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The Thrill of it All
By David Glenn Cox
The Henry Louis Gates story has brought to the surface issues that America would prefer not to talk about. Was the President right? Did the Cambridge Police Department behave “stupidly?” My opinion is yes, but no more stupidly that usual. The racial component is undeniable, and America’s first African American chief executive damn well knew it.
Gates, after a long flight and a busted door, now finds himself answering questions in his own living room, trying to justify being in his own home. After a long litany of irritations, Gates went off on the cop. He raised his voice. He yelled, but that is not illegal; sadly, to a lot of cops, it is close enough.
It takes a special kind of person to want to be a cop. Imagine long hours of dealing with society's problems with tools that are, for the most part, wholly inadequate. It is a job that has the tendency of attracting the wrong kind of person, and running off the right kind. Over my life I have known three policemen well, and all three of them seemed to share a peculiar sense of humor.
Stewart was a cop in a mid-sized Southern town, but no one in the South goes by the name Stewart. So Stewart was known affectionately on the street as Chippy, and when it was popular to wear your hair long, Chippy kept his short. Then, for some unknown reason, he began to let his hair grow out until it just touched the top of his ears. From that day forward Chippy was forever known on the street as Chippy the hippie.
Chippy would tell us about being a policeman, and would remind us that if you put on that uniform somebody’s going to kick your ass. Not maybe, not possibly, but definitely. No matter how big you are or how bad you are, unless you’re the biggest, baddest mother in the whole damn world you’re going to get your ass beat.
Chippy’s beating came after chasing stolen car suspects. They had bailed out of the car at a railroad crossing, one going left, the other going right. Chippy gave chase down the tracks into the pitch-black darkness. After about a mile run Chippy noticed that he could no longer hear footsteps. That’s when he got clobbered. His nose was broken as he wrestled with the suspect; his shirt was torn to bits, and as they fell Chippy landed headfirst on the rail and was knocked unconscious.
When he woke up the suspect was gone. As he returned to the squad car, his partner, seeing Chippy’s condition asked, “Where’s the suspect? Do you need the paramedics to come pick him up?”
“He got away,” Chippy answered.
His partner, in macho bravado said, “He got away?!! How the hell did you let that happen?” He said this to a man with his shirt torn off, a broken nose and a concussion.
Chippy then asked his partner, “Take me by the house so I can get cleaned up and get another shirt.”
His partner remarked, “Go home? You want to go home? You just clocked in!”
It was Chippy’s right of passage; you aren’t really a cop until you get beat up doing it. For weeks the other cops asked Chippy, “Any leads on that stolen car suspect?”
Ed was a cop for over ten years. He used to tell me that only two kinds of people wanted to be cops, the ones that want to help people and the ones who want to push people around. Then he would add that the ones who wanted to help people usually didn’t stay around too long.
On one of his first nights on patrol, his training officer pulled up in front of a house where there seemed to be a party going on. He stopped the car and told Ed, “Stay here and watch the car.” Ed, being a rookie, did as he was told, but began to get nervous when his training officer was gone for almost an hour. He didn’t know what to do, as a sense of fear overtook him. What if he’s in trouble, or dead? Then the officer re-appeared and got back in the car as if nothing had happened.
Ed asked, “Where were you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” was his only reply. Then fifty dollars landed in Ed’s lap, tossed by his training officer. “Do a good job, Eddy, and next time you can go inside and collect!”
As Ed became a regular, the shift commander asked, “Hey, Ed, you want some overtime this weekend?”
“Sure,” he answered. But when the schedule was posted his name wasn’t on it, so he assumed they’d either forgot or he meant the next weekend. Then he got his paycheck, eight hours of overtime just as promised.
Ed became the lead man on his shift, and if there was a problem Ed was supposed to go investigate it. They had a police cruiser wrecked at the mall, and when Ed arrived it was obvious that the car was totaled. He interviewed the officer who explained that he had noticed some suspicious characters cruising the mall parking lot late at night. He began to follow them when they took off at high-speed, zig zagging between the light poles in an attempt to elude him. Ed wrote the officer's story verbatim and signed the report, and then handed the form to the officer who signed it as well. Then Ed asked, “Now, you want to tell me what really happened?”
