Officer Alex shares some insights on how avoid dealing with a “wet-cop”
The rain. ALWAYS with the rain.
And not just rain, but cold. You know what goes good with “cold?” Alcohol. That’s…pretty much it.
You know what doesn’t go with “cold”? RAIN.
I can layer against cold, but when it’s cold and raining? That just means I have more layers of cold-ass clothing on. The clothing is made of polyester, sure, and it wicks like the truth through an FBI Assistant Directors Inspector General report—which is great until you discover this also means air travels through it like an Austin, Texas porch-bomb.
Summertime? Good. Wintertime? Platter of crapburgers.
Don’t get me wrong now. I can handle standing in a downpour ciphering a VIN number through some luckless travelers newly shattered windshield while praying to my cynical cop-gods that I don’t hear the dreaded sound of a secondary crash caused by staring stupidly at this first one; working wrecks is my job.
But once I’ve crawled into a Hardee’s or Bed Bath & Beyond to escape the elements? Please don’t ask me any questions about anything or anyone while I’ve still got rivulets of water streaming down my neck from my once beautiful mane of unevenly cut hair.
Talking to a wet-cop is worse than speaking to a dining-cop (though only by the slimmest of margins). The wet-cop is the ecological equivalent of a cat with his hackles up; a rattlesnake shaking its tail; a woman going through her man's browser history. You simply do not approach it. Do not even make EYE contact. Just pretend you caught a glimpse of someone close to you that has died and avoid it like the poltergeist your brain knows it to be.
This seems obvious to you and I, sure…yet as logical as all of this is, interaction is more often than not inevitable.
What is this urge people have, I wonder, to approach a clearly wounded animal…and cram their fingers into an orifice? Have we evolved so far past our primal origins that we no longer posess a sense of self-preservation? Are we just a few generations away from not having the sense to avoid walking into a burning forest fire?
Pandas are too lazy to procreate. Whales beach themselves. Blue collar workers actually voted for Hillary Clinton. But feeling it’s okay to spontaneously recite the driving history of every human being you’ve ever encountered with a water soluble public servant on a rainy February day?
Thank goodness for the raindrops or they’d see the tears of pity I weep for our species.
There are solutions, though. The Academy doesn’t teach them, but that’s why we have Field Training Officers and attrition in general. For me, I went with a perpetual scowl.
It was actually fairly difficult to get the hang of at first, but it turns out that’s because there was already one there and instead of looking “unamused” I looked like I’d just seen my dead grandmother crawling up my leg with an Alfred Hitchcock knife clenched in her teeth.
I had to downplay my already existent facial display of contempt and learn to fine tune it like squelch on a CB radio (which has actually helped in many other aspects of my life—particularly when dealing with young children who used to flee in primal fear prior to my enlightenment).
Others take a less direct route like avoiding eye contact at all costs. And I’m not just talking about looking away and/or downward, I’m talking about turning their backs to folks and even covering them with their soaking wet gloves. (The latter is actually preferred but I recommend mixing in telltale sobbing to complete the effect; the awkwardness expedites the process and he discomfort it invokes shows a documented reduction in behavioral complaints by citizens.)
I say all this because I’m in a transitional phase as a cop. I’ve been here too long to consider faking it and giving little two finger hand-salutes from the bill of my hat with a smile in the rain to feign Norman Rockwell-esque happiness for the sake of their faith in my profession as an institution. Yet I’ve also not been here long enough to reach my retirement eligibility date so it’s a simple matter of long term survival now.
Am I proud of it? Of course not. But fortunately, pride disappeared along with a pain-free lower back and pre-marital freedom of choice LONG ago.
What I’m really proud of though is—wait…ah. Another wreck call just came in. And it’s raining. Of course.
See you at Bed Bath & Beyond.
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.