ONLY A COP
Lenny Stover
ONLY A COP
by Harry T. O'Reilly
______________________________________________
I was at a cocktail party recently in Manhattan and my host, in efforts to
get conversation going between people with mutual interests, introduced me
to a shiny, well-groomed young man who had recently earned his master's
degree in criminal justice. When he learned that I was a retired cop who
was now teaching at John Jay college, he remarked that his father was a cop.
When I asked where his father worked, he replied, "Oh, you wouldn't know
him. He never did anything important. He's only a cop in the 32nd
precinct." My host saw the look on my face and before I could put my drink
down so that both hands would be free to choke him, he whisked the kid off
to a neutral corner to protect him, rushed back, and begged me to forget
about it. I couldn't, so I'm writing this column in the hope that this
message will reach that young man and so many people like him who are so
quick to minimize the role of the working policeman in our society.
I never worked in the 32nd precinct, and I don't personally know any cops
who do, but I've visited there a few times, much against my will, when I was
"flown" in to supervise a detail of men who were supplementing the
precinct's manpower during various crises over the years, and I know what it
is like to work there. I don't know that kid's old man, but I do know
policemen, and I know that whether your beat is in New York City's Harlem
district or in a suburb of Los Angeles, the nature of the job doesn't vary
that much. The volume of activity may be greater or less, and the
surroundings may appear to be different, but the dangers and the problems
and the stresses and the heartaches are very much the same.
Listen closely, son, I'm going to tell you about your father. Your
reference to him as "only a cop" upset the hell out of me, because "only a
cop" implies a sense of failure or lack of achievement because he's not a
sergeant or lieutenant or higher. How many brothers and sisters do you
have? Did grandpa die and leave you a ton of money? If not, are you aware
of the financial realities of raising and educating a family? Do you have
any idea of how difficult the competition is to be promoted in an occupation
where there are limited vacancies and opportunities for advancement? Are
you aware that if you have to work a second, and sometimes third, job to
make ends meet, that maybe you are too weary to study or attend the
promotion-tutorial classes? Are you aware that for many men, being "only a
cop" can be so fulfilling that there may be no desire to be promoted?
Have you ever noticed those green, white and blue bars over your father's
shield? Have you ever asked what they represent? I can assure you, he
didn't get them in a Cracker Jacks box. Each one of them represents a
superior achievement in a job where bravery, courage, danger and brilliant
police work are considered routine.
While the chiefs and bosses were sitting in headquarters sending down those
orders to "use restraint" and while the sociologists were trying to explain
(if not to justify) why people were rioting or looting, he was more
concerned with staying alive as boards, bricks and rifle fire came down from
the rooftops. Despite his own fears, he was very careful as he fired his
revolver towards the rooftop not to hit one of the innocent, curious, decent
people who stuck their heads out of the windows of the apartments where they
had barricaded themselves in fear.
He never told you about the time when half a cinder block thrown by a
"social protester" crashed through the roof of the patrol car, narrowly
missing his head as he and his patrol partner drove along a side street on
patrol.
He never told you about the rats, the pissy hallways, the fights or the dead
babies. You never knew that when you were a kid he wrestled with you on the
living room floor while the Popeye cartoons blared out of the television set
that a few hours earlier he was wrestling around on a filthy sidewalk with
someone who was intent on taking his pistol from him and blowing his head
off.
You wonder why he didn't show too much emotion when you cut your hand
playing ball and had to get stitches. Perhaps he has become jaded to pain
and suffering. Perhaps he felt that your hurt was small in comparison to
the accident which he handled the night before where he saw brains spattered
across a windshield and a severed arm and smelled fiery death. Perhaps you
should be proud and grateful that after that he still had enough feeling
left to kiss the boo-boo and hug you and pat your head, brief though the
moment of tenderness may have been.
When you complained of him "never being home," he was usually out
moonlighting to make the extra money required to pay off the house that he
couldn't afford, but bought anyway, in order to get you away from that old
neighborhood when he saw the violence and crime increasing. When you
complained that he "wasn't there when you needed him," it wasn't his
choice - he was out earning the money to pay your tuition while you whined
to your friends about how he didn't care about you or understand you.
