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From A Cop: Thank You, Jay Nordlinger
There is never enough time to read everything one wants. Pages are dog-eared as magazines are thumbed through, all with the intent for them to be read as soon as time allows. The magazine is set aside, soon to be covered by others, similarly dog-eared and thumbed-through. Eventually the pile grows large and is thrown into the bin with a wistful sigh.
But once in great while, you reach into that pile and extract a treasure, which is exactly what happened to me when I came across a piece by Jay Nordlinger in an about-to-be-discarded issue of National Review. The Ricochetti of course know Jay as the co-host, with Mona Charen, of the weekly Need to Know podcast. But if you don’t subscribe to National Review magazine — the one printed on good old-fashioned paper, or its digital equivalent — and have it delivered every other week, you are denying yourself some of the best writing available anywhere.
I refer you to the piece titled “A Job Like No Other” that appeared in the Sept. 22 issue of NR. Written with the recent troubles in Missouri in mind, the article addresses police work and the men and women who do it. It’s behind a 25-cent paywall, and I would consider it a quarter well spent. I offer here a short quote that nicely sums up the modern police officer’s lot:
The truth is, I think, we want the police to appear when we want them to appear, applying exactly the amount of force we deem necessary. We want them to be invisible, until we are threatened, when we want them to swoop in out of nowhere to save the day. We want them to be perfect — according to our own views of perfection. In this sense, a policeman’s job is thankless.
Much thankless work lies ahead, in Ferguson and elsewhere, when the mob soon finds itself unappeased. On behalf of all people who perform this thankless job, thank you, Mr. Nordlinger.
Published in General
What’s this “we” stuff? You have a mouse in your pocket? I want the police to leave me alone. I want them to not threaten my wife with arrest for turning on her hazard lights when they turn on the disco strobes and driving another quarter mile to pull over under a street light rather than doing so immediatly on a dark road (and calling 911 to relay to the deputy that was the plan.) I want them to realize they are civilians and members of the citizenry, just like everyone else, empowered with legitimate use of violence to protect the rest of us, not just themselves. I want them to remember we have the Constitution and a Bill of Rights to restrain the state, not empower it.
My father was a former DOJ attorney who spent much of his life as a consultant to police depts and court systems. He told me many years ago (using the LA police as a specific example) that there was an expectation among the American middle class that drifters, the ethnically undesirable and the entire criminal element would be kept away from decent folk. People tacitly assumed this entailed force and other unpleasantness. They just do not want to hear about it.
Seeing the dark side of all levels of society while being held to the highest possible standard is a strange kind of stress, to try not to be swallowed up in the hypocrisy that defines the scope of one’s profession.
Over the years I have seen some astonishingly professional cops maintain in circumstances where I would have lost it. And I have seen some dangerous local morons who get protection out of undeserved loyalty behind the shield wall. I don’t forgive the latter but it does not make me any less appreciative of the difficulty inherent in the profession.
I would offer the first comment above as proof of the linked column’s premise.
I miss the roll calls and the officers I worked with. I have seen my share of unintended and intended mayhem. I have been on calls that after they have ended you find yourself staring into the abyss. You catch yourself and remember that the abyss will stare back if you’re not careful.
My experiences do not make me superior to those that have not worked the streets. I’ll just say that I have seen things that most people have not seen. I have seen death come for those that did not deserve it and I have seen death come for those that have deserved it. I have seen lives shattered by violence. I have known good police officers and I have seen officers that should not have been wearing the badge.
The one thing that you have not seen is me standing behind your desk criticizing every decision you or one of your co-workers have made because I have no expertise in what you do for a living. I made decisions in a matter of seconds knowing full well that they would all be analyzed in slow motion.
I think cops are a lot like lawyers. The bad ones make life much more difficult for the good ones and do a tremendous amount of harm to the profession.
KP: I’m truly sorry you’ve experienced the kind of gung-ho gonzos you depict above! I’m also reminded of a shattering experience in my extended family here several years ago, when state LEOs (who are local for us) truly strove to serve and protect.
I get that the police deal almost exclusively with a segment of the population that cannot be classified as civil society, but that is still no excuse for treating the 97% of us who are not under the care of correctional bureaucracy like criminals.
