~a column by colleen O’Brien
My husband was a cop who came to dislike cops.
I did not know this until some time after he’d become a law enforcement agent. But when we never went to the cop parties it dawned on me that something was up. I knew about them, the parties, because I knew sheriff deputies’ wives, but when I asked my husband for the third time why we never went to one, he said, “I just don’t like ‘em.” He’d been tested (academically, psychologically, physically), then trained and put to work as a cop with cops: first in the jail, then in a patrol car and then by the end of his second year, as a detective, and here he didn’t like cops. Something was up.
So I kept asking, and finally he said: “They drink too much, they smoke pot, they do coke and they exchange wives. Still wanna go?”
Well, uh, no. really, said I, wondering how this could be true. After all, this kind of stuff went on in novels, not where we lived and worked, not in San Diego. I was on him like a fruit fly on a week-old plum. “Who?” “Where do they get the pot?” “The coke?” “I already know they drink too much,” I told him, “because the lieutenant told me when he interviewed me before you were hired. And that there’s a high divorce rate. Is that from the work itself or from the trading of wives?” On and on I asked about what I thought took place only in authors’ wild and crazy and truly interesting stories.
In the following years I learned a lot more about cops, some of it through the media, but most of it through cops I knew and liked – i.e., my husband and his two cop friends. I had always known he revered the law and felt privileged to uphold it, protect citizens and arrest bad guys. We didn’t talk much about this part of it, and I always felt he found it sappy to go on and on about.
But by the time he’d been a homicide detective for a year or two, I began to see a subtle eroding of his respect for the law, not just the law enforcers who failed to enforce at their own parties (and who knew where else). At first I put it down to one of the hazards of being a cop–cynicism – since they deal mostly with the dregs of society (especially in a big city), and because normal society doesn’t like cops at all unless they’re retrieving its lost possessions.
But it was more than that. What it came down to was my husband finally understanding that if you were poor or of color or a woman accusing some guy of rape, the law operated differently than it did for a well-off white guy. First of all, the well-healed got better lawyers. Secondly, the district attorneys, elected sheriffs or police chiefs, the mayors treated the “suits” with respect–and sometimes, even if they were the accused, with downright cordiality. Rape victims were just as often treated like liars. And Blacks and Hispanics were often physically manhandled.
So, a couple of years after it was federally mandated that law enforcement hirees include everyone, across the board, however ill-qualified, ill-suited or untrainable, my husband left the department and the job he loved more than any other he’d ever done. How could he work with men and women who should never have become cops and who were, according to him, “badge happy, gun happy and leather happy”? “I’ve had it,” he told me.
I’m almost glad he’s not still around to witness what of late is almost a killing a week of a black kid. (And who knows how many others, and for how long, that we’ve never heard of and never will?) If he were here right now, he’d be totally impossible to live with because of the continuation of what he began to see so many years ago — too many cops across the country who are ill trained and/or can’t or don’t know how to handle a job that must involve holding in their hearts and minds and bodies the sacred responsibility of life and death.