When he came home from work after a hard day and seemed a little abrupt to
you, you sulked and felt abused and unwanted. You didn't know that yet
another case had been thrown out of court due to some legal technicality
after he risked his ass making the arrest, or that he had been hauled down
to the civilian complaint review board again on some unwarranted charge
because his accuser knew that lodging charges against the officer can be
helpful to the defense in a criminal prosecution, or that an overzealous
boss who never worked in a combat zone before was on his back over some
petty rules infraction.
Maybe your pop is at fault for not sharing his job-related problems with his
family. Maybe we all are. Maybe in our efforts to protect our loved ones
from our frustration and pain, we fail to communicate to them the very facts
which would help them understand our anger.
Perhaps you would have understood if your father was a "hollerer," one of
those cops whose wife always complains that he "takes the job home with
him," the guy who yells and rants and gets it off his chest and then goes
back the next day to do the job again. Maybe your pop needed that kind of
ventilation to void himself of the frustration he felt and the humiliation
and the painful criticism of his work at the hands of the self-styled
"community leaders" who by their visible and vocal presence purport to
represent a community whose decent, hard working people do not share their
views of the police, but who are more concerned with day-to-day existence
and survival in a poverty area than they are in politics or community
affairs.
When he came home for dinner late with a few drinks on his breath, maybe he
had to stop off so that he could open his heart about some painful aspect of
the job to brother officers who could understand what he was saying, rather
than inflict pain on those who he chose to protect. Perhaps he
underestimated the strength of you and your mother, who might have willingly
shared the pain and commiserated with him, or perhaps it would have been too
much for you to handle. Who knows?
Your father has listened to the station-house rhetoric for years. He knows
the old timers who claim to have given up, but who still will fight you to
get up the stairs first on a gun run. He knows the young buffalos who bitch
beyond reasonable bitching but still do the job, and he knows the angries,
the men who never seem to feel good about themselves because of the
seemingly endless struggle against an unrealistic bureaucracy that demands
so much of them and offers so little in the way of reward or compensation.
After all, they are "only" cops.
Your father has sat in the back room of the precinct and listened to the
negative remarks and the ethnic slurs of his colleagues which, to an outside
observer might indicate a deep-rooted hatred for the people of the
community. But he tolerates the remarks, not because he is afraid to take a
stance, but because he knows that cop's true feelings, and that the same cop
who is doing the bad mouthing would not hesitate for one instant to crawl
into a burning tenement and risk his life to save a child of the same ethnic
minority which he was defaming a few hours before.
He has shared the joy of birth.....in fact, there are kids walking around
the neighborhood bearing his first name, just as you do....because he
delivered their mothers of babies in a taxicab or in an overcrowded,
sweltering tenement apartment. He has smiled with his people, and he has
grieved over the deaths, the shameful waste of precious life, which is part
of the lifestyle of his community.
He has stood in the rain with tears streaming down his face as they buried
yet another of his brothers who was killed in the line of duty. You never
heard about it, but he lost a piece of himself each time it happened, and it
happened far too many times.
Your "only a cop" description tells me that perhaps you think your old man
isn't too smart, yet he had the wisdom to insulate you from the hardships
and hurts of his life and to try to raise you in an atmosphere of normalcy
that was denied him for at least eight hours a day for the greater part of
his adult life.
Now son I'll get off your case. I can understand your feelings, and so can
your old man, believe it or not. I am not looking to lay a guilt trip on
you. Maybe your father didn't talk to you enough. Maybe you weren't
listening. As the song says, "There aint no good guys and there aint no bad
guys." But I'd like you to take a step back and take a look at your old man
again. You're looking at a man who has seen more of the evil and negative
side of life than anyone else you have ever known, and yet he is still able
to be sweet and gentle when the time is right to be soft. He is a strong
man, with a strength born of surviving a steady diet of painful episodes,
any one of which might shatter a lesser man. He has been through the fire
that can destroy or purify, and he has emerged as tempered steel. Try
talking to him sometime about the theory you have learned on the way to your
master's degree. You missed something somewhere along the line in your
education if you can say that as a working cop your father "never did
anything important." Maybe if you can communicate with your pop and
combine your formal learning with his street wisdom and knowledge of the
real world, you can get something that will give you the impetus to effect
the changes necessary to create a viable criminal justice system at some
point in the future. The one we have now isn't working too well, I'm
afraid. It's you and the people like you who will have to be the catalyst
for change.
