It’s a calling, just like joining the military, becoming a firefighter or paramedic or even a preacher. It’s not for everyone, just as any job, which requires a large part of your life, be sacrificed to further your career and yourself.
In the Academy the very first thing the Academy director did when he welcomed us was to ask us to look at each person sitting next you, then he stated that in less than two years one of them won’t be in LE.
LE has very high rate of divorce and substance abuse as well as a high rate of stress related illnesses and injuries.
I’ve been in LE for a combined total of 5 years, I took a 7 year sabbatical to pursue other interests before my return, during my first tenure I pulled my back really bad sidelining me for several months, then upon my return to LE within a year of going back on patrol I was out with a blow out ham string.
It’s very demanding physically and emotionally, criminals are becoming more and more audacious and displaying less and less respect for everyone, much less LEO.
In the early 90’s during my first go around folks still had a bit of respect for the law, people would tend to obey it and when the law showed up they would give you lip but it was more or less rare that you would actually have to come to blows with someone. On occasion we’d pepper spray an idiot or two but never had to do more than spray them or tussle with them to get the cuffs on them.
But in the past year I’ve put three people in the hospital with multiple broke bones due to encounters with my ASP, I’ve pepper sprayed many more, I’ve been on the threshold of pulling the trigger twice, I’ve been shot at once and involved in two incidents where others cops shot at suspects, one was a pair of GA State Troopers who killed a 19 year old B/M for pulling an unloaded gun on the during a traffic stop, the other a total flake case who just started shooting up his neighborhood from his front porch.
Crimes are becoming more and more violent, dope is more or less the accepted norm of the day, inner city it’s crack, rural it’s meth and everybody, I mean everybody smokes weed. Try to convince a guy who just took a hit off a crack rock the size of a golf ball he’s under arrest and take him to jail w/o either beating the holy hog snot out of him or having it beat out of you, meth is even worse, folks on meth are as unpredictable as a Grizzly Bear spaced out on LSD. There is not a single Hispanic in this country who can speak English once the cops show up even if they are the ones who called them, young black males will fight you for no apparent reason other than the fantastic idea that you are somehow disrespecting them by simply talking to them, no one carries ID anymore including drivers, everyone is everybody else’s cousin, no one is wearing their pants they all belong to their cousin, it’s always their cousins car, no one knows their social security number or (believe it or not) even their date of birth, no one “lives” anywhere but they all “stay” somewhere (it’s usually, “I stays over there”)and you have to phrase it that way or you get the blankest stare you can imagine, no one knows anyone else’s real name everyone is either “Ro-Ro, Nig, (yes that is a popular nickname among African American males) Pookie, Swint, Swint-Dog, Dog, Peaches”, or you get the idea…
When someone tells me something the first though that runs thru my head is, is this a lie and why would this person lie to me, what would he or she gain from lying to me, why do I do it, because of the number of times you catch people lying to you in the course of your job, it becomes an automatic reflex.
I apologize for this little rant but LE is a career that can and will make you cynical against your fellow man really fast. Sad to say but I don’t trust [hardly] anyone anymore who I don’t have a lengthy relationship with and I am skeptical of people I encounter on a daily basis.