Saturday, January 16, 2021

Saturday Snippet: Things Cops Know

 

Police work is often a closed book to many of us.  So much goes on that can't be described to outsiders, because it's too brutal, or too agonizing, or too gut-wrenching.  As a result of this and other factors, cops carry a terrible load of stress, resulting in much higher divorce and suicide rates than most other professions.

In an attempt to help the rest of us understand how cops think and feel about their job, Adam Plantinga wrote a book titled "400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman".



It was very successful, so he followed it a few years later with a sequel, "Police Craft: What Cops Know About Crime, Community and Violence".



Obviously, he has to "sugar-coat" certain aspects of the job, because they're too raw and brutal to be shared without that precaution.  I've worked in a law enforcement supporting role (as a prison chaplain, and a visiting chaplain to local agencies), and I've seen some of that rawness at first hand.  Nevertheless, even being a little reticent at times, he does a great job of conveying the reality of police work.

I'm going to quote several excerpts from his first book, "400 Things Cops Know".  I hope they give you a taste of the book as a whole.


Once in a while, even with the deep-rooted cynicism that comes with the job, you’ll get a casualty so raw that you carry it with you long after you clear the assignment. Like a seven-year-old girl who is struck by stray gunfire while playing outside her house and who dies at the scene in front of her family. One minute she is skipping rope. The next, she’s gone. And you read the rest of the news headlines that day. The government is unveiling a new food pyramid, which recommends one more serving of vegetables and one fewer of grains, and the price of gas is up three cents, and Paris Hilton has a new fragrance out. And it all seems so stupid and petty. And no, the whole world doesn’t come to a grinding halt just because a little girl is murdered on some corner in some city in America. But maybe, just for a little while, it should.


* * *


You’ll get hurt on this job. It is a certainty. It is the cost of doing business. After thirteen years, I’ve been socked in the face, kicked, and head-butted; had a chunk taken out of my right palm; and been hit by a car driven by a fleeing felon while I was on foot. During melees, I’ve sprained both my wrists so badly that I couldn’t put on socks for a week and smashed up my left elbow to the point where, even years later, whenever I rest it on a hard surface, it feels like it’s on fire. I’ve been black and blue from head to foot. My right ankle still makes unnatural sounds after I rolled it going over a fence in pursuit of a suspect. But my injuries pale in comparison to those of other cops I know who have wrecked lower backs and bulging disks in their necks from traffic accidents, who have sustained broken ribs from fights with combative suspects, who are convalescing after being shot multiple times in the chest during close-range gunfights, or who have had fingers bitten clean off by plumb-crazy people. You tend to get excellent health coverage with this job. That’s good because you use it all the time.


* * *


If you respond to a holdup alarm at a bank with a suspect potentially still inside, you’ll tape everything off and cops will be covering the perimeter with shotguns, awaiting the order to go in. This will not stop citizens from driving up and asking if the bank is closed. One time I told a guy, yeah, it’s closed because of a bank robbery that could still be in progress. He then asked if he could just pop in briefly to use the ATM. “I have to get money out,” he explained, as if this ATM possessed magical money-producing properties that the dozens of other ATMs at nearby unrobbed banks did not.


* * *


As a cop, it’s easy to get discouraged about the state of today’s youth. You don’t see much of the honors student bound for Dartmouth, because he doesn’t do anything that would cause him to come into contact with you. You mostly see the teen hustler wearing a jacket with dollar signs written on it gearing up to break the Ten Commandments but good. You patrol neighborhoods where toddlers chew absently on cigarette butts from the ground and two-year-olds with matted hair and jam-smeared faces play unsupervised in the street. You see fifth graders with girls’ names tattooed on their arms. You talk to teenagers whose dad is locked up and whose mom is strung out on dope. The kid’s breakfast is a bag of chips and his lunch is a butter sandwich—which is exactly what it sounds like—and his friends are all just like him and some of them are carrying guns. Does it really come as a shock that these young people tend to fall out on the lawless end? They’re just little criminals waiting to become big criminals. The shock would be if they turned out halfway normal. You marvel at the few who make it. It’s the equivalent of muscling their way out of quicksand.