Just remember as you proceed in your career that your pop is, as all cops
are, part of the thin blue line that each day preserves our civilization as
a misguided society systematically places frustrating stumbling blocks in
his way while protecting the rights of the criminal element and virtually
ignoring the rights of their victims. It's an awesome job, and yet he can
still come home at the end of a tour and kiss mom on the cheek, ask you how
things went in school, go on with his life, and go back into the pits again
tomorrow.
I guess being "only a cop" is a pretty worthwhile thing to be.
______________________________________________
About the author...........
Harry T. O'Reilly was the Director of Investigative Services Training for
the Multi-Regional Criminal Justice Training and Education Project in
Aurora, Illinois; an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Law
and Police Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Director of
the Institute for the Study of Investigative Services at John Jay College;
and a 20 year veteran of the New York City Police Department, working as
Detective Supervisor in the robbery, burglary, homicide and sex crimes
units. He was decorated 28 times for outstanding police work.
Robin*
And then monkeys flew out of your ass.
"Lenny Stover" <mppd...@the-police.com> wrote in message
news:NedJ7.1837$2S2.1...@feed.centurytel.net...
SnowLeopard
The way I see my police duties in the past, those I hope for in the future, is
that I did my job, I worked to make the system work. I'm a bureaucratic
generalist and perhaps, a relentless element of the system. Will I be
disappointed if I, say, never make a huge commercial poaching bust? For the
glory, no. From the standpoint of putting such a person out of action, yes.
But I have been, want to be again, that dependable element that people look to
to get the job done. A regular.
That said, I will admit that one should not cut down what one does. "Just a cop,
never did anything important." I'm not sure that is a cut down. Now, "never did
anything" is.
Is the work important? Of course it is, but any work that needs to be done tends
to be important. Should we attach glamour to it? Increase the visibility of it?
That one I leave on the table because in my mental makeup, I don't think we
should but that just may be my calm approach to things.
I have done so many things and when it is necessary for people to know, I toot
my horn. But I do not put those things out on a billboard for all to see always.
-Traci
("There is no shame in being part of the regulars.")
Lenny Stover
"Robin*" <sprin...@earthlink.net> wrote
>
> And then monkeys flew out of your ass.
I think you are confusing my ass with yours. (and it's gerbils in your ass,
isn't it?)
Lenny Stover
"Robin*" <sprin...@earthlink.net> wrote
>
> And then monkeys flew out of your ass.
I think you are confusing my ass with yours. (and it's gerbils in your ass,
isn't it?)
Robin*
Good retort. You go to a special school?
Robin*
No, it's monkeys, and it's your ass.
Steve Furbish
"Robin*" <sprin...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:PdKJ7.51156$hZ.48...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Well Mr. Bullock, at least he shows evidence of having gone to a school of
some sort. Was that "monkey(s) flying out of your ass" comment supposed to
be presented as original or profound? Because, if so, we know you're a liar
or stupid (or both).
Steve
Robin*
"Steve Furbish" <sfur...@mediaone.net> wrote in message
news:B4aK7.4456$eh7.2...@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net...
My post was as original as Limpy's. And you wouldn't know honesty from your
ass.
Lenny Stover
"Robin*" <sprin...@earthlink.net> wrote
> Good retort. You go to a special school?
Um......yea. Lets see........
Chicago Police Academy
Tennessee Corrections Academy
Police Training Institute
Morton College
Multi Regional Criminal Justice Training and Education Project
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc..................
Lenny Stover
>
> "Robin*" <sprin...@earthlink.net> wrote
>
> >
> > And then monkeys flew out of your ass.
>
ass,
> isn't it?)
This *must* have been a good retort as Robin indicated, since it posted 3
times LOL
Steve Furbish
>
> "Steve Furbish" <sfur...@mediaone.net> wrote in message
> news:B4aK7.4456$eh7.2...@typhoon.ne.mediaone.net...
> >
> > Well Mr. Bullock, at least he shows evidence of having gone to a school
of
> > some sort. Was that "monkey(s) flying out of your ass" comment supposed
to
> > be presented as original or profound? Because, if so, we know you're a
> > liar or stupid (or both).
>
>
> My post was as original as Limpy's.
Yet yours was offered first chronologically, and seems to indicate that you
hold yourself to different standards than you employ to judge others?
> And you wouldn't know honesty from your ass.
If it's foreign to me it's completely alien to you big guy.
Steve