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Vice Blog

(COLOMBIAN) 911 IS A JOKE

Since Sewers of Bogota is running on The Vice Guide to Everything Tonight tonight, we dug up this old thing about Colombian cops that Baby Balls wrote for the VBS piece.

The Bogotà police force is no joke. They all look like soldiers and the majority of them ride around on bikes like the one at the end of this episode, with their clubs across the handlebars for easy access. Since Colombia's basically been at war for the past 40 years and the sort of well-off humanitarian-types who typically champion prisoner rights or fighting police brutality are too busy worrying about being kidnapped by guerillas to care what some cop is doing to some glue-sniffer, they pretty much have carte blanche to do whatever they want to the poor schmucks who end up in their custody. Over the course of our sewer-hopping, we heard about kids getting sprayed in the balls with a fire hose from no less than three different victims of the practice (the follow-up punch is when the cops haul the soaking wet kid back to his cell to freeze-dry overnight). This in addition to the usual retinue of beatings and rape-threats they stick to when they're out on the beat. For all their shittiness, it bears mention that the cops in Bogotà are up against a seriously heavy task. Not only do they have kidnappers and holdovers from the days of the Colombian narcotrade who would just as soon car-bomb an apartment complex full of kids as ease up on part of their turf to contend with, for all their friendliness around us and Papa Jaime, the better part of the sewer kids we met were out of their minds on glue and basuco and constantly fidgeting with what looked like box-cutters or shards of glass wrapped in tape. We stopped by the

city police museum

on a lark one afternoon and were in the room with their "these guys died" wall waiting on a translator. I assume this was just the latest segment of a much wider wall or series of memorial walls, because the dates of death for the guys listed started in November '06 (we were there in February '07) and there were already a good 30 to 40 names—12 on a single day in December. So it's not the kind of gig that's drawing in Colombia's brightest and most ambitious. Actually, a good deal of the Colombians we met told us cop jokes with the same frequency my grandparents used to bust out the Polish jokes. I think a lot of them were actually adaptations of the same jokes. Anyways, we got to see this legendary incompetence in action one night on our way out to the sewers. There was a bottleneck on the highway where a police van and about seven or eight biker cops had apparently busted someone. The guy's car was still there on the side of the road, but it looked like they'd already hauled him off and the remaining cops were supposed to be cleaning up the crime scene or whatever. One guy was off a little ways looking for something in the grass, probably drugs, but the rest of them were just kind of hanging out chatting by their bikes. Right as we were passing, the guy closest to us lost his grip on something he'd been holding and started fumbling for it really clumsily, the way they do in cartoons when an object is covered in butter or made of soap. I couldn't make out what the thing was because he was sort of standing between me and the light, but then he completely lost of hold of it and it went flying then bounced off his bike seat and clattered to the asphalt on the other side of his bike right under the streetlight. It was his pistol. The question of why he'd even had it out in the first place didn't even enter our minds until the panic-laughter from watching a man butterfinger a loaded gun subsided.

PS: The painting above is from the captain's office at the station with the police museum. This is how they see themselves.