* * *


One of the reasons you have your hands so full with wayward youth is that people who arguably shouldn’t be reproducing are having two, six, nine kids and counting with a slew of different partners. I ran into a guy named Milton once, a foul-mouthed con on parole for homicide who proudly boasted that he has sired thirteen kids, none of whom he could support, but most of whom were named after him. He was going to have even more kids, Milton told me. He was going to create an army of little Miltons.

Or take twenty-one-year-old bipolar street hooker Veronica, who sports a tattoo on her left shoulder that says “Bitch” and has a small bandage on her arm from a recent gonorrhea shot. Veronica has given birth to two children, one a four-month-old boy and the other a one-year-old girl, and the Bureau of Child Welfare is a regular visitor to her house regarding allegations of child abuse and neglect. Veronica is having problems with one of the children’s fathers, a man named Andre. Veronica has a domestic abuse injunction against Andre, and Andre has a similar injunction against Veronica, legal orders that both of them routinely violate. Ask Veronica how it’s going with Andre and she’ll tell you matter of factly that she “bit his ****” during their last encounter because he tried to rape her.

These parents make one think of a passage from The Closing of the American Mind: “But they have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others.”

What they have instead is the ability to create generations of family units that are at best tangled and at worst hopelessly broken. Some of these kids may claw their way out of their situation through a combination of determination and luck, but the deck is stacked. This influx of maladjusted, physically and mentally unhealthy kids is at the core of many of our societal problems, especially when they grow up into maladjusted, unhealthy adults who commit a boatload of crimes.


* * *


In winter, some families who can’t afford rent still string a hundred dollars’ worth of Christmas lights down their front porch, and suspects flee from the police on foot and often shed their jacket or hooded sweatshirt to avoid detection. In rough weather, this doesn’t always help them, because if you respond to the pursuit and see someone badly underdressed for the climate, you know something is up. Guys don’t walk around in just a T-shirt when it’s 15 degrees out, unless they’re fleeing from the police or they’ve just lost a bet. If you don’t find the suspect but do find his jacket abandoned in the bushes, you set up containment on the block and wait him out. If you’re tooth-chatteringly cold in your heavy winter cop jacket and long johns, you know he’s hurting without a coat at all. After about five minutes, suspects have been known to walk out from their hiding spot and turn themselves in, electing for jail over dying of exposure. If the suspect doesn’t emerge, you pack up shop and leave. Maybe he’s frozen in mid-stride, in which case he’ll turn up come spring thaw.


* * *


Sometimes you’ll find dope on a suspect and then later, when you’re back at the station typing up your report, you may struggle to remember where exactly the stash was on that guy. Was it in the left side of the coat? The front of the hoodie? The back of the shorts? Right rear pocket? Left rear? Front lower right? Perhaps for this reason, an inordinately high number of police reports indicate that the narcotics were recovered from the suspect’s right front pants pocket. This particular pocket has been known to serve as a universal fallback when memory falters. Although once in a while, this can lead to complications. I’ve heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a street officer who indicated in his incident report that he recovered drugs from that very pocket.

“That seems a strange place for this man to put drugs,” the reviewing sergeant said.

“Why?” the arresting officer asked.

“Because,” the sergeant pointed out, “he’s got no ****ing right arm.”


* * *


Longtime officers and detectives from Sensitive Crimes often look physically and spiritually weary, as most people would if they were exposed to a steady diet of crimes against children. If you talk with them for a spell, they’ll describe the unique nature of pedophiles to you. You could take Halle Berry, they’ll say, and parade her around naked in front of these offenders and they won’t care. They’ll push past Halle to get to that seven-year-old boy or ten-year-old girl. You see, they’ll continue, most crimes are a means to an end. A guy robs a store because he wants money, not because he necessarily likes robbing places. If he had another way to get money, he probably wouldn’t rob the store. But for a pedophile, the means—sexual contact with a child—is the end. He has no other way to get what he wants.

Perhaps the other reason they seem weary is that their work involves conducting investigations into child pornography, especially those cases where the suspect has documented his or her own sexual contact with children. And you understand this. Because as a patrol cop, you never forget the first time you have to see it, especially if you have young children yourself. It is representative of a broken world, and there is such a disconnect between those vile images and the way things should be that your mind recoils at what goes on in the dark corners. You may think, even with everything you experience as a street cop, that there is still more good than evil in the world. When child pornography is in front of you, you question this assumption. You question it deeply. And you realize that if a suspect is in custody for such an offense, he may not be safe from you. You contemplate, just for a moment, how it would be well worth it to go into the cell and get your hands on him, worth it to lose your job and be charged criminally just for the chance to spend a few minutes physically punishing him for his unthinkable crime, as if this violence would somehow restore the balance of things. But you don’t do that. You lock it away. When you get home that night and watch your own sleeping children, you may weep. And if those same children ask you at some point if there are really such things as monsters in the world, you wonder if you may truthfully answer no.


