Quote:
Originally posted by jamese
The other thing I find, is they still talk to me even after finding out I'm a cop.
Jim
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A cop!! Click, buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. <grin>
I know your comment was probably tongue-in-cheek, but I'll respond anyway, just because it's early Sunday morning, I can't sleep, and so I'm wasting bandwidth.
I've noticed over the years that gun people are generally more "cop friendly" than the general populace. Gun folks are just more likely to "get it" than others.
Those that enforce absurd and oppressive gun laws with too much enthusiasm are usually not greeted with a smile though.
And its possible that a lot of people who are outraged by the overstepping of federal agents in recent years (sticking a machine gun in Elian Gonzales' face and killing an unarmed mother and baby at Ruby Ridge come to mind) are transferring that outrage to local constabularies.
I hear people say "I hate cops" from time to time. I want to ask them, "Do you hate them when you've been in a bad accident, or when your home has been burglarized?" "Maybe you shouldn't call them when you need help then!"
But I think the biggest problem is that police departments in general don't do as good a job as they might weeding out people who really shouldn't be policemen, and the general populace tend to assume that one encounter with a rude or aggressive cop means all cops are that way. My wife and I have each had an incident in the last few years involving a simple traffic citation and a cop with an obvious anger management problem. These are the kind of guys who should be weeded out as fast as possible. They make the jobs of other cops substantially harder than they need to be.
Cops are people, people have flaws. But cops are also, justifiably, held to a higher standard and when one falls down, people tend to generalize.
Something that would benefit police-public relations greatly, believe it or not, would be sales training for police. A good salesman can convince someone to do just about anything, and do it with a smile. It is actually possible to arrest someone and make them like you at the same time.
I ran a retail store in Oakland CA for a dozen years. You can imagine that in downtown Oakland, I knew a LOT of cops and called often. I used to joke that I'd sent more people to jail from that store than most full time policemen. Most of these guys (cops) had been on the job for years and being Oakland cops, had a lot of experience!
These guys could make a suspect laugh at the same time they were handcuffing him. They just knew how to deal with people. The closest I ever saw one of them come to drawing a weapon was one time when our "favorite" cop was removing an aggressive drunk from the store. He put his hand on the butt of his weapon and told the drunk, "if you breathe on me again, I'm going to have to shoot you". Everyone laughed, including the drunk, and the situation was totally defused. (I imagine he would have gotten in trouble with superiors for this if they had found out, but he just instinctively knew it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.)
One thing I observed in Oakland during the 1989 earthquake (I was right in the middle of it), I'll never forget and this left an indelible mark on all the cops we knew. By the time of the earthquake I knew the face of just about every ne're-do-well and petty thief who liked to hang around the downtown area. To the astonishment of everyone, when the shaking stopped, the looting did NOT start. (We had not so much as a pencil stolen and we were dealing with a lot of damage and some injuries, so it would have been easy.) The street-dwellers everyone thought would have taken advantage of the situation were instead helping to dig others out of the rubble... all over the city. I witnessed this directly and everyone else noticed it too. In some cases they were working shoulder to shoulder with cops who had previously arrested them. This phenomenon was talked about for days afterwards. The dregs of society had risen to the occasion to become the heroes of the day. The expected crime wave never happened and in fact crime dropped dramatically those first few days.
I don't ascribe to the "there's good in all of us" theory, but it's a lot closer to the truth than I would have thought prior to that earthquake. Cops have a very tough job dealing with the bottom of the societal barrel every day, and many become jaded pretty quickly. Remembering that all but the very worst of us has that potential hero inside of him could make the job a lot easier.
OK, I'll shut up now.