Only Troopers Get Good Stuff For ‘Real Stories’

Blue lights winking on a seamless summer night.

Muttering and agitated, Sgt. Ken Lofquist hauls his imposing 6-foot-4 frame out of the Crown Victoria with surprising speed for a guy whose next birthday strikes the half-century mark. The 24-year veteran of the Washington State Patrol strides toward the drunk and his pal who nearly broadsided us as we turned west onto Trent.

These fools would be in big trouble - if they weren’t on bicycles.

Lofquist says he once cited drunken bikers just like drunken drivers. Then a court ruling excluded bicyclists from the driving while intoxicated statute.

So instead of a biker bust, the sergeant scolds the nitwits for pedaling against traffic, wearing dark clothing, not having lights and nearly getting grilled by a Ford.

“Stick to the back roads and go home,” warns Lofquist, stomping back to the car. “I see you out here again, I’ll pinch you.”

You see the strange side of humanity when you ride shotgun with a working cop. That explains the voyeuristic appeal of those live-action police programs.

A film crew for “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” cruised Spokane Friday and Saturday night looking for some rock-‘em, sock-‘em stuff to spice up the Fox Television show.

“Real stories …” is a somewhat cheesy rip-off of “Cops,” the original Fox show that videotapes officers earning their paychecks.

“I get mad when people start singing that ‘Bad Boys’ (“Cops”) theme song around me,” says Cliff Potter. The freelance cameraman from Seattle is hired occasionally by the Los Angeles-based “Real Stories” to ride with Washington troopers.

This is the third time “Real Stories” has prowled Spokane.

Potter and his sound man, John Grimm, tagged along with troopers Jeff Thoet on Friday and Pat “P.P.” Percival on Saturday.

With Thoet, they stopped a weaving car containing a huffy college professor and a woman. The man explained tersely that he wasn’t drunk, but was having sex with his companion.

You probably won’t see this segment on TV.

That’s the difficult thing about filming police work, says Potter. You have to sit through hours and hours of tedium to get something usable.

He’s got that right. I rode with Lofquist Saturday from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., following the TV guys and later trolling for drunks on our own.

We encountered more boneheads than boozehounds.

Take the guy who sat at an intersection at 2 a.m., staring at a green light. “He’s toasted for sure,” remarks Lofquist, who quickly pulls him over.

“Naw, I haven’t been drinking,” explains the driver, who passes the sobriety test. “I’m just colorblind.”

We stopped another loser in a battered pea-green pickup. The 1977 Chevy swept across three lanes and then didn’t signal when he turned right a block later.

He’d had some beer, but not enough to flunk the tests. Lofquist told the guy to go home and he’d cut him a break.

A half-hour later the same pea-green pickup zoomed by us doing over 50 on Sprague. This time Lofquist wasn’t so generous, handing the driver a $66 speeding ticket.

On this night, the best “Real Stories of the Highway Patrol” were those told around the table in a coffee shop.

“P.P.” Percival shared a doozie about a dog that kept trying to make off with the head of a woman decapitated in a car wreck.

“Can you imagine trying to explain a missing head?” asks Percival.

Then there was the night a tipsy guy in an electric wheelchair strayed into the street and got hit by a car.

Lofquist cited the guy for driving while intoxicated. “Why not?” he reasons. “An electric wheelchair is a motor vehicle.”

Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do?

, DataTimes