I suppose you have heard me say that the people generally get the kind of department they want and deserve.

I think I'll post a couple of examples. As I have posted before I am truly blessed with a good department and maybe this will show you why.

A few years back I was wearing an old 'Hell Gate Pilots' jacket. The Hell Gate pilots (now defunct) were ship's pilots, guys trained to guide ships and barges through a certain piece of difficult water. Hell Gate is in New York  where the East and Harlem rivers meet.

A certain officer pulled up to me and in a snotty voice asked me "What is that? Some kind of gang?"

It annoyed me so I answered, "Try ship's pilots. Don't believe me? Look it up. You'll see."

He gave me a bunch of tough cop crap and drove off.

Two weeks later at the 7-11. I was wearing an M-14 T-shirt from a match I had just shot.

"What's with that M-14 shit on your shirt?"

I turned around and showed him where it said 'rifle Team' on the back and told him I was a competitive shooter.

"Yeah, well, uh...I suppose that's OK by me if you behave yourself."

"I fail to see why I have to check with a local policeman to exercise a Constitutional right," I replied and started to shuffle off. I was stopped and treated to more macho tin horn tough guy sheriff crap.

A few weeks later I saw a new cop on the block and a couple days later I asked another officer what that was all about. He told me that one of the officers 'took another job somewhere'. His tone of voice and the look on his face told me the department had gotten rid of him.

About a month ago I saw his replacement (he's now been here for years)sitting in a parking lot obviously catching up on paperwork and I pulled up alongside. "Hey, I ought to chew your ass out for this but how about putting the ass end of that cruiser up against a wall when you catch up on paperwork. There's been a couple of copycat attempts on policemen since the New York shootings and I don't want to lose you."

He gave me a somewhat sheepish look. "Thank you," he said.

Incidentally this is the same cop that helped out a neighbor a while back when his lab jumped the fence. He simply saw the animal floating around the neighborhood, caught him, stuffed him in the back of the cruiser and returned him to the owner. Actually he was SUPPOSED to call animal control but decided to make it easier for everyone involved.

I saw him loading the lab into the cruiser, stopped and laughed. "You're a natural born blood donor, aren't you?"

He gave me a cheerful, somewhat sheepish grin. "Beats getting animal control involved."

In the town I live in I am blessed with a damned good department because they keep the good officers and get rid of the jerks.

I think a lot of this is because the City fathers here keep their eyes on the department.

Yep... there are 1st Class dicks in LE... as in any other job.  Some agencies will run off bad apples whereas others are scared of lawsuits and tolerate rude, arrogant, insulting, power-hungry, and abusive people.

What they ought to do is not be scared of lawsuits from lousy officers. They ought to be terrified of lawsuits from pissed off citizens!

Incidentally please note that this is NOT a bash thread. As I have said before, I am DELIGHTED to have the department I am served by. These guys are generally pretty good and I try and watch their backs as best I can.

You're 100% spot on.  There are giant douche nozzles in law enforcement, just like every other job.  However, with the role LE has in society this can be a problem.

I've always tried to talk to people like equals when I'm working.  It usually works, but sometimes there is someone that wants to pick a fight with you no matter what.

Not to continue the circle jerk, but you're the kind of person that we like to serve.  I'm guessing you'd help me out if I was rolling on the ground with a guy who just committed assault rather than taking a video on your cell phone and yelling "POLICE BRUTALITY" (personal experience here)

In all fairness I have to say that my general rule of thumb is that it depends on the officer.

If I don't know him, he gets the benefit of the doubt. I'll help him out.

If I do know him and think he's OK, I'll get plenty dirty to help him out. Damned right.

If I do know him and he's a jerk, he's on his own.

THAT'S more than fair.


Incidentally I have helped an officer out. I kept him from being blindsided when he was making a legitimate bust in a bar I was sitting in.

Then again, several months later I sat on my ass and watched another officer get some pretty good lumps. He was a lousy officer that was always looking for trouble where there wasn't any.

A sample of the second officer's handiwork caused me the biggest courtroom belly laugh I have ever had in my life. It shows the kind of clown he was.

Back in the day the bars were closed between 0500 and 0800.

Shirley, a not too bright barfly type was out at 0530 or so and had to pee. I'll go straight to the courtroom from here. I happened to be in court that day to give moral support for a friend. I won't get into that. (he got off. It was thrown out.)

Shirley's case came up. Here's the good part.

Magistrate: "Let's hear your side of it."

Defendant: "Everything was closed and I had to pee. I went over to the dock, climbed down the ladder, walked down the catwalk so I could hold onto the supports, squatted and was peeing. Suddenly a flashlight came on and I heard someone shout, 'Police officer! Freeze!'"

