We Are the Cops (26 page)

Protect your own assholes. If you don’t protect them, nobody else is gonna. A guy with like a million years on the job told me that. And he was correct.

As a culture, we continue to divide – and many liberals will not agree with this but it’s just my opinion – and this goes back to having the St Patrick’s Day parade. Every single time we create a parade for a culture, we have created another divide. We’re never
going to be a melting pot or just one culture and all be ‘Americans’ when we have the St Patrick’s Day parade or the Puerto Rican Day parade, for example. I truly believe that it continues to divide the cultures.

Now, instead of having the Latino Parade that all Latinos can enjoy, you have the Mexican day parade, you have the Dominican day parade and at these parades the youth fight with other youth that are not of the same culture as them. They say people just want to empower their culture but really, truly there is a division there that people don’t see.

Gays have been fighting to get into the St Patrick’s Day parade but have been denied. So, you have the Gay Pride parade now but the arguing continues about why they can’t march in the St Patrick’s Day parade.

Now, in policing we’re bringing many of these people onto the police force and we’re allowing them to recognise their culture rather than just be ‘the police’. We have the German Society, the Italian Society, the Catholic Society, the Irish Society, the Gay Officers Action League, the policewomen – everybody’s just separated. We’re not working together and that is a reflection of society. We’re doing it in society and now we’re doing it in policing and it’s going to continue to mushroom. We’re allowing separation.

Everybody wants to represent their own culture. Well, you can represent your culture at home but you have to keep it separate from your job. How do you attend an anti-abortion rally but then also protect somebody who wants to get an abortion? How
do you go to a Klu Klux Klan rally and protect the people of their First Amendment rights? You have to check your own beliefs and opinions at the door. The problem is, I don’t think officers are checking it at the door anymore.

Officers are now complaining about investigations being carried out on certain organisations or groups; for instance, complaining about Muslims being investigated for terrorism. We have officers making complaints about that. They feel that the police department is creating a stigma – that all Muslims are terrorists. But the police department is not creating a stigma – you simply have to look at all avenues of investigations in order to police effectively.

Religious holidays are another problem. I can’t be off on Christmas Day because, let’s face it, not everybody can be off on Christmas Day. But for a Jewish holiday, all the Jewish guys get the day off. On Friday we have Jewish cops who are allowed to leave early and can’t work late tours on Friday. How does that make other police officers feel?

They’ll say, ‘How come he can do it, but I can’t? How come his religion is more important than my religion?’

There’s the separation that I’m speaking of, because they’re not acting as cops first. If you come on this job, you can enjoy your religion and you can have your religious holidays, but if you make a decision to become a police officer, you have to check it at the door. You’re not a republican, you’re not a democrat – you have no party lines because you effectively have to police all of them.

I’ll have to go and work the Israeli Day parade but they give
all the Jewish guys the day off so that they can attend it. Or they’ll give the Italians the day off to attend the Columbus Day parade. But what if you’re black and you want to attend the Columbus Day parade? Well, no, you can’t get the day off because you’re not Italian. So that is the divide I am talking about – a straight down the line divide.

We keep creating these ethnic barriers and then expect the cops to come on the job and police, but they’re not. It’s a very hard situation and I don’t think there’s any easy band-aid to fix it.

We’ve had an increase of police-involved shootings because nowadays, more often than not, if you come up to a gangbanger, instead of just trying to get away and pitching a gun, they’ll shoot at you. They’ll stand and shoot at you. I think it’s just the lack of respect, but also the political climate. The gangbangers know that they have us on our heels; instead of being aggressive, we’re backing up, and they know it.

They feel they have a little more power and there’s also a lack of fear. I mean, years ago, the people would fear the police and you knew if you broke the law and you got caught or you ran, you got punched; so you’d fear the police. Nowadays they’re begging you to hit ‘em because if you hit ‘em, they can sue you. You lock them up in the car or the van and they’ll sit there and jaw-jack all the way back to the station trying to provoke you. So they know things have changed; they know there’s a difference in policing.