“It was late and we were bored, so we started chasing this dog through the parking lot and hit a light pole.”
Ed suffered from job burn-out; one night he was called into the wealthiest neighborhood in town. A teenage boy was threatening to kill his father with a rifle. They subdued the youth in his room, a room with a TV set, a stereo, a game system, and an electric guitar and amplifier.
Ed swore to me that his very next call was a domestic dispute in a trailer park. A man and woman were highly intoxicated and had beaten the crap out of each other. As part of his investigation Ed checked the trailer to see if there were any other victims. In the back bedroom under a bare lightbulb hanging by its cord there was a teenage boy, engrossed in a book.
“Are you all right?” Ed asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” the boy answered. “They do this all the time when they get drunk.”
“What are you doing?" Ed asked.
“I’m finishing my Algebra Two, Trigonometry home work, and then I’m going to finish my English homework.”
The dichotomy of station and the unfairness of life burned Ed out. A kid with everything wants to kill his father because he wants more, and a kid with nothing who lives in an alcoholic hellhole only wants to finish his homework.
They were called one night to a burglar alarm in a downtown men’s clothing store. The four policemen decided two would search around the building and two would wait for the owner and watch the front door. As the two cops searched around back they found the back door had been jimmied. They slowly opened the door and quietly moved inside.
Meanwhile the owner of the store, an elderly Jewish man, arrived and unlocked the front door. As you would expect it was like a scene out of Andy Griffith. With the two teams unaware that each other were in the building, they began firing at each other. No one was injured; the alarm had apparently frightened the burglars away. But when the lights came on the old man almost fainted. An entire rack of suits had bullet holes through them and two glass display cases were completely destroyed.
The old man, cussing, said, “Tomorrow morning I’m going to throw that burglar alarm in the trash! Those guys couldn’t have stolen half as much stuff as you guys fucked up!”
Ed knew of an officer in town who was having an affair with another policeman’s wife. The two illicit lovers wanted to be together, but the scandal of the divorce would threaten the officer’s job. Cheating with a fellow officer’s wife is unforgivable.
Ed was on a bust where they netted ten pounds of marijuana, and Ed knew about the affair. The officer having the affair was Ed's partner, and the husband of his girlfriend was turned in via secret witness, tipped off that he was carrying a pound of marijuana in his car. Ed suspected immediately what was going on and checked the report on the drug bust; sure enough, his partner had listed only nine pounds of marijuana.
Ed went to the county prosecutor to tell him what he knew. The district attorney explained, “I’m here to get convictions for the county, not to solve domestic disputes.”
Ed then went to the judge and again told his story, and the judge answered, “If you think I’m going to let a dirty-cop drug conviction go during an election year, you’re crazy!”
The officer was sentenced to five years in prison, and Ed hung up his badge.
James was on the front line of the first Iraq invasion saying, “Anyone in front of me got shot!” James had a disease not uncommon for combat veterans, he was an adrenaline junkie. As Winston Churchill put it, “There is nothing quite so exhilarating as being shot at without result.” He was intoxicated by excitement, once passing another police car in a high-speed chase while playing the Beach Boys' “Surfing Safari” over the PA and making swimming motions with his arms.
James wanted the suspects to run; he wanted to be the first one on the scene of a shoot out because it was like heroin to him, and he always needed a fix. If the policeman who arrested Mr. Gates was anything like James, he was just as angry that Gates lived there as Gates was for him being there. Yelling at the cop was just the icing on the cake.
Soldiers get rotated in and out of combat but cops do not. They are there day in and day out, doing a job most of us wouldn’t do for twice the pay. That said, that’s why there are so many bad cops. They become desensitized to it all and become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. Chippy only lasted three years, and Ed told me if he’d stayed with the department he could collect his pension by now, $150 a month. And James? They’ll have to make him retire because he loves the thrill of it all!
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