My wife got pulled over a few days ago.  She was behind a MBTA bus on a street where it’s not clear if it’s two lanes or four lanes.  It’s up to the discretion of the driver.  The bus was getting ready to pull back into traffic and, not wanting to be stuck behind it, she pulled around it.  The cop flashed his lights and pulled her over.  My wife sized up the situation and quickly brought herself to the edge of tears.

“Do you know why I pulled you over, ma’am”

“N-n-no, sir,” she sniffled, “I don’t.  What did I do?!”

“You crossed the double yellow line, ma’am.  You could have gotten into a head on collision.  Now that wouldn’t have been very good, would it, ma’am?”

When she related this story to me her response to me was “What the fuck?!”  Naturally, she did not use this line on the cop.  She kind of sniffled with a touch of hyperventilation, acknowledged her mistake and apologized.  He let her go without a ticket.

Contrast this with the following.

I was contracting full-time at a company for about two months.  Five days a week I would drive the same route.  At the intersection where I would take a right onto the street the company was located at, there was street construction for most of that time.  There was always a cop there to make sure that…that…well, there was always a cop there.  I never really figured out what he was doing there.  It may have been that he was making sure that no illegal holes were dug.  It may have been a work release program and he was keeping an eye on the prisoners.  Once or twice the notion passed through my head that he may have been there to direct traffic safely around the construction, but since he most looked down the hole or taked to the crew, I quickly ruled that out.  It occurred to me he might not have been a cop at all.  People ran the stop signs with impunity and often eclipsed the right of way.  A cop, I thought, would want to do something about that.

One more story.

I’m just about to pull out from a parallel parking spot on the street, when a cop coming the other way bangs a u-turn in front of me, effectively cutting me off.  No lights.  No siren.  Nothing.  He saunters (yes, saunters) out of the cruiser into the convenience store I was just in.  It was a little too much for me.  I was cranky to begin with and this pushed me over the edge.  I rolled down my window.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Did you just bang a u-turn in front of me?”

“What,” he answered, stammering a little.  Citizens do generally not question cops and cops tend to freeze up when it happens.

“You just banged a u-turn and cut me off.”

He regained his composure.

“YEAH?  I’M ANSWERING A CALL.  YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?!”

“Well, yeah, I do.  I thought you were supposed to flash your lights or sound your siren when you were going to do something dangerous.”

“HRMPH, HRMPH, HRMPH,” he muttered as he walked into the store I had just bought a pack of cigarettes in.

I don’t hate cops, but I’m not fond of them.  There are cops that truly feel that they are making society better.  There are cops that do not live in donut shops.  There are cops that are not mob informants.  There are cops that walk the talk and live the clean, productive lives that following the laws supposedly leads to.

As a kid I was taught that cops are supposed to be role models.  My mother’s father was a cop.  Cops are what everyone should aspire to be.  They work hard, follow the rules and uphold the laws.  They are honest, trustworthy and fair.  They are Boy Scouts, clean as a whistle and packed into a nifty uniform.  This is what I was told to believe.  This is what I was told was true.

My first face-to-face encounter with a cop was at a speed trap near my house when I was 17.  The New York State Trooper was sitting at the bottom of a hill that had an incline of about 40 degrees.  The speed limit was 30mph.  There are many people that would say that speed traps are not honest, trustworthy or fair.  I honestly thought I was watching my speed down this hill, so when he pulled me over I was bewildered as to why.

“License and registration, please,” he said gruffly.

“What did I do?”

I thought this was a fair question.  I really was unaware that I was speeding.

“License and registration, PLEASE.”  His voice grew deeper and menacing.

“But, I just want to know…”

“GODDAMN IT, SON, WHEN A NEW YORK STATE TROOPER ASKS FOR YOUR LICENSE AND REGISTRATION YOU GIVE IT TO HIM!!”

This was not a good first encounter with the law.  I don’t remember if I got a ticket or not.  I do remember telling my dad that I got pulled over.  He explained to me what a speed trap was and that it was just a way for cops to meet the quota of tickets they were required to meet.  He mentioned something about revenue for the state.