* * * 


Police psychologists have testified that the typical police officer will see more human tragedy in the first three years of their career than the average person will see in a lifetime. You wonder if this is the aftermath you have to look forward to. You retire, bitter and iconoclastic and fifty pounds heavier than when you began, and get in four to twelve golden years of retirement, fighting heart disease and gout now instead of crime. And then you die. I heard a veteran sergeant once talking about his retired cop neighbor, a neighbor who spent most of his post-career days looking vacantly out on his lawn, a man whose sole focus was to mow immediately after the sergeant did so his grass would be more freshly cut than the sergeant’s. “You lose your mind after a while on this job,” the sergeant mused.

What’s more, recent FBI statistics show that police officers are six times more likely to kill themselves than the general public, a figure that more than triples after retirement. I know five people who have committed suicide. All of them were cops.

All of this is enough to make you vow to treat yourself better. Eat more raw vegetables. Listen to classical music. Maybe buy a smoothie machine. You gotta do something.

You also have to find a way to get meaningful sleep. Because as a working cop, you will battle the kind of sleep deprivation that any doctor or firefighter will understand. Whether it’s from working unanticipated overtime because your district station is awash in gangland shootings, or having morning court after a long night’s shift, fatigue sets in and has its way with you. You’re typing a police report that could put a dangerous felon away for life and you’re so tired you can’t remember what day it is. You get up from the desk to walk into another room to get something and you stop still because you can’t remember what you came in for. The defense is grilling you on the witness stand and your head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. The instructions on your bottle of caffeine pills say just to take one but you pop three. It’s no way to live, and your job performance suffers for it.


* * *


The job will change you. It changes everyone, for better and worse. You will become far more alert to your surroundings. You will keep your gun hand free even when off duty. You will become hyperaware when taking money out of ATMs, day or night. You’ll look inside convenience stores and banks before you enter to make sure you aren’t walking in on a holdup in progress.

If you didn’t curse before you became a cop, you probably will once you have six months in on this campaign. You will curse like a dockworker. You will also become angrier. More disillusioned. Far more skeptical about the inherent goodness of humankind. The constant exposure to toxic social conditions and dealing with people at their hopeless worst solders an extra layer onto your skin. You see too much darkness, and it becomes part of you in ways you may not fully understand. Some describe this condition as compassion fatigue, the main symptom being a vague sense of loathing for human frailty and for one’s self. Maybe this extra layer is good. It keeps you from being emotionally invested and affords you the detachment you need to be an objective investigator. It acts like a suit of armor against the elements. But part of you may want to be, well, illusioned again. Part of you wishes that guy you used to be, the one in the police academy with the fresh haircut and the extra-shiny shoes, wasn’t such a stranger to you now. You know that for the most part, it’s good that guy is gone. He meant well, but he wasn’t an effective street cop. He was too hesitant, too trusting. He’s been replaced, and you don’t expect him back.

But once in a while, you sort of miss him.


When you get frustrated about cops and law enforcement, it helps to think about what they go through every day.  It's a different world behind the badge, one that many of us can't even begin to imagine.

Peter


21 comments:

McChuck said...

The American problems of policing do not arise from the police. They arise from the courts who let the villains back out on the street, again and again and again.

The mid-90's drop in crime arose explicitly from the "three strikes" (and similar) laws. Which were recently undone in many places.

gwalchmai munn said...

I try to buy a cop lunch once in a while, just because.

The Lab Manager said...

I would guess if we could end much of the welfare system and let many of these useless eaters starve, things would be a lot better.

Seems to me much of these societal issues were probably created by government.

STxAR said...

Dad was a Texas Peace Officer in Lubbock in the bad days, about 1965-1985. It was a tough place. He looked like the guy this man describes.

He was an athlete, sharp as a tack, and funny as all get out.
I've only seen a couple of people able to outdraw him.

