The job isn’t the numbers. The job is the neighbors.
The thing about working a district is you never know how good you have it until it’s gone. (Okay, aside from all the terrible things that happen, but that’s another story.)
I remember being nervous about “getting a bad part of town” on my first random assignment out of the academy. It’s not fear, mind you; if you’re afraid to work ANY part of a town you were in the wrong academy. No, it’s about the pressure of failing the people around you.
At first you think that pressure is about letting down the veteran cops who are already working the area, keeping up with experience and confidence you haven’t even begun to accumulate yet.
Getting to them quickly enough when they need back up, making sure no one else was coming into your district to write reports YOU should be writing, making sure your stats were on par with your co-workers to keep the boss happy. It’s an obsession you focus on while also trying to figure out just what the hell you’re doing call after all and day after day. Intellectual tunnel vision.
What goes missing from the equation, however, is why you’re really there: The People.
When you never look past your dashboard, your activity log sheet, your co-workers’ patrol cars, you never see the faces on the streets and behind the windows of those you’re also there for. It’s not that you don’t interact with citizens; they are the source of your calls for service. But in trying to learn now to “be” a cop and how to fit in with them, you allow that mental divide to be created that separates you from those faces.
It’s necessary on some levels, but you wind up missing out on the joy of working a district and instead wind up sitting in your cruiser alone bitching about everything rather than refueling the passion that got you there by meeting actual people and becoming, however distantly and intermittently, a part of their lives.
I was called to a house once early on in which the resident, an elderly widow, wanted me to help clean out her gutters because rain water was overflowing them and drenching her when she had to get in and out of the house in the rain. “The nerve,” I thought to myself.
Wasting an emergency responder’s time with yardwork? Who do they think I am? Oh! the sweet indignation. I was trying to find a polite way of getting out of this without getting a complaint so I could get back to “real” police work when I actually started thinking about my last question. Who DO they think I am? Well apparently this poor lady thinks I’m the only one she could think of to help clean out her gutters.
She had no husband or children in town to assist, and most of the neighbors she knew had passed and there was of course an obvious fixed income issue here. So I crunched those numbers, came up with an answer, and did what I didn’t want to do: I asked her if she had a ladder and reached into a pouch on my belt to pull out rubber gloves usually reserved for blood and I by-God cleaned me out some gutters using a dead man’s ladder. Emergencies are different from person to person.
That’s some low-hanging fruit as far as non-standard police services go (leaving the elderly or kids hanging like that definitely bothers some more than others), but that’s the kind of thing you stop getting a chance to do as you progress through your career through either promotion or transfer to different units. As my career winds down now the best I can hope to do by end of business is populate the hell out of a spreadsheet…and how does that compare to the tangible accomplishment of fixing the chain on a kid’s bike or recovering a stolen car that belonged to an uninsured working single mother? Exactly.
For those currently doing The Job or those reading that are considering taking on The Job, take a few moments to consider what I’m getting at. Street corner dealers repopulate like puddles during rain. Working wrecks for insurance companies and breaking up drunks fighting make for better stories… but that kid looking at you while you fix his bike or the single mom that got to keep her job because you looked for her car instead of forwarding it on to a detective to “get around to”? That IS “The Job”.
Do it well. Even the less sexy parts.
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.