Lights and Sirens
Part 47 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“Part of the reason the public is misinformed about the true nature and cause of gang violence is the gatekeeping function the media has assumed for itself. No matter how reasoned the argument or how well supported by facts, dissenting voices are stifled. The media is wedded to an ancient paradigm that no longer applies to the realities on the streets in America in the twenty-first century.”
~ Tony Rafael, The Mexican Mafia
Bubbles
When you are tasked with policing the streets of America, it can be challenging to sustain your motivation. As an officer you are steeped in disdain—you are up to your neck in it every day—and it isn’t always benign. The ferocious and sometimes violent ignorance of the average citizen will eventually take a toll, both psychologically and physically, no matter how well trained and steeled against the blows you might think you are. And there really are no days off. They tell you this in the academy, and it turns out to be true: you are always on duty. Your easy trip to the grocery store is now colored by the way you see the world. You can spot a crook from a great distance, because you spend your days among them and crooks have things in common the untrained eye doesn’t see. You don’t walk the aisles the same way, you don’t stand at the checkout counter with a stupid grin watching the checker scan your vegetables. You watch everybody, you watch hands—which are the root of all evil—you turn your back on no one, and you carry a concealed gun wherever you go.
There comes a time, and it comes quickly, when you simply can’t turn off the safety habits you learn and employ while working the street, while jacking up a gaggle of gangsters on the corner, walking into the seething chaos of a domestic, or responding to a man on a park bench who is cutting himself into ribbons with razor blades.
You will lose friends you had before you were a cop, because being a cop triggers a deep resentment and inveterate suspicion in the people you know. By virtue of the shield you carry, or maybe it is the oath you swore, they no longer see you as a person, they see you as an entity, a corrupted and thoughtless robot, a kind of Borg machine with suspect intent. Dinner parties will devolve into diatribes and angry stories about how neighbor Ted was mistreated by the cops when he got a speeding ticket. You will be bombarded by horror stories of corrupt cops and bad shoots and poor decisions broadcast on an endless reel by the network news and offered as evidence that the world of policing is inherently rotten. You sit there and take it, watching them wind up with that rare and righteous disdain reserved for cops. They will tell you, over a steak and a glass of cabernet, how all cops are liars. All of them. Which means that you are too, though you are not meant to take offense. You sit there and think: Last night a fuckwit threatened to kill me and burn down my house, how could you possibly hurt my feelings? And it’s always for nothing, of course, their little brush with the law that only confirmed their worst suspicions. The complainants are dead certain they have crossed paths with an egregious conspiracy, represented for all eternity by you and your presence at the dinner table, and are convinced of their righteousness in the eyes of Olympus.
