After 32 years on the Carrboro beat, Officer Bob hits the road
By Taylor Sisk
Staff Writer
While Officer Bob Murdaugh says he’s the only person of his acquaintance who’s ever been bounced from the Boot Hill Saloon during Daytona Beach’s annual Bike Week, certainly it must have happened to many hundreds of other individuals. Regardless, the image of Officer Bob being bounced, in Daytona Beach or otherwise, is entirely discordant with the image of Officer Bob that’s been forged in the minds of so manyCarrboro residents in the course of his some 32 years of service, and is no way to begin to tell his story.
Very recently retired from the Carrboro Police Department (May 31 was his official final sign-off), Murdaugh is looking tanned and rested as he enjoys a late-morning breakfast on the patio at Breadmen’s. He’s been spending a lot of time aboard his trusty BMW, and, already well out of regs, is eight days into a burgeoning white beard.
He’s here to talk, in his words, “facts, fables and philosophy,†and in the course of an extended conversation, each is well represented.
Back to the bouncing later.
The making of an officer
“Somehow,†Bob Murdaugh recollects, “I was made a member of the safety patrol at Hope Valley Elementary School. So I was in uniform and in law enforcement early on.
“But I never really aspired to be a police officer. It just sort of worked out that way.â€
Murdaugh graduated from Durham’s Jordan High School in 1970 and headed off to become a “two-time Duke University freshman.â€
“There was a period of time when I was between semesters at Duke University, and I was in dire need of a job. A friend from high school asked me if I wanted his stepfather to find me a job. He was in the administration at Duke University. And I said, `Sure; I’ll take anything.’
“So I was told to go see `Chris’ at building 10 on campus. Chris turned out to be a retired FBI agent who was then the director of the campus police. He brought me into the office and told me that I was going to sit in this one chair and answer the phone and tell all his officers where to go – I was to be a dispatcher.
“I said, `Well, I did say I’d take anything.’
“That day was one of the more stressful days of my young life. I remember every time the phone rang it was some new crisis and I had no idea what to do about it. I thought the day would never end.â€
But young Bob Murdaugh was the curious sort – and retains to this day a profound and searching interest in human nature – and that, more than anything, charted his destiny.
“Police officers have a tendency to embellish on their stories,†Murdaugh says, “and I was a curious young man. So I would ask them to tell me about what happened after I had sent them to a given crisis.
“And to hear them speak, there would be naked women, people with knives and guns, and all sorts of wild things going on. But it all seemed to be over in about five minutes. I was dying to know how this occurred, and I figured the only way to really find out was to become a police officer myself.â€
He became an officer on the Duke campus force while living with a friend from high school in Carrboro. Murdaugh tended to keep odd hours (as he still does today) and got to know all the Carrboro cops on a first-name basis.
“I’d ride with them at night … So when I decided to become a real police officer, I decided to do it here.â€
Mid-70s Carrboro was, of course, a decidedly different place from what we see today.
“They rolled up the sidewalks pretty well at around 11:00,†Murdaugh recalls. “There was nothing much open after 11:00.†For a late-night bite to eat, the cops would head over to the old Golden West Steakhouse down at Estes and Franklin, where the Chamber of Commerce now sits.
Carrboro crime in those days of yore was, says Murdaugh, “mostly disputes between people who knew one another.â€
The making of Officer Bob
It’s been remarked more than once over the years that Officer Bob Murdaugh seemed to go about his business as if he understood himself to be a peace officer employed in the field of law enforcement. He takes pride in that. It’s always been by design:
“When I first became an officer at Duke University, I was shocked at the difference in the way people received me. I didn’t think that I had changed, but wearing the uniform caused people to receive me very differently. Uniforms were not well thought of or welcomed on university campuses in the early `70s; the Viet Nam War was still going on.
“But I was offended. I thought wearing the uniform should indicate that I was a good guy, and that it was a perfect excuse to crank up a conversation about nothing in particular without creating concerns.
“I set about to do that,†and in the wake of such conversations, he says, “I could see a kind of look in their eyes as I walked away, like, `Well, that wasn’t particularly unpleasant. What just happened there?’
“I enjoyed doing that.â€
Taking a similar approach into situations of conflict or potential conflict: “I found I had pretty good success. I would consider who was involved in the situation and go in as probably more of a mediator than an enforcer – doing what I had to do in the long run, but trying to convince people that I wasn’t doing it just to get my jollies – and truly, I wasn’t.
“Carrboro is a small enough town that I knew early on that I was going to be seeing a lot of the same people over and over again, and why go out of my way to make them angry, just to make the next contact that much more difficult.