For a different National Review perspective, Kevin Williamson sounded more like The King Prawn yesterday: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390971/meet-new-serfs-you-kevin-d-williamson
Too bad all I got in the mail was the front cover of that issue, in a clear plastic bag, with an apology from the USPS. Somehow the magazine was damaged in transit from NR to my house, and all that survived was the front cover. The conspiracy-theorist in me wonders if the mail-woman (mail-lady? neither word sounds correct) didn’t do the damage herself, then did she probably at least smile about it, as she shoved the squashed up piece of mail into my mailbox?
I am sorry, but after what TKP has been through, I am willing to cut him some slack.
Since the system is clearly broken, and police are part of the system, you can at least acknowledge that there are problems.
I still maintain that traffic laws are part of a big problem of erosion of trust. Red Light cameras and speed traps clearly set up to generate revenue. Cops that speed without their lights on.
Where I am most likely to run into the police is on the road, where I am chilled every time I see a cop car, even if I am not speeding. Cops on the road are the enemy of drivers in a world where giving tickets to otherwise law abiding citizens is the norm.
I want the police to be the “good guys”. I know many who are. We should not, as a system, be using them in ways that make them the enemy of drivers. We should not have red light cameras, radar guns and speed traps. By all means, pull over drivers who are a danger.
I can use a specific experience that happened to me:
I was coming home from an event with my wife. In getting off the interstate, I was startled by a big rig that was too close to my lane. It is one of those interchanges where exiting traffic moves to the left, while entering traffic moves to the right (I hate them). Anyway, he was moving to the right. I drifted to my right, onto an ample shoulder that is the size of a car. No sound ridges. No dirt. Just poured road, with a line on it.
Anyway, I moved into the lane I wanted after the big rig passed me, a bit shaken but OK. I proceeded, at the speed limit, or maybe 5 miles over, to head on my way. As I was turning onto my next road, blue lights. I pull into a parking lot and wait for the police to come to me.
I get “I pulled you over because you served back there. How much have you had to drink tonight?”
Now, I know saying anything at all is a fast track to jail. Admit to one drink, and even if you are not .08, I could get pulled in. Still, people want to be honest with the police, so I told the truth that I had two drinks, at 6 and 7 (it was 12:30).
Now, he let me go with no ticket or anything. However, I still felt attacked, scared, and violated. I was spooked by a big truck, and he used that as an excuse to pull me over and check me out. It is not right to stop me going about my way when all I did was avoid being hit by a truck.
Because of that, my trust in the police is just a little bit less. Is that a good or bad thing?
Yep. If the police were at least held accountable for this mistakes, but they are not. They do whatever, to whomever, and then go about their lives, leaving death and tragedy in their wake.
Please, Mr. Dumphy, come back and defend all these things or put them into some sort of perspective as to how any of the things in this article are the police somehow crossing a fine line.
I am willing to grant them leeway in split-second situations. But this stuff (and their willingness to shoot dogs)? Seems like will-to-power to me.
It boils down to this:
Don’t treat me like a common criminal when I am not. To the police, there are not upstanding citizens. Unless they are connected. IF you are connected to say, the VPOTUS, then by all means you get a pass.
Rules for one set of people and not us, and the police are there to make sure that the rulers are kept safe from us serfs.
I have received some absolutely beat-to-hell NRs in my mailbox, and have had the same dark thoughts.
We just got back from a trip to Ireland. I could have sworn I packed the latest copy of National Review in the outside (unlocked) zipper compartment of my checked luggage. I do not recall seeing the magazine after that.
I think that I’ll be tearing the cover off my Nov 3 edition. You?
Yes, if the mailman wants to rip that one apart he can have at it, and I will send him a thank you note.
I figure that if I get pulled over, no matter the reason, that police officer may have had one or two interesting events happen to them in life – maybe even something that day – that I will never experience. So I’m going to do the right thing, be polite, show my hands on the wheel, ask permission to move my hands to get my wallet and registration, etc. For two reasons:
1. I might not be happy being pulled over, but he or she’s got a gun.
2. He or she’s the one person I’m going to call when I really, really need help, and I don’t have a gun.
3. Police, generally, will run to the sound of gunfire. I, generally, will seek cover.
I don’t pretend to think that all cops are angels. I’ve met plenty of tools along the way, guys who I don’t think should carry a badge and have the authority they do, but there’s no way to weed these people out en masse.
For the most part, we’ll never have to see the world through their eyes, nor be required to do the superhuman in the worst of circumstances. So I try not to make their day any harder than it already is, because I’m pretty sure that the odds of me getting a gun pulled on me during the work day is pretty low – theirs is much higher.