I was floored.  Quota?  Revenue?  Wasn’t the law the law?  He told me that cops had to write a certain number of tickets each month and that the fines paid on the tickets went into the state government.  The quota on tickets was to supply a predictable stream of income.

So much for the law.  It was a rude awakening.  Ruder than when I found out that there were more ads than new stories in the newspaper.  My mother explained that the ads were how the newspapers made money, not from the sale of the individual newspaper.   The more ads, the more money they made.  It wasn’t really so much about the news.  The letter I was planning on writing, she said, would fall on deaf ears. I was 12 at the time. 

Recently, the local cops threatened to go on strike.  Think about that for a minute.  The cops effectively said, “We will not enforce the law unless you meet our demands.”  One of the main striking points was work detail.  Work detail is when a cop stands in front of a hole making sure that no one falls into it.  The city had said that it could not provide the money to pay for cops to stand in front of as many holes as the cops would have liked to.  For this our local protective custodians decided that a strike was warranted.  “We must protect society from holes in the street,” they cried, “Drivers and pedestrians will not think to look for the orange pylons and blink yellow lights denoting the use of caution and may wind up in unthinkably perilous situations!  Only we, the local constabulary, are capable of protecting citizens who traverse the street of our fair city!”  Ok, they probably didn’t say that, but you get the point.

An informal poll of people who usually share my views shows the 99% agree with me.  However, in the interest of fairness, I’d like to expound on my wife’s criticism of my criticism.

My mother, the policeman’s daughter, not surprisingly has a strong interest in right and wrong.    She is also what I call a “private social activist.”  She doesn’t belong to any social justice groups that I’m aware of (parenthetically, she and my father swapped political affiliations – She went democrat and he went republican), but is constantly on the look out for violators of social justice, most notable people who park in handicap spots.  At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is almost a hobby for her.  She is, in fact, a civilian office who can legally write tickets for handicap parking violations.  I went through countless years of teen-age embarrassment going to the supermarket and the malls and watching her follow, harass (and sometimes, stalk) violators.  “Excuse me,” she’d coo venomously, “those parking spots are for the physically handicapped not the mentally handicapped.” I don’t remember her ever succeeding in changing anyone’s mind, but that was not the point for her.  The point was to call attention to the offense in hopes that the offense would not be repeated.  In this, I think her success really lay.  After all, the next time the victim parked in a handicapped spot, visions of my sweet, short, round mother viciously singling him or her out would dance in their head like some psychopathic sugar-plum fairy on Christmas Eve.  Not surprisingly, I have inherited this confrontational trait from my mother.  Click Here for one of the funnier transcripts.

From her, I learned that there was a social order to things.  You said hello to people you passed in the neighborhood.  You said thank you graciously to the cashier and the guy that pumped your gas.  There was a social contract.  All the world was a stage and we were players.  It was up to everyone to play their part properly and to the best of their ability.  Perhaps there is a certain Midwestern or suburban artifice to it, but this is what I grew up in.  When one of the players flubbed a line or didn’t make an entrance, the play got screwed up and they needed to be reminded that life was a group effort and to be more careful next time.

The police played the role of the reminders.

It’s a thankless role, to be sure.  Few people appreciate the work you do.  They write snotty articles critical of your job performance.  They make fun of the fact that you threaten to strike over work detail.  But whose responsibility is it to live up to the rigorous demands of the job?  In the eighties, black people were taken to task for not doing enough to raise the standard of America’s image of them.  Although the motivation was patronizing and offensive (you didn’t hear about “white people” killing “white people” or “men” dealing drugs to “men”) the message itself is honorable and is the basis for most societies – “You are personally responsible to society both locally and globally.  Behave yourself” 

As the enforcers of the law, police officers, one would think, would abide by the law and lead, not be force, but by example.  They are, I would argue, rightly or wrongly the center of this society.  The laws, many of them ridiculous, to be sure, are what America is based on.  In school, we were taught that Law is what defines a civil society.  Justice cannot exist without a definition of what Justice means and that definition becomes Law.