“I don’t know that I could have been the officer that I was in a larger area.â€
Somewhere along the way, he was dubbed, by a Breadmen’s waitress, “Officer Bob.â€
“At first I was kind of resistant to the `Officer Bob’ … but it seemed to work pretty well.â€
While negotiation has always been Officer Bob’s preferred modus operandi, there is, he explains “always Plan B.†Which essentially boils down to this: “Dazzle them with b.s. till the cavalry arrives.
“My motto was, `Misery loves company.’ If it was going to be miserable, I was going to wait for the company to get there, if I could, before I chose to act. It’s very easy to have people accept doing something for me when there are a couple of large, big guys standing behind me.†He says that there’s generally an option preferable to going to jail, and that most would-be lawbreakers are aware of this. “I tried to allow people to take that opportunity without losing face.… That seemed to work well.â€
His voice – a distinctive baritone, pitched to the particulars of the moment, obliquely authoritative and somewhat soothing – certainly must have helped
He allows as how, “I got bruised or scuffed a time or two – very rarely though, really. The one most recent, this one young guy mopped up the whole front of the Food Lion with me. But I was able to hang on till the cavalry got there, and he was collected up. He was a felon who had been forging stolen checks all over town and†– and what follows is some classic Officer Bobspeak, ever diplomatic – “he was rather desperate not to be apprehended at that particular point in time.â€
Police officer, human
Bob Murdaugh has, over the years, often been seen out and about in and around Carrboro in the capacity of a regular citizen.
“I never saw any real good reason that police officers shouldn’t be seen as human. I felt like it was an asset that we be seen as human, and just doing a job.
“I never tried to say that I was perfect, and I understood that most people aren’t perfect. We tended to meet officially on those days when somebody wasn’t being perfect – when they were being more human than law-abiding.†Going out when off duty gave him an opportunity to spend a little unofficial time with the masses. “I tried to set a good example when I was off duty, and the majority of the time I think I did.
“Being approachable caused any number of people to ask me questions and sometimes give me information that was beneficial to me as a police officer. There were any number of people who were in a bit of a bind and would stop and visit with me to find out how much trouble they were in, how serious was it, what would be the best course of action. I would never promise what might occur in court or something like that, but I would tell them how things usually worked.â€
Providing information was a habit of Officer Bob’s on duty as well:
“One of the things that I would do with my prisoners during an arrest process would be to keep them informed of what the process was about to be. Some of them were very practiced in this and had no particular need of new knowledge. But particularly when someone is suddenly having their life flashed before their eyes, being arrested for the first time, risking all sorts of things, just knowing how this is going to proceed in advance is a comforting thing, I think.â€
Facts, fables and philosophy
Here’s the thing: Though Officer Bob said at the top of this story that, “I never really aspired to be a police officer,†and that, “It just sort of worked out that way†– don’t buy a bit of it.
For, as he himself readily admits, through the general course of Officer Bob’s adult life (and, who knows, perhaps even at Hope Valley Elementary), if something crazy was going to happen, “I was somewhere nearby. And it got to the point where if something did happen and I wasn’t around, people would say, `Where were you?’â€
Over the years, the off-duty Officer Bob has seemed to find himself in at least as many hairy situations as his on-duty counterpart. Go figure why.
There’s the story that involves a chainsaw in a well-established Chapel Hill bar. (Bob’s pretty sure that firing up a chainsaw in a public place can be “construed as going armed to the terror of the people.â€) There are stories from the Sturgis rally in South Dakota and another in Flagstaff. In each case, Bob traverses unharmed – and, in most cases, moderates.
Except for the Boot Hill incident.
“I actually am the only guy I know of who got kicked out of the Boot Hill Saloon on Main Street, Daytona Beach, Bike Week,†Officer Bob says with, yes, some pride.
Here’s how it went down:
“Apparently as I was making my way through the crowded bar, this woman – well, somebody pinched her on the butt just as I was passing by, and she turned around and knocked my hat off, thinking it was me. I swear it wasn’t.â€
Long story short, the woman pointed Bob out to her boyfriend, words were had – the boyfriend “making a lot of noise†– off-duty Bob finishing his beer. So here comes the bouncer, “and I figure here comes justice.
“And I found out what bouncing is all about. I got wrapped up and bounced out the door†– Bob here pantomimes traveling bouncy, bouncy, across the bouncer’s hip and forthwith out the door – ejected.
The epilogue is that Bob slides back into the bar through a side door, and resumes his evening unchallenged.
A gradual process
“Situational thinking,†says Officer Bob Murdaugh, is what’s gotten him through the years. “I guess I’m a bit more of a social worker than most police officers…. I tried to tailor my approach to the individuals involved and the given situations, as opposed to a standard approach for all situations.â€
It’s not for everybody, he allows; and it don’t come easy.
Officer Bob tells this story:
“There was a new officer who saw me interact with a drunk person and reported it to my supervisor as being unsafe, not good police procedure.
