Detective Dana Crowley

Concept: Little Miss Rock and a Hard Place

AKA: It turns out the Dana is pretty hard core in the Police softball team. She’s shortish, so her strike-zone is hard for some to hit and when she connects with the ball, she’s got some pretty decent power. As a result, guys around the station call her “Slugger” Crowley. 

Desc: Exactly 1/2 inch over the department size requirement. Bright green eyes. Not a lot of fat on her although the amount of desk work she does is starting to make her concerned about her ass. Naturally curly black hair.  Nice smile. Favors cowboy boots because they tend to ground her stance and they’re useful in the field.  The nicest article of clothing she owns is a dark purple cashmere scarf.  Favors black jeans and solid color button up men’s shirts. And her  trusty black trench coat.

History: Dana is from a cop family.  And being the eldest, got the pitch much harder than her younger brother Daniel. Which was just as well, Daniel came out at 17, and while it’s not impossible for a gay boy to be a cop, that wasn’t a fight Daniel was willing to have. Dad understood eventually. Besides, Daniel was smart in a different way and now he teaches math at the university.

    But I’m talking about Dana right now. Dana’s pretty smart, and has a normal amount of actual ambition. She put in her time as a patrol officer, and after what seemed an interminable wait after passing her Detective exam, she got her gold shield and went to work.  She’s done a few thing in various departments. She detested working in Vice, Liked Bunco, but there’s so little call for it. Was good at Homicide, but it started to get to her...So what’s a girl to do if she’s bucking to have a captaincy of her own by age 40?

Well. IAB was looking for someone and Dana thought, “Well. It might not exactly endear me to my fellow cops all that well. but if I’m looking to play the long game, this is where I need to be.”  So they found each other after a fashion.

     It’s different.  Every suspect you meet is a cop and by extension, a trained killer. (Dana reads a lot of Lee Child, Looking for pointers.)  Sometimes you have to file a report on a decent cop who’s made a serious error in judgment and those days are never good ones.

   But other days, you file a report on a cop who’s done something so fucking egregious and then you end up getting pressured to label the shoot “righteous”  What the Fuck?   And why is it that the corruption cases never seem to go anywhere.  And maybe it’s just her imagination, but sometimes it feels like her captain is acting a little squirrelly and erratic. Granted his divorce last year was pretty ugly...but still.

   Increasingly. Dana is starting to feel like she’s caught in a bad situation. Cops are doing bad things out there, but it seems like her department isn’t being allowed to do what it’s supposed to. And dammit, Dana wants to know why.

Attitude: “Look. I don’t ever think that a police person is ever going to manage to be morally above reproach. Some do things that are morally shady and balance it by still trying to be the best officer they can be. I don’t generally tool around here giving people the stink-eye over little shit like some dicks in this department do.  But there IS a line. You can cross it.  And it’s up to cops like me to make sure that little shit is the only thing cops can get away with.

Skills:  Physically, She’s a dynamo in a small package. Not super strong, but knows how to use what she has and she’s got good stamina. She’s got some good dots in Athletics and Fleet of Foot in Merits. 3 dots of Brawl, Firearms, and Weaponry.(Specs in snap baton, and Baseball bat.)  Some dots in kung-fu, combat marksmanship, and cop tactics, But not a ton of dots in any of those Fighting Styles.  Socially, she’s pleasant enough and smart enough to be covetous of Bob Grieder’s social acumen.   Mentally, She’s pretty sharp. Decent investigation and computer scores. A fair pile of dots in academics with specs in forensics and ballistics. Each time the department offer courses, she takes them and usually crushes them. (Dana was always blowing the curve in school) 

Gear: Dana prefers 45’s She’s got one under her right armpit, another in the small of her back and a 38 revolver on her left ankle. Some years ago, she went to see the movie “Se7en” and from that point on started carrying a switchblade with a mother-of-pearl handle. (More for opening things and handling evidence than as a serious weapon.) 

When it comes to Phones, Dana is an early adopter. Usually first in line to buy the new smartphone-du jour. She’s got half the department’s numbers in that phone, it’s connected to her Skype number and her Facebook. She’s got a high-resolution sense on its camera. A couple hundred useful criminology texts, useful evidence gathering apps, and about a gigs worth of upbeat House and Trance music to keep her awake during the slow times. She dictates a lot of her notes into that phone. She even keeps a spare phone in her desk so she can swap out the SIM card in case hers gets damaged in the field.  Dana also carries Tarot deck in a zippered pocket in her trench.  Not because she has any belief in the occult, but because she read a novel some years back about a guy who used the tarot symbology as a means of cracking cases.  Some mumbo jumbo about “Finding out the things, you don’t know that you know.”  She tried it out and has been using it ever since.

Home: Shares a brownstone with her brother and his small doggies. She and Daniel can both walk to work from there. Weekdays are usually sleepy affairs but weekends at the Crowley household usually include the shooting range, The batting cage,  Brunch, and taking in a drag show with her brother. 

Circle: For an IAB officer, Dana is pretty decent and most of the other cops are a little guarded around her, but that’s to be expected. She still has friends in the other divisions she used to work in. She’s also got friends in the gay community, who good-naturedly tease her about coming out eventually. I mean shit girl. Look at those boots.

For the record, she is in a relationship with a guy, but it’s not going terribly well.

Story Uses:

“Something about this whole shoot is not adding up.”

Dana would be a great get for any hunter group composed largely of members of the Union. She’d also make a decent “Friendly” for Task Force Valkyrie and the special agents of V.A.S.C.U.  

“Is it just me or is this starting to stink to high heaven”

The reason that the captain is acting weird is that some vampire jack-wagon has got his/her hooks into him. Dana’s likely to see it first and is just motivated enough to find out exactly what’s happening and why...

Connections:

*Loves and respects the living daylights out of Detective Bob Greider.  Anytime she has a quandary at work, she goes and buys Bob lunch and he usually untangles it for her. If you could get anywhere politically, by working Bunco, Dana would go back to being Bob's right hand in a heartbeat.

* Officer Wesley Ullman is on Dana's shit list. She personally saw him harassing some gay people of her acquaintance and got all up in his grill about it. Look like he was going to draw on her too.

* Is in a "sort of a relationship if you squint" with Norman Cayce. The main trouble is that while the like one another and are good together in bed. Both have crippling schedules and the department has clear guidelines on employee fraternization.  Date night keeps getting pushed off. A lot.

* Has met Doris Badenov. In fact, Jordan once spent about a week on Daniel's couch. Daniel says he's a good guy, but he gets to drinking and then yammering on about vampires. Can't tell if he using a metaphor or is into "Twilight" or some crap.

* Darla Grumman badly wishes Dana wasn't straight, although Daniel is one of her best friends in the world. Why must things be so complicated?

*Regular reader of Lara X.

* Has known Detective Bela Janofski and the rest of the Janofski clan her whole life. She and Bela even used to date in high school. Norman is not aware of this connection at all. And in truth, it ain't like that no more...Well. Not really.  That whole thing only comes up every once in a great while. Mostly, they use one another as sounding boards on cases they're working on. Dana is probably the biggest reason that Bela's never taken a nickel he wasn't due.  And Dana, for her part would like to punch his ex-wife Janis until that adenoidal bitch stops moving.