Police Work

People always ask me why I got out of police work. But the vast majority of people who ask me that question are civilians who have never been police officers. Any police officer who asks that question usually does so rapidly... and actually fills in his own answer before I have a chance to respond to it... He will say something like, "Just get tired of it?" or "Not enough money?" And the answer is yes to both of those questions, and to several other unasked ones, as well.

But here is the answer that everyone is looking for...

I got into police work, very much against my father's wishes, because I wanted to follow in his footsteps, and prove that I could do it. Once I had a badge, and a gun, and arrest powers, I wanted to 'change the world', and 'make a difference'. These are the sentiments of a rookie cop who has no idea what he is getting himself into.

I wanted to save lives, and stop crime, and ride around and be the good cop whom everyone wanted to see coming... I ended up just like all of the rest of them; an armed secretary, rushing about from one frivolous call to the next, and seeing only the very worst side of humanity, on a daily basis.

The really exciting stuff you get to do, you have to generate on your own. You have to decide to follow a car, and figure out what bugs you about the driver, or the license plates... you have to decide to go down on the beach and look for the robbery suspects, on your own initiative. You have to smell the marijuana, and approach the car, and generate a small narcotics violation... in order to find and then to pull out 27 pounds of the stuff in the trunk, and make a major bust... If the dispatcher sends you on a call, it is usually just to sweep up. To write the report. To talk to the survivors. If other policemen would just take these 'followup' calls, you could get ever so much more done on your own, in your zone, and on your shift!

Police officers really have one job, and one job only... Many think it is To Protect and Serve. But once a man becomes a policeman, his superiors tell him something else; they tell him that his job is simply this; to report the commission of crime to the state. That's it. Other than that, he will call a wrecker, an ambulance, a fire truck, or a supervisor. In the performance of this reporting of crime, he may have to shoot someone, or make an arrest... but he will always be ball and chained to that eternally damnable paperwork. He is an armed secretary. And he will spend a great deal of his life in traffic court, on his off-duty time. This gets incredibly worrisome, after a few years.

I am glad I was a police officer. Like being a lifeguard, you learn invaluable skills that make you a much more observant and powerful person, mentally. I came away from that job with enormous powers of detection, and comprehension. I can profile just about anyone, and usually I am right about that person. Profiling is police work, despite what the Liberals say about it. It is the job of a police officer, to prejudge people, and to make learned assumptions that are correct about people. It is what they are paid to do. It keeps them alive, in the course of their duties. It is what a lifeguard does, every day... only the politics of Liberal government have not yet intruded into the pool areas, as they have done upon our streets, and highways, and into our prisons. Not yet, any way.

But I am glad that I was a police officer. The job has eroded into a Click It or Ticket stupidity that I cannot even imagine. It is now all about enforcing an unreasonably low speed limit in an area where the natural and workable speed is ten to fifteen or so miles an hour faster... in an area with a speed limit so low that one has to really ride the brakes to maintain it... and all because it generates revenue to write tickets of this type in those areas... Areas where you only frequently see patrolmen at the end of the month...



About the time they went from carrying revolvers to carrying automatics, the job just sort of died for us Old School types. When they stopped allowing full-bore high speed chases. When they went from leather to velcro. Police officers now seem so civilian, in their attitudes. They do not even use Ten Signals, any longer... nor Codes... The aura of a knight, or a cavalry soldier... a protector of the realm... is gone now, Swept away. I spoke with a policeman in Roanoke last year after I was rear-ended at a light, and he seemed just like us, the civilians. Maybe it was the computer in the front seat which told me that he was doing his own dispatching, these days... Running his own 10-28s and 29s, and criminal histories, instead of calling them in... But there was no feeling of being in a superior presence; of that awe and wonder about the man and his job. He was on our level. Not like in the old days.

Maybe that's a good thing, now that I am a civilian, once again. But it is not the job I knew, at all. My time is over, as a law enforcement officer, and I am glad of it.

I made every major case that I wanted to make... from stopping armed robbers to recovering many pounds of narcotics and stolen property. And I never had to shoot anyone. I always had the power to convince the suspect upon whom I had drawn down that I was deadly serious, and always got the compliance that I needed to make the arrests without incident. When a policeman has to fire his weapon, it means that the situation has escalated out of his control. And that job is all about this kind of control, and nothing else. About keeping that lid on things, and keeping the department out of liability. And that imagined aura of police officer superiority we once enjoyed, even though it was never real, always helped us do just that.

One should be a policeman when he is young, and still has that aura of immortality about himself. I lost that, at the age of 24, chasing a suspect off a porch in Daytona Beach. He and I both hit the ground at the same time, and knocked the wind out of us both... It was a few moments before I could get him handcuffed. As my sergeant appeared, and jerked him up, and threw him in the back of my cruiser, still gasping for wind, I was just beginning to be able to breathe again, myself... and it was then that I began to realized that I was not immortal. I stayed longer than that, of course, but the shield of invincibility was cracked, now, and not as strong as before. A great number of policemen killed in the line of duty have been there forever... thirty years, or more, at times... Sure, young cops get killed, too... mostly from inexperience... but the older ones, I think, should make an exit long before the odds catch up to them. Like gunfighters, or race car drivers...

I do not see police work as a career, nor did I ever see it as such. If you stay 30 years in patrol, people want to know why you never made rank. Rank, or being a supervisor, is a whole other job, entirely. You now have to do several police officers' jobs, including your own... and it gets worse the higher you go up the ladder. You have to become a nanny to your patrolmen, and see to it that they do their reports properly. You have to train them, and evaluate them, and you lose that edge; that hunter's instinct, because of these distractions. Your officers are now making the initial contacts, and the really exciting stuff. You, as a supervisor, get called in later, while it is still going on... but the thrill of the chase now belongs to the line patrolmen. The song does not remain the same! Police work is like being in the military... if you stay long enough, you will usually be promoted out of the job, itself, and into administration, farther and farther away from the streets, until you wear a white shirt with gold brass fittings, and stay inside all day long... And you lose the job that way.

If you do not make rank, dissatisfaction will consume you, utterly. If you stay on the streets forever, and watch your rookies that you yourself trained become your supervisors, it has a very negative effect upon you. And you lose the job that way...

So being a police officer on patrol is not a permanent situation, for anyone. And that is why I did not choose to continue looking for work in the law enforcement field of municipal city police work. The job has still not been professionalized, even though they have been trying to make it so for the last thirty years. The job just does not have enough benefits, and enough going for it to attract that sort of a reputation. The first policemen, centuries ago, were trash collectors on a night watch of the town... The job is a little better than sanitation, these days, but not by much... Like sanitation, it is a necessary activity... but unlike sanitation, the direct contact with people should make the job a priority, like school teachers, and day care workers... and lifeguards... but none of these jobs has the real aura that they deserve... nor even the aura that they once enjoyed... and they have never been paid anywhere what they are actually worth... none of them.

Except in police work, people are shooting at you... and usually when you least expect them to be doing that... So, no, I did not decide to push the odds any further. I was satisfied with what I had already accomplished, and knew it was a different game, if I stayed... but not one that would make it enticing enough for me to stay in it.

At the end of the day, the difference I made was not permanent, and has long been forgotten. Except to those to whom it mattered. Like me, they remember.