Magistrate: "What happened next?"

Defendant: "I shit."

The entire court started howling with laughter and the magistrate didn't even bother trying to restore order for several minutes.

That officer that had gone LOOKING-HUNTING, actually- for something so chickenshit lost my respect not only as a police officer, but as a human being. He had followed someone down a ladder, under a dock and negotiated a slippery catwalk to catch a stupid little girl tinkling into the harbor. Then and there I decided he was entirely on his own.

The ass chewing the magistrate gave him after she threw it out was monumentally EPIC. It began with, "You have embarrassed the defendant, you have embarrassed yourself and you have embarrassed the entire police department!" and continued for several minutes.

People sue over BS stuff all the time. Doesn't mean that there's really a legitimate basis for the suit
So the issue for most agencies and lawsuits are the frequent BS ones, not the rare legitimate ones
One issue with getting rid of non-performing officers is that agencies don't adequately document the history/ basis for discipline and /or termination

Had a few local stinkers but they seem to self weed themselves out sooner or later.

Did have one years ago before suppressors were legal go totally nutso on me. Was in the local gun shop talking to the owner about legalizing them and the guy standing next to me was, unbeknown to me, a local [city] cop. He went into a tirade about how people could shoot at him and other cops and they wouldn't know where the shots were coming from. I just looked at him and told him that if the guy [shooter] was worth a shit, he wouldn't ever have a clue where the shot came from in the first place. He didn't like that much..........

I made a similar crack to the dumb officer in the above post once. Of course, he went off on me.

The sergeant standing next to him cut him off and told him, "He's right. He probably has a rifle capable of taking you out at 500 years and very well may have the skills to do it. The Second Amendment says he can have on and that's the way it's supposed to be. Now get this in your head: The ONLY reason you are alive is that nobody wants you dead bad enough to go through the effort of killing you."


FWIW the statement the sergeant made applies to all of us, LEO and non-LEO.


Incidentally, thanks for letting me drop in here from time to time. It's pretty good being able to swap notes in an open forum. Sometimes we differ but that's OK. At least I get the feeling there's a reasonable amount of mutual respect here.

I honestly wish every department was filled with the kind of LEO's I see in this thread. Unfortunately, as has already been stated, every line of work has assholes. I only hope that good LEO's, such as yourselves, will help to weed them out instead of simply following the Brothers in Blue code.

What "Brothers in blue code"?

When they do document a lot of things, agency management and executives are often viewed as nit-picking, overly punitive, and out to get people which in turn can effect the morale/work ethic/retention of the troops.  It's a balancing act that occurs in just about every workplace, whether LEO or not.

I don't think I was referring to nit picking, but agencies failing to document serious violations
Twenty-five years ago I had a coworker who saw that I was gone every month for National Guard drill and went to great pains to invent an enlistment in the Naval Reserve.
He would go away every moth for "Naval Reserve" drills
It went on for a year before the admins finally caught on that it was entirely bogus
The guy had other work issues that had been happening and when they finally took him in for personnel action on this and other stuff he'd been doing  they lost on a lot of the stuff they thought they had on him because they'd failed to properly document his problems and any corrective actions they'd tried with him up to that point.
Eventually they got rid of him but it took way longer than it should have had they been doing things properly.
I don't see that as nit-picking

An example of nit-picking was my last CLEO who made increasing demands on my Guard unit to prove my attendance
The old bosses had been fine with copies of orders and an annual training schedule.
This guy started demanding a monthly letter.
Then he started demanding a monthly letter with first formation and final formation times
He basically was making me come in as soon as final formation was over
So the unit started putting down my times as being from 0001 Saturday to 2359 Sunday
So the CLEO started demanding that I come in at 0001 Monday
I went so far as to get JAG involved but it was  a young JAG officer who the boss got over on
It really didn't end til my deployment to Afghanistan, almost at the end of my military career.

To me, that's nit picking, and it was entirely done because he was head hunting every officer he could to get rid of them and replace them with people he thought would be beholden to him for their jobs
He was unhappy with anyone who had an institutional memory at our place and how things were run before he showed up at our doorstep..
He was raiding a neighboring agency for their officer to the point that agencies CLEO had to ask him to stop stealing his people.
Ultimately the majority of the officers he stole were nightmares compared to the people he booted out from our agency
People who fled that agency to ours tended to be guys who were leaving there for a reason and they simply brought their issues to our place
Karma.

The one where fellow officers tend to look the other way and remain silent instead of reporting another officer when their behavior crosses the line.