I watched him burn his uniform once, after recovering a week old body in summer...

The hollow look after watching a trapped driver burn down to cinder...

He made me swear to not be a policeman or a deputy. I think that was quite a gift.

Aesop said...

Hear, hear.

You simply have no idea.

The heroin addict you literally bring back to life from 0 respirations, who then m*****f***s you endlessly because you blew her high.

The five year-old whose x-rays shows 9 different fractures in various stages of healing.

The drunk in earnest, and with a huge grin on her face, explaining to officers babysitting that what she did on her ____th DUI was "no big deal", because no one's explained to her yet (nor is she sober enough to grasp it) that she plowed into six pedestrians and killed three of them, and police officers and paramedics described finding literal body parts scattered all over the street.

Doing CPR on a 20-year-old whose best friend stabbed him over some stupid argument, cut three major vessels, and with every pump, you're just squirting saline and whole blood right back out onto the floor, and he was probably dead in 10 heartbeat pumps before paramedics got there, but you don't give up on 20-year-olds after 5 minutes. And you can still see that particular shade of yellow his tongue was because there wasn't a drop of blood left in him on arrival.

I still love my job, but sometimes, if I could get that MIB flash memory-wiper, I'd erase that kind of stuff every shift, and be happy to not recollect. Ever.

Every day you wake up on top of the grass, enjoy the sunshine, hug your family, and be absolutely fall-to-your-knees grateful to almighty God, Fate, or a merciful Universe for everything you have.

Tom said...

Not really. In fact, back in the days of no social safety net, it was, believe it or not, even worse.

Unknown said...

Fred Reed wrote the cop beat for a number of years.

Spamtrap said...

Back when I was a newly minted police officer a veteran gave me some sage advice.

"You deal with the scum of the Earth day in and day out. When you reach the point that you automatically assume that everyone is the scum of the Earth, it is time to get out."

kamas716 said...

Another excellent, if older, look into policing is COP World by James McClure. He rode around with the San Diego PD gathering info into the then new policy of Community Oriented Policing around 1980. It was a sort of follow up/contrast to his previous non-fiction book Spike Island about policing in the UK, Liverpool area if I remember.

Beans said...

It is that bad, and worse. And for everyone wanting to legalize drugs and who say we're losing the drug war (which we have, not because of the cops, but because of the prosecutors and judges who circumvent the laws and sentencing guidelines because they feel drugs are a victimless crime) I say talk to a narc detective. Who has had to review cell phone video of toddlers stumbling in and out of clouds of smoke (not always pot smoke, saw one where everyone was smoking heroin and, yep, right into the child's face they all blew.) Who has to basically put on Level III biohazard to go into a house because everyone in there has MERSA and a thousand other nasty diseases. And then, because of lenient judges and prosecutors and idiots who want to legalize drugs, have to go back to the same house and do it all over again 4, 5, 10 more times in a year.

It's why you get cops who do things like 'accidentally' aim the flash bang for a couch or known pile of garbage.

Or who, after dealing with overdoses over and over and over again, of innocents hurt, of lives shatter, get kind of peeved when the local pusher gets mouthy and swallows a double fistfull of drugs just like last time, but this time he dies, and now everybody gets pissed off, not at the drug pusher for croaking, but at the cops who had to subdue the P-O-S and now face murder charges over bullscat.

Scratch most crimes today, including some pedophelia cases, and you'll find drugs are a common root cause. Seriously, people selling their kids to pedos for drugs or money for drugs. Kids selling themselves for drugs (more a teenager thing, really.) Car burglaries? Drugs. Most murders? Drugs. Most assaults? Drugs.

And yet the public and the prosecutors and judges think that drugs are okay, they can be managed

If every pusher was charged with the overdose death of his clients, the world would be a much nicer place. But no, because drugs are a victimless crime...

Yet they still try to sue gun manufacturers and sellers for the deaths caused by the illegal use of said guns.

And you wonder why cops get jaded and quit, leaving only the idiots and the politically indoctrinated in charge?

Beans said...

And to make matters worse, nothing's changed in 50 years. I'm watching re-runs of "Adam-12" and the same stuff they were facing in the late 60's and early 70's is the exact bullscat we're facing now.

Meth.
Heroin.
Pot.
Cocaine.
Pills.
Rape.
Child abuse.
People yelling at the cops because the cops are doing their damned jobs.

