A 43-year-old Santa Monica resident was arrested on Aug. 9 for disobeying a restraining order when a Santa Monica police officer chanced upon a suspicious rendezvous.
At 4:35 p.m., an officer of the Santa Monica Police Department was on patrol in the area of Cloverfield Boulevard and Olympic Boulevard came across and approached a pair of suspicious people sitting in the parking lot of a market.
The officer decided to invite this man and woman to indulge in a conversation with him, and they agreed to do so.
The officer, during the course of this conversation, asked if any of these two were on parole or probation.
The man of the pair told the officers that coincidentally he was on formal probation for a health and safety conviction.
The officer then asked this man if he had any drugs or weapons on his person, to which he replied, “no.”
The man even agreed to allow the officer to search him, which the officer did.
The officer did not find anything illegal on the man.
The officer called in a check on the man and discovered that in addition to the probation, he also had a warrant for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, as well as having a restraining order against him that prohibited him from being within 100 yards of a certain woman.
That woman, it transpired, was the very one sitting next to him in the market parking lot, so the officer arrested him there and then.
This 43-year-old Santa Monica resident was thus charged with violation of a restraining order, probation violation, and the warrant for riding the bicycle on the sidewalk.
Bail was set at $20,561.
Editor’s Note: These reports are part of a regular police coverage series entitled “Alert Police Blotter” (APB), which injects some minor editorial into certain police activities in Santa Monica. Not all of the Mirror’s coverage of incidents involving police are portrayed in this manner. More serious crimes and police-related activities are regularly reported without editorial in the pages of the Santa Monica Mirror and its website, smmirror.com.