Also, people now size you up on the street. If you walk up to somebody and they’re dirty – they’ve got narcotics on them or a
gun on them or they’ve just committed a crime – they’ll size you up. They’ll be thinking, ‘Either, A) I’m gonna give up, B) I’m gonna try to run, or C) I’ll shoot them.’

So they size you up. They take a look at you to see, ‘Can these guys run? Are they younger? Are they older? Are they fat or overweight? Are they small? Are they big?’

It’s funny, I was working in patrol and on the radio we’d always hear these two cops – partners – call for help. It was like, on a weekly basis. So we’d jump in our cars and go and help them. No issue with that but I was just trying to figure out, how come these guys in particular are always calling for help? I’m looking around and after a while I’m thinking, ‘Man, I’m six foot tall. I have a partner who’s six-four. Athletic.’ And I realised, you show up to a job, whatever it is – a domestic, a battery, assault, anything, a theft, anything – you show up and the criminals, they size you up. These two guys I’m talking about are both about five-five, five-six. I mean, good police officers but if you get out of your car and you’re both five-five, five-six, the crook’s gonna think, ‘If they grab me or if I let them grab me, I’m going to jail. So I’m going to go through them – either I’m going to try to run or I’m going to fight my way out of it.’

So you realise that it helps being in shape. Also your attitude tells them a lot – your reputation, your appearance, whether you’re all dishevelled or not squared away. If you look squared away and you look fit and in shape compared to somebody who doesn’t care about their appearance, or somebody who doesn’t care about whether they’re overweight or not, they know. The
crooks know. They’re thinking, ‘I can get away from this guy.’

I’m not saying me and my old partner never fought with anybody – we had to fight with some people – but they were just a little more determined to get away. But after a while you learn you can’t fight with everybody; you don’t want to fight with everybody. It’s better to use your mouth to get people in handcuffs.

But yeah, people don’t fear the police anymore – not as they used to, anyway.

The job has changed; we’ve become much more liability motivated. There’s a lot more knee-jerk reaction rather than common sense going on. I mean, somebody gets sued and it changes everything. We’re becoming this kind of soft-gloved agency which at the same time tries to be hard-gloved. And sometimes it conflicts.

It may have always have been like that; I don’t know if it’s just that I’ve gotten older in the job and I’m seeing it more. I mean, our policy manual, when I came on, it was maybe three hundred pages. It’s got to be close to eight hundred pages now. Everything is all about liability. We’re very scared to do things that a police agency may have to do, in case it looks bad in the public eye. We would prefer to give the impression to the public that we are handling everything in the most civilised way possible rather than facing the fact that sometimes we are put here to be the enforcers of the law and sometimes it’s not pretty, but it needs to be done. And the criminals see that.

The criminals, they’re getting more violent. They’re getting bigger guns. They’re taking bolder steps. Even music and things
like that are becoming much more violent towards the establishment and towards the police. It’s becoming more acceptable to disrespect the police.

I always say, it’s fine to question what the police are doing – in fact I’m always transparent. But now people actively go after the police and are openly defiant to the point where violence is being perpetrated throughout our society, whether it’s on TV or in music.

The news is also becoming much less objective, and instead it’s becoming more adversarial towards the police. When I was first hired, the news was kind of our ally. There were times when we would screw up and they would rake us over the coals for it but there’s also times when we did OK or did good. Now, no matter what we do, there’s always some controversy involved. If we get involved in a shooting, what’s the first thing the media do? They grab the victim’s mother or father and interview them and that goes on the news. Well, that’s the first thing anybody sees or hears about the case and that then becomes ‘the truth’.

So we’re facing that environment – this society that’s becoming much more adversarial against the police. And our department – and I’m sure it’s happening elsewhere – is becoming a department who is creating policies and taking us in a direction where we are bending to it.

