Please Note: I got way too involved in thinking about this post, and in my efforts to give the OP an honest answer, it caused me to dig up some personal memories that I had shut away.
There are some examples of real-world violence and sadness in my post, so exercise your own best judgement before reading further:
I thought this would be easy to answer, but in the midst of it I started thinking about my son, and how I would answer him if he asked what I thought about him becoming a police officer. Trying to put it on paper was difficult, and I kept getting to three, four or even five pages of stuff and would erase it all because it wasn’t right.
It’s important that I say that overall, I absolutely enjoyed what I did for a living. There were days when something about the place or the job really ticked me off, and I went through periods of being disillusioned, but for the better part of all those years, police work fit me like a glove. And I had a great career with eight different assignments that just got better and better. Not once did an ambulance load me up, and my very few trips to the ER were for minor stuff.
And the retirement benefits are not bad at all
Thinking about it brought up a lot of old memories. I thought of my soon to be 20-year-old son who is so full of light and energy and started thinking about me when I was 20 and graduated from the police academy. Walt’s post that he linked to in which he mentioned memories of the charred body of a suicide reminded me of my own similar memories. Mine was forgotten for twenty-five years, but when I read that, an extremely vivid picture from that night leapt into my head. Thinking about this thread over the last several days made that memory come back repeatedly. To steal a line from Tommy Lee Jones,
That's one of a hundred memories that I don't want.
I think this turned into a cathartic exercise for me, and as many times as I’ve stopped myself from posting a reply, I started typing a new one. Last night I couldn’t get to sleep as I kept remembering things that happened that I had forgotten for years. I’m hoping I can post this and then slam the lid on this stuff.
The guy who was our main shrink for all of my career was a very smart man who had a lot of insight into what makes cops tick, and how they react to the stresses that their work brings on. Most of us have what he referred to as the “police face” and the “Husband/Daddy face”. We act and think one way at work in order to stay safe, and we act another way around our friends and family because you can’t bring the things of the street into your home and expect to have a sane and happy life.
In twenty-three years of marriage, other than an occasional glimpse of Mr. Policeman, and couple of phone calls home to say “if you’re watching the news, don’t worry because I am okay”, I kept work at work, and that’s where it stayed.
Once I started thinking about my oldest being a cop there were memories that had been compartmentalized for years. It started getting very complicated for me emotionally. A huge part of my life has been dedicated to keeping the real ugliness out of his life. I remembered when he was 4 or 5 years old and he and I were watching television together. He fell asleep and I started flipping channels and stopped to watch some crime drama. There was a scene in which a police officer was killed, and suddenly, my son who had woken up and was watching with me, suddenly grabbed me around the neck while violently sobbing.
I don’t remember his exact words, but the message was clear. Apologies and assurances spilled out of my mouth as I hugged him back.
That was a tough moment for me. Before that night, I didn’t think that he understood what I did for a living. The uniformed phase of my career had been over long before he was born, and I must have naively thought that he had not yet picked up on the truth. That he made the connection between what he saw on television, and me, and felt the emotions that he did, made me realize the gentle innocence of that kid. Keeping bad work stuff away from home became an even greater priority in my life from then on. Thoughts of him doing police work were something that never crossed my mind until I read this thread.
So, in this exercise I tried to imagine my kid in patrol when I was his age, and the more I remembered things the more I thought to myself that I must be mis-remembering things. It couldn’t have been as bad as I was recalling. There were lots of good memories, but in the midst of it I would suddenly remember something that was not so good. I kept seeing all the people who tried to kill me, and I remembered what seemed like the countless times I found myself stepping over bodies, pools of blood and spent shell casings. And worse than all of that were the just horrendous injuries and deaths in car wrecks. The aftermath of a shooting or cutting can be almost peaceful compared to what happens in motor vehicle wrecks.
I remembered going to a lot of police funerals.
It all seemed so incongruous with everything else I remember, especially the last half of my career. Sure, it’s a big city with its share of violence, but nothing like what I was remembering. So much of the last 15-20 years on the job were relatively similar to what most everyone else here has related. I did wind up in a deadly force incident two years before I retired, but I worked narcotics then, and we did a lot of really dangerous stuff every night.
Nothing seemed unusual, but the things I was remembering from the first five years were demanding an explanation.
It came to me last night to go look at some statistics and some things I had stuck away in a box in the closet. I wasn’t wrong in what I was recalling; it was an incredibly violent time here.
A few brief figures for comparison to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Today there are 2.3 million people in a city of 600 square miles, policed by 5,000 officers. There will probably be around 300 murders this year, 10 – 15 instances of police officers using deadly force, and unfortunately 1 or perhaps 2 officers might die in the line of duty. Lots of bad stuff, but about what is “normal” for big cities.
Then I looked at the 80s. 1982 was a dark crescendo to a decade filled with lots of bad stuff. That year there were 1.5 million people living in 500-550 square miles, with a little more than 2,200 police officers. There were 705 murders, and more than 600 fatal motor vehicle accidents. There were 77 incidents of police deadly force that year. Two of those were mine and occurred exactly one month apart, almost to the hour. Five officers were killed, three by gunfire, one motorcycle officer hit by a drunk driver doing 87 MPH and another motor officer killed in an accident involving a gasoline tanker, the stories I heard about that are the stuff of nightmares. The two motorcycle officers were killed on the same day.
