th Avenue for smoke in that area,” a female dispatcher says.
The night begins with an assignment, a rarity for Daniel Hagen, an Omaha Housing Authority security guard. Most of the time, Hagen patrols the Southside Terrace Garden Apartments, the largest remaining public housing cluster in Omaha, on his own.
He cruises the neighborhood, coasting down hills, lurching up streets, waving to some people, waiting for eye contact from others.
But he’s rarely told what to do, except for right now, about 10 p.m. on a recent Friday.
The temperature in the teens, the wind in the 30s. And smoke in the area.
As Hagen drives along the eastern edge of the complex, smoke seeps into his beat-up Crown Victoria, a former Omaha Police cruiser that’s rolled over more than 125,000 miles.
“Oh, yeah,” Hagen remarks, inhaling a whiff.
The back passenger window is down, as always, so Hagen can hear the city. On this night, he hears the howling of wind, the shouts of children and the calmness of winter.
About an hour ago, Hagen saw a kid playing with matches but he didn’t think anything of it.
After making a couple loops in and around the complex, Hagen sits in his car along the eastern edge.
Then comes a group of 10 or so kids, latching to the OHA cruiser like magnets on a refrigerator. A scrawny 11- or 12-year-old leans against the passenger door.
“What do you want, huh? What do you want?” Hagen says.
“What’s up, Hagen? What’s up, Hagen?”
They shake hands, the kid stretching his arm into the OHA cruiser.
“I heard you were playing with matches,” Hagen says a little later.
“No, that ain’t me,” the kid replies.
“Look at that — smoking stunted your growth already.”
“Naw. I don’t do matches.”
“I’m just teasing you.”
“Something still caught on fire?”
“Something. Can’t you smell that smoke?”
“Yeah, go find that,” the kid says.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I got a coloring book and three stickers for you if go find out what happened. I’ll be driving around. You flag me down.”
“I don’t know what happened. I ain’t no snitch.”
Omaha police officer Mike Meyer spots Hagen and coasts his cruiser down the hill. The kids stick around.
“I didn’t find anything, Mike,” Hagen says.
“Yep, I did it, so what? I did it. So what?” the kid says, standing on his tiptoes and puffing his chest out as he yaps and laughs.
Hagen sighs and glances at Meyer. “You know how it goes,” Hagen says.
He tells Meyer about a man he’d like to ban from OHA property. Then it’s on to more important business.
“Hey,” Meyer says, “what’s the deal with, uh, what’s the deal with Taylor Martinez, man?”
The kids shake a handicapped sign stuck in the ground. A white SUV pulls behind Meyer’s cruiser. But there’s no halting this conversation.
You know how it goes.
Hagen, 42, is about 6 feet, 2 inches tall and has graying black hair. Divorced, he was married for 23 years.
Before joining OHA, he worked for Papillion, Boys Town and Valley police.
He has been patrolling OHA properties for the past 11 and a half years. For the last eight, he’s been here, driving around these clustered brick apartments in this beat-up Crown Vic.
He sips from the 64-ounce Diet Coke he sits on the console of the car. A roll of toilet paper is wedged in between the console and his seat. And the coloring books and stickers are stuffed in a suitcase in the back.
“I do this mostly because I enjoy it,” Hagen says.
OHA guards must be certified law enforcement, says Bob Fidone, senior director of public safety and compliance.
He tells his guards to focus on “magnet units,” the apartments bringing the majority of the calls. As a result, Fidone says, a homicide hasn’t happened on OHA property in the last four years.
The power of the OHA force, he says, lives in eviction.
Hagen’s power also lives in relationships, the key substance of the community-policing strategy he says has helped OHA achieve the homicide-free stretch.
Throughout the night, Hagen peruses the property, stopping when he notices something unfamiliar, such as a beige Ford Explorer sitting in a different spot every time he sees it. He also stops when he sees something familiar, such as the woman dressed in blue shorts and a bikini-like tanktop, standing outside her apartment. “Do me a favor, will ya?” Hagen says.
“Uh, move the car!” she says of the vehicle illegally parked in front of her apartment.
“No, no, no. Don’t move it,” he says. “We got a spot for it at the impound lot. Tell him to leave it there until the tow truck gets here, will ya?”
But she needs it to get to work.
“Go fix that problem,” he directs.
“I will. I’m going to go call him now and tell him to get back here with the keys,” she says.
“All right. See ya later.”
“Thank you, honey,” she says.
No report to file. No car to tow. No neighbor to anger.
“We’re kind of fixing the problem without having to get nasty about it,” he says later.
The night becomes a series of brakes, stops and reverses, hours and hours of backtracking, staring at the same brick, looking at the same satellite dishes in front of the same homes.
But some people cause more than one brake, more than one turn-around from Hagen, such as that beige Ford Explorer.
It’s near 12:30 a.m. now, and the driver has moved again.
Hagen sees another police cruiser rolling down a hill.
Police tell him they’re here for the woman who’s driving the Explorer all over the complex. She’s looking for her 14-year-old daughter.
Before an officer and the mom approach the apartment where her daughter may be staying, Hagen makes a suggestion: “I’m gonna go to the backside of this unit because I’ve had a lot of activity there the past two months, and they’ll bug out the back end if she is there.”
Officers bang on the front door, and out the back waltzes a woman wearing headphones.
“Hi, there,” says Hagen.
The woman lives there, but she swears the 14-year-old daughter is not inside.
Police and Hagen open closets overflowing with clothes. They shout at and nudge a teenage girl, who appears asleep on a tiny bed in an upstairs bedroom. They see a 1-year-old on another mattress in the same bedroom intently watching “The Mask.”
But they don’t find the 14-year-old runaway.
Back outside, the 35 mph wind whips against the mother, who wears a Nebraska sweatshirt as she waits near her SUV.
Usually she can find her daughter; normally she comes home. But in the span of 24 hours, who knows what could happen?
She says her daughter hangs out with a little African-American girl and a group of kids at the property.
“They were out earlier,” Hagen says, nodding his head. “I know them.”
Contact the writer:
444-3106, jonathon.braden@owh.com
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