THE VAST MAJORITY OF COPS ARE GOOD GUYS

The ex-wife of a cop sent me an e-mail which read in part: I know from personal experience that there are some sicko law enforcement officers out there, including some that are outright corrupt and brutal. The power of 'control' screws their mind.

This is how I answered her:

I agree with you that there are some bad cops out there. But I am sure that the vast majority of cops are good guys doing an extremely difficult job under the most trying of circumstances while being underpaid and underappreciated. And those cops always face a good chance of sustaining some sort of injury and the possibility of getting killed.

Being a cop hardens you. People who have never been one would not understand that. Cops run into the dregs of society day in and day out. Cops experience some of the most God-awful crimes - hot and cold running blood. And a lot of the people cops are trying 'to serve and to protect' jump all over the poor bastards for giving them a traffic ticket, for not getting their property back that was stolen, for not catching the crook who stole it, and - because it is a police function to regulate human behavior - for what they perceive to be interference in their pursuit of pleasure.

On top of that, cops get hammered every day by the media with reports of official misconduct. Rarely does the media report the good things cops are doing. I think that’s because the good deeds are taken for granted. And when the media gets hold of a video showing cops ‘beating up’ some person, that video is often edited in such a way as to make the incident look much worse than it really was.

Because cops experience that kind of shit every day it is no wonder that some of them turn out to be as you describe them. But what's most noteworthy is that despite all that, the vast majority of cops continue to be good guys.

EDITOR'S NOTE: When he saw that California produced a firefighter license plate, a cop asked his partner, “Why didn’t they make a license plate for us?” His partner answered, “Because no one hates firefighters!”