Old NFO said...

Those horror stories are what harden LEOs and medics world-wide. For every story one has, there are ten or a hundred just as bad or worse... dammit...

Skyler the Weird said...

I worked an intake center doing fingerprints and mugshots in a large Southern jail. It was very stressful even though we weren't commissioned officers. It was called the Glamour Slammer cause the local federal judge thought the prisoners were unfairly treated. They always came in with a chip on their shoulders cause they knew they'd be coddled. One guy was let out and came back a week later wanting back in. When he was turned away, he got in his car and wrecked the Sally Port and was promptly arrested.

One wino was arrested so many times I could recognize his right thumbprint. He was usually a John doe in the local county hospital prison ward. Had to testify once that twins cannot borrow the other twins fingerprints. Got to see the seriously dark underbelly of local crime and local law enforcement.

dogsledder said...

The Miltons of the world should be forcibly sterilized. Sound cruel ? Who fucking cares ? Sometimes you must break eggs to make scrambled eggs.

Rick T said...

I worked a few years as an orderly in a local hospital, and we were small enough I covered every ward/department on 2nd or 3rd shift. I spent a lot of time in our ER when I wasn't moving patients or setting up traction for new admission.

I remember a dual ER admission from an auto accident. In one room we had the drunk driver who was uninjured. In the other was the driver he hit dying of flail chest. It was all we could do to not go in to Room 1 and throttle the clueless bastard..

The Freeholder said...

My son's best friend went to the local community college and got his BLET cert. He went to work for a local department. At first, I guess it was fun chasing bad guys. Then he was nearly killed in a traffic accident-not on duty, just trying to get to work in a bad thunderstorm. I saw is patrol car. If I hadn't known it was a Crown Vic I wouldn't have recognized it. Months of convalescence. Once he went back to work, I think something happened while he was on duty. Don't know what. It took a bit, but he quit. Works now for something like $13/hr in an electrical parts house. Much happier, even if he's as poor as a church mouse and lives in a shit neighborhood.

After reading this, I'd say the kid got smart early.

Unknown said...

I've got some sympathy for the good cops (and in most places, that's the majority of them).

That said, there are a lot of bad ones.

And the good ones pull the "thin blue line" crap to protect the ones who should be permanently relieved of duty, if not imprisoned themselves.

Which is why I only have *some* sympathy for the good ones.

Heck, I keep my nose clean, actively avoid stupid people, being in stupid places, or even drawing attention to myself.
I've still had very unpleasant interactions with policemen several times. There's too much "let me hassle a random citizen so I can get my fix of feeling powerful" going on out there. And the police don't police their own.

5stonegames said...

Beans, in order to win the war on drugs you have to have border control and neither the Left nor Right will permit it.

Basics first. The less stuff allowed in the US, the less drugs we'll have. Combined with various laws that deal with precursor chemicals and the like and you could reduce drugs to "plants that can be grown" and a bit of this and that.

If we were really serious about it and we aren't, we'd be cracking down hard on unmarried moms and deadbeat dads. Again not gonna happen.

So without those fundamentals, you can't win and crackdown efforts will amount to nothing since the inexorable demands of the market will win. As Mexico is fond of saying "We wouldn't be selling them to you if your people didn't want them."

Will said...

Our "War on Some Drugs(TM)" will never work. It is just a makework system, designed to tax the public and to restrict freedoms. It's just like our anti-gun laws. Stop focusing on objects. Instead, make their misuse the focus.

Humans have always found various types of mind altering substances attractive, some more than others (both people and drugs). You can't legislate that out of existence. A better strategy would be to go after the misuse of them. Harm someone while under the influence of a drug, put them in prison. I would think that a year minimum would be a good baseline for a first offense. Make it painful/costly to run afoul of this, and the world will improve. You can't make the world perfect, like the Leftists and other authoritarians attempt, but you can make it better than it currently is. Our current drug war is a sick joke.

emtgene said...

Spent 47.5 years as a first responder. State Trooper, EMT, volly firefighter, small town cop, SRO deputy. PTSD. Please, spend your retirement as a release from the stress.

Marco the Lab said...

Our church regularly offers the congregation to fill out hand written thank you cards with prayers on them and include a restaurant gift card for policeman. I think that is getting rare now days.