Large Fierce Mammal

For many years now, it has been with furrowed brow that I have observed the world as it applies to the work of professional law enforcement. My troubled mind comes from having had the extreme privilege of a career that has led me to know and work with a satisfying sample of cops – some good, some not so good. Some ill suited to the job, and some exceptional as though born to it. Just like every other bunch of people, brought together to get a troublesome job done right insofar as possible, before hopefully going home alive and whole. Today we’ll talk about that.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago because, where I live at least, it overlaps some of the adult years of my own lifetime, a policeman’s job was easier, even if the paperwork and court room part of it was always there to haunt him. It was easier because people were people and it all made a sort of sense, even on those occasions when it didn’t. Occasional domestic disputes, people drunk in public and everything that can lead to, petty theft, intoxicated and lead foot drivers, delinquent kids who sometimes needed to be scared straight or at least sternly shown the path, and tavern fisticuffs pretty much covered it. Sure, it was risky work, but for the most part, every cop knew when shit happened who the usual suspects were. Everybody knew the cop gave a shit, but wouldn’t take any.

And then there were the occasional horrible moments that left the cop to clean up society’s mess. Every summer but one, from the time I was four years old until I was 17, my family visited relatives in Montreal, Quebec,. For the most part, we drove there, and quite an adventure it was. In the summer I was seven years old, somewhere in New Brunswick, we came upon the scene of a traffic accident. In hindsight, I came to realize as an adult that it had only recently happened, as evidenced by the fact that only the two vehicles involved, and two Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrol cars, were present.

One car was upright on the median, the other lying on its side on the opposite shoulder. Visibly bashed though not so mangled as a vehicle of 21st century manufacture would be, my child’s inquisitive eyes were drawn to this latter car, and the huge stain of dark wetness that had pooled under it, some beginning to run in a rust coloured rivulet down and diagonally across the slight incline of the otherwise dry pavement. As it turned out, the life blood of a family that included both parents and all three children.

Then my eyes turned to the policeman on the road, gravely waving my Father past. In those days, the Mounties wore high brown riding boots under riding britches with bulging hips, a Sam Browne belt with shoulder strap, and that iconic Stetson hat. All contributed to the wow factor for a young boy …and then there was the look on his face. Something I’d never seen before.

His uniform is an easy thing to conjure from history, but that look …that totally gutted, world weary expression that spoke of a soul screaming to leave this place, and only barely restrained by the necessity of “The Job” … has never left me. Young as I was, my understanding of it has evolved with me as I have grown and come to understanding.

So, the cop was respected, and rightly so. By some because he (I say “he” because in those not so long ago days, “cop” and “she” were usually not found in the same body) was known to most who met him as a person before a uniform or badge. A hard ass when it came to upholding the law who might once … ONCE mind you .. have happened to be looking the other way when you did something really stupid that time. Who brought your wandering Dog home to you instead of taking it to the pound. Who took your wayward kid on a ride along one day so he could soak up how the world works, and why it needs cops.

Then society lost its way and, being a part of society, took law enforcement with it. It didn’t happen overnight, and this lost way I speak of far predates the events of 11 September 2001 which had their own very different, but undeniably no less deleterious effects. I have an acute interest in addressing the specifics of those, but not here and now, lest they cloud the issue – suffice it to say that the seeds of those effects would have landed on much less hospitable soil but for the fertilizing outcome of today’s subject.

So let’s go back to my reference to society having lost its way, and I’ll explain what I mean. Like most big things, it started small. Little innocent things, piling bit by bit one on the next. Thin and almost transparent, like layers of onion skin, but each contributing the stink of its presence to the vegetable as a whole.

When I was growing up in the small but prosperous town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, mine was arguably the only family there that routinely locked its doors, whether the house was occupied or vacant. This was because while my Father was a native and would have been perfectly happy to live without a lock anywhere on the place, my Mother was not, having grown up in the city of Montreal, Quebec where such devil may care practices had long since been cast aside. In Lunenburg, churches were never locked, and major public buildings only so when their custodians remembered.

I recall that one next door neighbour; a family by the name of Sodero, the husband of which was the manager of the local liquor store; would go on vacation for two weeks every summer during which he’d ask my Father to keep an eye on his house. Those two weeks were the only ones out of the entire 52 that the latch was actually turned on the portals of the Sodero household, and for my Father’s convenience … you know, just in case … Fred Sodero would remind him where the key was “hidden” – hanging on a nail in the milk box to the right of the porch door; a skeleton key that no doubt fit more than 90% of the locks in the town.

On Boxing Day of 2013, I published a piece here that spoke of still other aspects of Community as it was once practiced. In that case, the matter wasn’t crime but a snow storm that buried my home town when I was but a toddler, but the principles were there. People used to look out for each other, and knew how to work together even with those you could barely stand the sight of. The idea of calling in the Police to settle a dispute between neighbours, let alone family members, was foreign to the mindset of self sufficiency and self reliance that was prevalent until well into my own lifetime, and anyone who ended up actually needing the involvement of law enforcement to settle their issues was looked down upon.

And then, things began to change, leading to a situation where one didn’t talk to the noisy neighbour with the barking dog. The Police were called instead. A simple example, but you get my point. Rights swelled in the public mind as any concept of personal responsibility shrivelled into non-existence. The role of government in the lives of those eligible to vote became more parental. More intrusive because, after all, children need to be supervised; even the adult ones. Laws evolved to further dissuade people from “taking the law into their own hands”, even in attempts to resolve the simplest and most minor of conflicts. Let the grownups handle it. And the cop, as the ultimate representative of these statutory “grownups”; well, he started to notice he was getting called to the same addresses for the same reasons, and arresting the same people, over and over and over again.

So along the way, the job of the cop on the block got bigger, meaner, harder, more complicated, more dangerous, and absolutely unforgiving. Zero tolerance replaced judgement and connection with reality, and the daily lot of the cop began to resemble shovelling shit against the tide. The disconnect between the cop and the neighbourhood got wider, even as the term “neighbourhood” itself became meaningless. The cop only showed up when there was trouble, or to piss on your fun and your personal sense of freedom and entitlement. Over time, the cop on the block evolved into the stressed out offspring of a social worker, a soldier, a zombie, a psychic, and a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, with little to no room in the minds of those who write the laws Police must enforce, or those to whom those laws apply, for acknowledgement of a shred of humanity behind the badge or the personal consequences to those who wear it. Stress has a funny way of exposing human frailty, in every job.

The good news is that the cop on the block still lives in many of the men and women out there on the job today. The bad is that in a world governed by politicians who are increasingly and ever more openly treating the citizenry as untrustworthy chattels of the state, and the Police as soldiers of a strong arm force, armed and equipped to keep the sheep in line, the time is right for officially sanctioned, indeed officially rewarded, thuggery. All in the name of national security, keeping children safe, or any other set of buzzwords nobody could ever object to, and that only those in government, it’s explained, have the resources and savvy to understand and come to grips with.

The cop on the block doesn’t fit the current legislative mold, and sooner or later for those still out there fighting the classic good fight, everybody needs to retire. Even the most motivated among us can succumb to despair in a daily grind that feels like all you’re doing is picking fly shit out of pepper with boxing gloves on. As Canada circles the drain of another federal election, think about that.