Baby Baby

I was already heading that direction. I heard an officer call out on a disturbance between two females in an intersection in one of our many neighborhoods. I was about a block off when the radio erupts with the emergency wail. My ears perk up because you never know what is about to drop and where. I could tell the dispatcher was confused on how to label this. She says "uh hostage situation." I have never heard those words go out across a police radio. I'm thinking something like in the movie Die Hard where terrorists take over a sky rise. I continue listening; "reportee states she was assaulted by another female who then took her baby and shut herself in an apartment!" Great! A baby is being kidnapped and I was just passing the street where the complex was. I make a U-turn and go down the street and find the complex. I get out of the car as the rain was gently coming down. Normally I wouldn't mind the gentle rain but in this situation it sucked. I was looking for a certain apartment number and found the building it was in. I couldn't find any other officers and I knew there were about four of them already running around. I turn around to see a very young girl looking at me. I asked her what apartment she was in and she asked if I was looking for the baby! The door to the apartment behind her was wide open! I still had no idea where the other officers were! I asked her where the baby was and she said she was inside. I drew my pistol and cautiously walked inside the apartment and found a tiny baby sitting on the floor just chilling out. She looked up me wondering who I was. About this time everyone else showed up. I don't know why, but for me the baby wasn't considered safe until I picked her up and put her in her baby seat. So I picked her up and fastened her in her car seat. She was a pretty baby. We found her mother and wound up arresting her. Turns out the original disturbance I was going to was the two women involved in this. What happened was the mother got upset that she was being asked to pull her weight (help out with rent and bills) and the mother suffering from the typical street thug mentality took it as an insult that someone dare suggest she isn't entitled to stay somewhere without helping out. The mother attacked the woman (her friend who took her in) and then fled leaving her baby there. I then left the scene grateful we didn't really have a baby hostage and we'd have to negotiate with some psycho. All is well that ends well!