Thought Experiment

Start here , and please don’t click on until you’ve read and thought about the article.  I’ll wait. 

I told you I’d wait.

A friend recently pointed this out as an example of a cop who really gets it, and, well, my friends aren’t always right.

Let’s back up for a moment.  Lawofficer.com , like officer.com and policeone.com , is one of the of-by-and-for-the-cops niche websites.  Its intended audience is, well, cops, and covers things that many folks who wear badges find interesting, whether it’s the benefits of flash drives , the importance of rotating ammo , or how to turn a hunch into a legally defensible stop . 

[To digress for a moment:  it’s around the margins that these sites are the most interesting, by and large.  The comments here, like the forum over at the editor’s previous gig, are unedited, and often revealing — in both good ways and bad.  This particular article doesn’t have any comments; all that’s another discussion for another time.  Short form, for now:  you can learn a lot about honor and dishonor in police culture in these cop forums and in the comments.  I’m going to post on some of the pretty awful stuff you find under some rocks there some other time, but for the moment, you can find a ray of hope in at least one discussion of the mooched cup of coffee ; look at the comments from “jgb in MN”.]

What’s most revealing in a lot of this — some of the unwitting naked revelations aside — is what isn’t said.

But let’s look at what was said and done in a report of an event that my friend pointed out as an example of a cop who really “gets it”:

We can all lose our cool from time to time, but when someone does, the rest of us should help bring things back under control, not pick fights. We’re supposed to be the professionals.

Sure.  That’s definitely talking the talk, but let’s look at how the guy actually walked the walk, shall we?

Bullethead — the fellow from whom the above words of wisdom were dispensed — really likes his job.  He’ll tell you how cool it is — and how cool he and his friends are.  They make warrant arrests of people who definitely committed have been credibly accused of really horrible crimes.  It’s high-profile; they get a lot of ink, and he likes that.  Beyond that, he and his buddies are leaders of men — “When the people in this unit aren’t finding super scum, they’re fielding questions from troops needing mentoring and guidance or conducting training at their own agencies.” 

All of which is, at least in principle, very cool, indeed. 

So, upon being informed of the location of a murderer, two groups of these super cops are supposed to converge upon the location and, well, bust the guy.  While Bullethead (hey, I didn’t make up this guy’s handle; he did) doesn’t get into the details, there’s some obvious issues that even an amateur like me can spot — since the perp isn’t nailed down, if they don’t get him now, they may have some trouble finding him later; and they do want to both surprise him (murderers, upon occasion, may prefer not to be arrested and perhaps might choose to commit various naughtinesses upon the persons of the folks trying to arrest him), and they do want to arrive in quantity.

Which makes sense. 

What doesn’t make sense starts from the beginning of their little road trip:

My partner starts flying down residential streets [they’re headed for a “distant suburb.” JR] like a NASCAR driver. This is when amateur hour began. 

Yup.   And the fine professional law enforcement officer — our own Bullethead — doesn’t say, “Hey, slow the hell down.  Now.” 

We were a block away from the target when a guy stepped off the curb. My partner didn’t even tap the brakes. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but it was probably “I’m important, so move or I’ll run you down.”

And Bullethead, having apparently taken his vow of silence after getting into the car, doesn’t break it now.  

Then the law of unintended consequences jumped up and bit us in the ass.

Well, no.  The Law of Eminently Predictable Consequences jumped up and bit a lot of folks in the ass.  Let’s read on.

As my partner speeds past him, the guy turns and throws a bottle at us and shatters our mirror. Not a reasonable response to speeding . . .

Nor, for that matter, a reasonable response, on balance, to some moron driver just about fucking running a pedestrian over, which is, after all, what the guy was responding to. 

but something that could have been avoided by tapping the brakes.

Or, even more easily, by having his partner say — and mean — “This isn’t a NASCAR track.  Slow the hell down, now.” 

They proceed to arrest the alleged murderer– which only goes off well, according to Bullethead, because everybody else “was still in the game.”   His partner — he calls him “18-years” — is focused on the guy who broke his mirror, and —

along with Bullethead, whose vow of silence is still firmly in place, and who carefully isn’t saying, “Hey, call it even.  You drove like a self-important asshole; he broke your mirror; think of it as a teaching moment, so when the troops need mentoring and/or guidance, you can give them this as an example of how acting like an asshole is a bad idea”

— heads back to arrest the kid who he almost ran over, which they do.

As soon as 18-years snatches the kid up, the family starts coming out and asking questions. Instead of answering them, 18-years goes into defensive mode, telling them to copy his name off of his raid jacket and refusing to answer questions.

Oh, goodie.  Bullethead, of course, is busy not explaining himself, either.  (We’re not sure exactly what he is doing, although he implies he’s trying to “deescalate things.”)

Then 10-years cop shows up, and instead of helping me deescalate things, he starts stroking up the family even more, and he ends with a straight challenge to fight the kid’s family.

At which point, finally, a light goes off over Bullethead’s pointy little, and he orders the two other jackasses to “clear the area.” 

And, finally, we get to the point that my friend found so impressive.

What’s the point? First, even seasoned cops in a high-profile unit can turn into complete idiots for very little reason.

Well, yeah.  In this case, it was because one of the Special People, while acting like an asshole, provoked somebody else to act like an asshole. 

Second, we should remember why we’re here. The important work we were doing that day was overshadowed by the stupid actions of a couple of jackasses.

Well, yeah, but you’re missing the point, Bullie; you elide right over it in the next ‘graph.

We’ll all have to kill time in court because this kid is going to fight us . . . 

Hope so.  Not because it was okay for the kid to throw the bottle at your maniac-driving partner’s car — it wasn’t — but because the whole damn thing could have been avoided if either of you had acted like a grownup, and been thinking with your brains, rather than your badges. 

Yup; he drove like a dangerous idiot — and you just sat there and let him. 

. . . and we’ll probably end up in Internal Affairs as well.

Waitaminute.  You mean that after your idiot partner almost ran down a kid, and then busted him and — with the help of a ten-year-veteran cop — did his level best to escalate a misdemeanor arrest into a fucking riot, you’re only “probably” going to end up in IA?  You mean to tell me that you didn’t, once you came to your senses, call your partner’s maniac idiocy to the attention of his supervisors, and did your damndest to see that he gets whatever training, supervision, and consequences he needs so that he doesn’t go slamming cars around the fucking streets like they’re a NASCAR track again?  You didn’t even point out to your readers — all cops, like yourself — that you could have prevented the whole thing by shutting down your partner’s idiocy from the moment he started driving like a lunatic?

Keen eye for the obvious:  doing the right thing in the first place would likely have had a more serious impact than writing it up later on, ending with pious, buttery pronouncements like, say, this:

On top of that, one more family will forever hate cops for nothing more than the ego of one idiot who still doesn’t get that our power comes from the consent of the people.

We can all lose our cool from time to time, but when someone does, the rest of us should help bring things back under control, not pick fights. We’re supposed to be the professionals.

Yeah, you are.  Supposed to be.  A whole lot of supposing going on.