Most people see cops driving or standing on work detail.  Almost everyone drives behind cops because they are afraid to pass them.  How many times have you seen a cop use the turn signal?  With the cops I watch, it’s about 25%.  How many times have you seen a cop jump a left turn?  With me, about 75%.  My admittedly skewed view is that cops are some of the worst drivers on the road.  I would love to do a cable access show some day with one of the features being “Trail A Cop.”  It would document the non-emergency driving habits of various police vehicles.  I mentioned this to my sister one day and was told the following story.

She was driving home from work one day behind a cop.  They were on the freeway.  He got off.  She got off.  He took a left.  She took a left.  He took a right.  She took a right.  Needless to say, she was getting annoyed that this cop was going everywhere she was.  This went on for about fifteen minutes.  Suddenly the cop turned on his lights and braked her to a stop.  He got out of the car and started walking towards her.  What the fuck, she thought.  She rolled down the windows.

“Ma’am, why are you following me,” he asked?

“Wha-,” my sister stammered, “I’m not following you!”

“You’d better not be,” he cautioned, “It’s illegal to follow a police officer.” [Emphasis added]

While this hasn’t dimmed my hopes of doing this project, it did, I admit, strike a small note of fear in me.  Could I really be arrested for policing the police?  And what could the charge be for following a police officer?  And why can’t you follow a police officer?  If a cop can trail me for 10 miles on the interstate waiting for me to go over 55, shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing?

As pointed out by the cop that banged a u-turn in front of me, cops are supposedly allowed to do anything they want to and to question them is out of the question.  Citizens are supposed to entrust their lives and livelihoods to a group of people who refuse to be personally accountable.  Perhaps the owner of the store had called the cop.  Perhaps I’m wrong that there was some kind of emergency, but having just left the store 10 seconds before the cop showed up, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say there wasn’t.  It’s a reasonable assumption, just as cops find it reasonable to stop black people simply walking on the street, to think that this cop was breaking the law he was sworn to protect plus endangering the lives of the other people driving on the street.

When you watch cars run stop signs in front of cops who are too busy looking down a hole to notice, it’s not unwarranted to believe that the cop is lame.  The Boston Globe recently had an article detailing the number of court cases dismissed due to cops who hadn’t shown up in court because they had to stand next to a hole, which apparently pays better than going to court.

While walking to work, I saw a cop pull up to the corner, park in front of a fire hydrant and start walking into a bagel shop.

“Umm,” I ventured, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get ticketed for parking next to a hydrant?”

The cop looked at me and smiled broadly.

“Nope.”

“Because you’re above the law, right?”

“Yup.”

Cops are people, too, I’m told.  They are human and fallible.  They have emotions, families, mortgages and the pressures of everyday life. They make mistakes.  Because of this, we should cut them slack and not hold them to a higher standard then we hold ourselves.  The difference is that when a citizen makes a mistake, the citizen gets a ticket and/or goes to jail.  The cop rarely does.

So tell me again why I should respect the police?

Time:  10pm

Place:  Star Market Complex

Situation:  Guy in a BMW parks across not one but TWO handicap spots while he runs into the bank ATM.  There was parking one space next to him.  His girlfriend chews gum in the car.

Me:  Heh-Heh. Great park job, man!  You got across two handicap spots!

Him:  Heh-heh.  Don’t tell anyone!  (snicker)

Me:  Awww…don’t worry.  Fuck handicap people.  They’re just whiners, anyway.  Why do they need the spots?

Him:  Huh?  Hey, be nice, now.

Me:  Nice?  I’m nice.  Ya know what’s not nice?  Parking across TWO spots just to save yourself 2 seconds.  Now, that’s not nice

Him:  Hey.  FUCK you!

Me:  No.  Fuck the handicap.

Him:  What’s your problem, man?

Me:  It’s not my problem, it’s your problem.

Him:  Didn’t you jerk off enough when you were a kid?

Me:  (Laughing) I jerked off plenty.  You must’ve jerked of more than me since you’re apparently blind.

Him:  You’re an asshole, man.

Me:  Probably, but I know how to park.

Him:  Park this! (He grabs is crotch)

Me:  Wow!  You’re gay and you don’t know how to park!  That’s great!

Him:  FUCK YOU!

(He stalks off)