“This person was particularly drunk – I couldn’t decide when I first saw him if he was falling down or trying to get back up. He was leaning on a shopping cart for support. I helped him over to a bench and we sat down together to talk about what might be best for him in this circumstance.
“The other officer came by as my backup and he saw the two of us sitting there together, and this fellow was sitting on my right, and that was the side I had my firearm on, and this officer thought that it was unsafe that we would be sitting so close together.
“What he didn’t know though was that this particular drunk guy had spent many hours drinking coffee with me at various places around town. I would see him frequently, we were on a first-name basis, and when I first walked up he looked up and saw that it was me and said, `Oh; Bob.’ He was happy to see me. But he didn’t look like a lot of other people in town. He was scruffy, he had long hair, he had a beard, he looked like a cross between a biker and an old hippy; he was an element that was sort of foreign to this young officer.â€
Officer Bob explained the situation to his supervisor, who knew the person, knew they had a good relationship.
“But he said, `What you’ve got to watch out for, Bob, is doing things to let these new officers think they can do it too the first time. They don’t see the time you’ve invested and the relationships you’ve built. You have to let them know that this takes work, it’s not automatic.’
“I hadn’t considered that; I really hadn’t.
“This has been a very gradual process over the years – relationships that I’ve developed with the good, the bad and the ugly…. I took a lot of pride in being able to walk into an anxious situation and have it immediately calm down. I very much preferred that it calm down.â€
He’s done it in Spanish as well – though he admits that despite several Spanish I classes in high school and college, he’s far from fluent. But: “I couldn’t imagine being a police officer [in this community] and not speaking any Spanish. It was a big help. Even if I couldn’t do it all myself, I could usually ask, in Spanish, `Do you know someone who speaks Spanish and English?’
“It seemed that the members of the Hispanic community, when I did speak some Spanish, became less fearful of the police.â€
So here’s the deal, as Officer Bob sees it: “Carrboro really is a friendly town, and it seems to welcome everybody. It’s amazing how many different kinds of people we have that seem to get along together – and I’ve seen this remarked about by visitors to the area.â€
He tells of working a gay pride parade, a day in which he was free to stop and visit and talk with people.
“There were some lesbians from Texas – I think the Houston area – who had stopped prior to the parade at a convenient store, and they had seen some Hispanics get out of a car, and they saw some blacks get out of another car, and saw some skinhead-looking white guys get out of another car. And their hearts immediately sank, and stomachs fell, and they thought they were about to be in the middle of one hell of a rumble.
“And they were totally amazed when these people went about their business, ignored each other, and got back in their cars and left without any sort of incident. That just wouldn’t have happened where they were from.
We take so much of this for granted; this has been the norm …
“I have to be careful when I go to other places, that I don’t think it will be that way there.â€
A man and his moto-bega
Officer Bob will remain a reserve officer. “I told them I would come back for command performances and guest appearances, maintaining my certification.
“Come the Christmas Parade, I hope to give Santa Claus a run for his money,†he says, stroking the makings of that beard. “I don’t know if they’re going to make me shave for being in the public eye. We’ll see….â€
If he gets bored, he’ll find something else to do. He’s only yet 54.
“I don’t have a wife to beg permission from, and I don’t have any kids to grubstake in life. So as long as I go broke the day I die, I think I’ll be all right.â€
He’s off again on the bike tomorrow for a rally in the mountains. “I have a little pop-up camper that I haul behind my motorcycle, and when I hitch the two together I refer to it as my moto-bega.
Shaking on it
So who does Officer Bob admire?
“I admire so many people who keep doing what needs to be done, in spite of what would appear to be a sort of never-ending situation where not much seems to be getting accomplished. The people both in public service and in private who maintain their good attitudes and keep doing vital jobs. The rest of the world seems to take those people a bit for granted sometimes, but it needs doing.â€
As a peace officer for the town of Carrboro, North Carolina Bob Murdaugh says he learned this:
“I learned that there was some good in everybody. I met very few people who were truly all bad.â€
He learned that “if you could appeal to the good in somebody, and ask them to bring it out, let it out, and to do the right thing – and [convey to them] that you expected them to do better, that you knew that they could – oftentimes they would.
“You could get on my [explicative] list, but it wasn’t like you couldn’t work your way off. It was very few people who were truly on my [explicative] list, and nobody wanted to be there.â€
He describes the “handshake situations,†in which he’d ask an individual who might otherwise be offered accommodations for the night courtesy of the town to promise to do better, and to give him a shake on it.
That done, “The officers and I would leave, and the other officers would say, `Oh, we’re coming back; I know we’re coming back.’
“But invariably, to this day,†Officer Bob says, no one has reneged on the handshake- “at least through the end of my shift.â€
And what more, really, could be asked?