We’ll say, ‘Okay, don’t rake us over the coals in the news. We’ll change.’ But we should be saying, ‘No. That’s just not the way it is. I don’t care what you say or how badly you feel about this. We’re enforcing the law and this is the way that we do it and
that’s the way it should be done.’

But we don’t say that. Instead we bend towards the adversarial side and say, ‘Okay, just don’t sue us.’

The area where I work has got a lot of shit heads. I mean, there’re good people that live there as well but there’s a lot of shit heads that end up there too, so when you deal with them you have to get in their faces; you’re swearing at them and cussing at them. You know, I’m ‘mother-fucking’ the guy and saying, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’ Stuff like that.

But then some officer that hasn’t been on the job maybe five or six years shows up, looks at me and says, ‘Oh my God! You’re going to get into trouble for talking to him like that!’

There’s been a couple of times when I’m ‘mother-fuckering’ some gangbanger up and down and some newer guy comes up and you can just tell – it’s like a deer caught in the headlights – you can tell what he’s thinking: ‘Is he really swearing at that guy?’

It’s totally different from when I was a young, newer officer working patrol. I mean we’d have contests every night to see who could arrest the most people, give the most warnings or find the most drugs or whatever. Now it’s almost like who is
not
going to do the most. Who’s going to do the
least
? Because the new officers are afraid and they have all been taught that they’re going to get in trouble if they do anything.

We’ve had guys getting into trouble for swearing at a suspect! But a lot of the time, that’s the only thing these suspects
will understand.

If you’re saying, ‘Please sir, you just need to calm down and be nice.’ They’ll be like, ‘Motherfucker! What the fuck?’ You know?

If you ‘mother-fuck’ them right back, you’re speaking their language. It’s not like they’re thinking, ‘Oh my goodness! Those harsh words are hurting my feelings!’ Finally they understand.

So you work to your environment.

I think in a lot of your major departments there’re so many stop-gaps that have been put into place that it’s very difficult to have widespread corruption. At least, that’s how I see it with our police department, because you’d have to have a number of people working together who would all need to be prepared to jeopardise their career and their potential future.

The opportunities for that are few and far between. I mean, I’ve worked on task forces where we’ve come into contact with upwards of two million dollars on narcotics cases. You would literally have to have about eight people in agreement on corrupt terms to do something with that or about that and the opportunities are just not there because there’s so much knowledge surrounding it; so many people are notified and the culture has changed – at least it has here.

The culture is, it’s not worth trying to grab a stack of cash from somebody and jeopardise your three million dollar, thirty year career (it is that much when you’re talking earnings and pension) and I think our department has done a very good job of compensating
the employees to avoid someone’s need to be corrupt.

But I still think it happens elsewhere around the country.

We don’t rely on the public. We don’t expect anything from the public. We are the police and we police. We’re not here to fix your problems; we’re here to police you.

The public are a very limited resource – a very, very limited resource. People in general don’t do the right thing. You can’t trust the public; they only do things that are self-serving. There may be a small percentage that wants to help, but it’s a small percentage. People walk with blinders on and they don’t want to be bothered. It’s hard to get them to testify in court even.

It needs to be emphasized sometimes, I think, that the public – that person who called for you – they don’t care what you were just dealing with, they just care that you’re there and that whatever their problem is right now, it is the most important thing that you have going on in your life. And you kind of owe it to the public to be that way.

You may have just been on some ridiculous call or you may have just gotten done with some internal affairs investigation and now you’re going over to see an old lady who’s house got broken into whilst she was out shopping and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Are you kidding me? I’m on a burglary call?’

You need to remember that this is an invasion of her life; someone broke into her house. She doesn’t care that you just got chewed up or that you just saw someone get shot. All she cares
about is that you – the police officer – show up and gives her the service that she deserves. And at times that can be extremely hard to do.