This book is a collection of stories that emerged over several years during which the authors met and became friends over numerous cups of coffee after exercising at a YMCA in Pennsylvania. Their collaboration started with a novel based on a true incident, published as Guilty but Innocent, and has continued ever since. This book tries to bring to light the humor, the difficulty and sometimes the pathos of a cop’s life.

Fairy Tales traditionally start with “Once upon a time” whereas just about all police stories begin with “And this is no sh*t….”, and this compilation of stories of a cop’s life in the City of Baltimore is no sh*t! Each story is true although, necessarily, names have been changed, as they say, to protect the innocent. Some of these stories and anecdotes are humorous, some are weird, many are sad and not a few are tragic but they are typical of what virtually every police officer throughout the world experiences on an almost daily basis. People are strange and what they do is often stranger still.

It is fortunate that the vast majority of criminals are basically clueless when it comes to what will, or won’t, get them arrested. The old adage “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime” seems to have the same significance to the average wrong-doer as nuclear physics or perhaps it is a hearkening back to the gladiator syndrome – it won’t happen to them. No matter what criminals may think or how often they get away with things, their misdeeds will catch up with them – it may take time, sometimes years, but catch up it does. Many of the stories within these pages show the truth of this.

Despite the fiction portrayed on our TV screens each and every day, it is very rare for citizens to actually tell the police anything let alone offer to provide useful information. When the police perform a door-to-door canvas, the responses include, “I don’t know nothing”, “He didn’t do it”, “Whaddaya asking me for?”, “I never heard of him/her/them”, and that is when the person answering the door actually says anything. More often than not, a face peers out and the door gets slammed shut without a word being spoken. Cops are instantly recognizable to certain segments of the population whether or not they are in uniform. As is often said, a cop can be “made” from a mile away even on a dark, foggy night. Nevertheless, plain clothes officers still catch wrong-doers because they are clueless or simply stupid, and sometimes both. Two stories, The Drug-sniffing Horse and Stupid Is as Stupid Does, bear that out.