For every one of those deaths of police officers, or citizens murdered or killed in an accident, there were…I don’t know, something on the order of 50, or maybe 100, that were seriously injured by assault or vehicle collisions.
1982 was a bad year.
One of the officers killed by gunfire was a very close friend of mine.
In March of that year she and her rookie were assigned to work a temporary morgue at the scene of a high-rise hotel fire that killed 12 people. I went by there to bring her a fresh battery for her handheld radio, and I was there when the bodies of a family of five were brought in.
She was killed in a narcotics buy-bust in August of that year.
I remember the nights when we left the doors to our car unlocked because there weren’t enough handheld radios for everyone on the shift. We justified it by saying, “If I have to fight my way back to the car to call for help, I don’t want to have to look for the keys when I get there.”
There was one night while I was taking time off, and my regular partner was almost killed. By fire ants.
That almost sounds comical, but the real event was one of those unpleasant memories of someone’s nightmare of a night at work. Since I was off they made him ride with a less than sharp rookie, that we had nicknamed “Spanky”, or “The Squirrel”. They stopped off for a couple of cold drinks at a convenience store, and as they were leaving a guy stepped out of the pool hall next door and was in the midst of venting his rage at the world by firing his gun in the air. He looked to see the police car backing up at the same time they realized what the “pop-pop-pop” noise was. He decided to re-target at the blue & white.
It all culminated with my partner chasing the guy around the back of the shopping center, only to find that the bad guy had stopped running and was laying in ambush. Two rounds past my partner’s head made him fall to the ground in mid-run, only to land on top of his gun at the bad guy’s feet. He was laying in fire ants and basically had to play dead until the guy got tired of laying in wait for the rookie to come around the corner. Meanwhile the ants started biting, and if you’ve never been the victim of a fire ant, I can only describe the sensation as white hot molten pain.
It was a no handheld night for him, so he stumbled back to the car and tried to call for help. Back then everything was overtaxed and insufficient to the demand, including radio airtime. The radio was just non-stop calls and requests for backup from 8 at night until 4 or 5 the next morning. We had an unwritten rule that nobody got on the radio for anything self-generated unless it was they needed help. We didn’t call out on anything routine like traffic or suspicious people/circumstances, and we didn’t even advise of our arrivals at calls scenes. He couldn’t get any free airtime, and, as he told me later “I just kept the mike keyed and screamed for like 30 seconds so they would shut up.”
At the hospital it was looking bad for him and the prognosis was not so great.
They were about to crack his chest when he started to come around. He said that his doctor told him later that they believed he survived only because he was in such good physical condition.
There were never enough cops for anything on the street other than trying to keep the lid on the war zones. There were a lot of one-man units because they were trying to cover most of the beats. For a while they would always send another one-man unit to check by on anything that had the potential for danger, but that didn’t last long. On some nights there were ridiculously dangerous situations being responded to by a single officer.
One such Saturday night, when it was as busy as it ever got, I was dispatched to a shooting in progress in an apartment complex parking lot. When I arrived, all I found were about 50 shell casings, some spilled Tecate beer cans, a ziplock baggie full of limes, a .380 pistol, and blood trails leading off in different directions. The only available unit for backup got pre-empted by a similar call a couple of blocks away. At that point there was no backup, everybody else was either downtown booking prisoners or scattered around the district dealing with their own little slices of the big nightmare.
Following the blood trails lead me to the victims. One dead in the bed of a pickup truck, one made it to the second floor landing of a stairwell, the third died in the bathtub of his apartment.
SOP was to hold the scene and wait for homicide to show up. Only they weren’t coming, or so the dispatcher informed me. There were fourteen murder investigations already in progress, all three shifts of homicide detectives were already working those locations.
Fourteen homicide scenes in one night, and a lone patrol guy working a triple homicide by himself, I don’t know if that ever happened before or since, but I know that I lived it that night. Of course the scene down the street, where my erstwhile backup was, that was the other half of my scene. They were the guys who showed up to start the shoot out with my beer-drinking victims. One dead and three wounded down there.
Eventually, as I was half-way done botching up a crime scene investigation that was way over my head, a half-asleep and very rumpled day shift homicide detective showed up and the whole mess was his. Another unit eventually showed up, and we got it worked, but I doubt that investigation would win any award as an example of good police work.
But that was the way it was back then, we didn’t go to work, we went to war.
I did not set out to have a psychoanalytical moment over this. It started as the search for a honest answer and turned into something else. If I thought I would stop typing these things and then erasing them, I would never post this response. But I want to close the door on it and move back to happier thoughts. You get stuck with the mess because I feel that the only way to move on right now is to post it and just stop thinking about the subject.
At least I came up with what I would do if my son asked the OP’s original questions.
I would tell him these stories, and some others that only the surviving participants can recall, and which are partially detailed on some old dusty reports in storage somewhere. Not that I would dwell on this aspect, but it is part of the whole package, and I would not feel as if I had adequately informed him if I left any of the truth lay hidden. In twenty-five years I got to do a lot of good by helping people out here and there. I also saw, did, and experienced things that were not very pleasant. Everyone’s experiences will differ, although just about every cop alive can duplicate or outdo just about anything I said here.
There will be many good days, and a few that are best forgotten.