Officer Alex reflects on the Sisyphean task of combating gun violence
I had the longest night the other night…it’s like that sometimes. Oh, everyone has a long night now and then, don’t get me wrong. Some fly by, some are paced slow and steady as your heart, but mine wouldn’t end because people wouldn’t stop shooting at each other. And if that seems weird to you? Well then good, because it’s still weird to me.
I mean for shitssakes people, can you not just take a breather now and then? Turn the other cheek, not wuss out, but maybe put a day between that crap? I’m waking up, reading over last night’s plans to address the previous night’s shootings, and just when I think I’ve got a bead on the thing, “BAM!” (no, literally) and here I am again starting from scratch, all over again. New Plan. It’s killing me here, and now that I think of it, it’s killing a few other folks too, literally.
I’m at lunch with a buddy today and we’re just sitting down at a little known out of the way Subway off of Highway 153 (Italian BMT, white bread, toasted, with only light amounts of ranch and spicy mustard) and before I can settle into it properly, “BAM!” another shot is fired outside the store.
Seriously now, I’m eating here. Literally breaking bread in a restaurant that’s earned a place in my heart and my debit card for as long as either lasts, and even this isn’t a safe space. I am sad…then I remember the fact I just heard a gunshot in the not too distant area outside, and the cruelty I confused with self-preservation finally hits the doorbell to my mental front door and runs away.
Nothing is found and no one calls in to report being perforated, but that was how the night went. It was New Year’s Eve all over the place with a smattering of Independence Day for good measure. Groups of consciousless young men straight out of the ending of the Lord of the Flies were beefing over the moral equivalent of “smudging a shoe” and the City was having to suffer for it, and we couldn’t find a cure.
An argument over a girl leads to a man shot, which of course leads to a retaliatory shooting, then the retaliations over the retaliations begin until the cycle is broken by arrest or depleted ammunition (or targets), but even death isn’t good enough in these cases.
We can do the math on the most likely shooters and the most likely targets, but even intervention akin to a scene straight out of Minority Report does little good. The cops and therefore the citizens alike just push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down on them over and over and over, yet like the sadly remorseless gang members themselves, it seems to do no good.
I have time for a bad cup of coffee before heading out to flip on my back-flashers, driving around a neighborhood slowly with blue lights partially on as a visual deterrent to those still doing no good, and to remind the good ones we are still here for them. It seems absurd, but it was effective and that was good enough at the moment until a vaccine was invented to cure the apathy of these abandoned youth committing these crimes.
I rolled down the window a few inches to let the cold night air wake me up, and of course to be able to better pinpoint the next few rounds fired.
“Best job in the world,” I muttered as I took another tepid sip. And I smiled…because despite it all, I meant it.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.