The cops are not heroes

“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” 

- Harvey Dent The Dark Knight

When I was a kid, cops to me were real life heroes. They were the physical manifestation of Batman, Superman…hell, even Gandalf!

The point is they were something I knew I could put my trust into because of what they represented to me as a kid. I had neighbors that were police officers, people at my church, schoolmates’ parents were cops, and I was always excited to meet them. I was in Scouts as a kid and I can remember in the back of every Boy’s Life magazine was Scouts in Action!

It was the stories of larger than life Scouts, braving the odds and performing life saving feats. Something I always wanted to have written about me. That very solid urge to go above and beyond the normal call of humanity and do something selfless and great for another human. When I was old enough I joined the Police Explorers, and what a rush that was!

Here I was as a teenager, sitting in a REAL police station, with REAL cops.

Some might argue the old 017th District station was nothing more than the dungeon portion of a medieval castle….but I digress.

I was able to watch them interact with each other, with me, and I got a chance to see the brother and sisterhood that was the law enforcement profession. Our Explorer uniforms even looked similar, we had patches and ranks…it was like cop-lite heaven for me. We got to do community events, go on outings, compete in competitions against other Explorer posts, and get a brief, insider look at the policing profession.

I was hooked.

I wanted to be a hero.

I wanted to have a comic drawn about my life saving events.

I wanted to do something for someone else that they were unable to do for themselves and expect nothing in return.

I wanted to combine my calling to serve others I got from the Scouts in Action comics with the hero aspect of being a cop. Talk about a real superhero…

I eventually became a cop, and even before leaving the academy I began to experience that “hero” status I held so high, eroded away underneath me. While in the academy I remember being confronted at lunch and being asked why cops hate Black people, and if some lady’s teenage son was safe around us.

I had no real answer because cops were heroes!

Of course you’re safe around cops!

As I walked back from the Adams and Racine 7-11 I came away confused and dismayed. This profession to some is thought of more as the villain than the hero. But I didn’t dwell on it much, I had my hero training to return to, can’t be late!

Eventually we graduated and hit the streets. I was able to learn about this new power that was bestowed upon me, like a superhuman superhero power!

I know every new cop experiences it. The ability to lawfully detain someone, deprive them of their freedom, restrict their movement, write them tickets, take their things….it all seemed so much like being a superhero. Great power AND great responsibility was involved in every decision I made. Like any new superhero I took full advantage of my youthful, FNG energy and did a lot of flexing of these new muscles. I stopped everything that moved, wrote a lot of tickets, took a lot of things away from people I felt were deserving of losing them.

Then I began to see that my actions weren’t really “helping” anyone because it was usually the same cast of characters I was arresting, citing, or towing their cars. It was almost never ending, plus it started to create a sort of resentment in me. That resentment spread into how I functioned on the street, I became apathetic, I distrusted the court system, I was burnt out, and pretty much an asshole. 

Yet even with my understanding through experience, we were not the heroes I thought the police would be. We’ve run into burning buildings, rushed to shooting scenes to render aid, and actually saved lives like a hero does, but we still found ourselves vilified, outcast, and at odds with the community. Sure, many of us built contacts and bridges, gained the trust of many, but the overarching view still remained: 

We were the villains in a story we weren’t the authors of.

When the good work we did was brought up, it was glossed over, just a single tweet, or brushed off as copaganda while so many pointed to our faults as a profession. Good news for many seemed to be the loss of another officer to an ambush, another story of a cop who lost their fight with their demons; even when we were dying it wasn’t as heroes. It was as an expendable piece of the state.

That hero status I expected wasn’t there, and there seemed no way to earn it. For every actually heroic thing an officer does, some idiot officer overshadows it and sullies the profession. The actions my coworkers and I took were compared to, and contrasted against someone’s mistake. We weren’t heroes like the firefighters that showed up on scene (usually after we secured it….wink wink). I found that many small kids were frightened of us, or verbally hurled insults at us for nothing more than we showed up, in uniform, to a call.

But then I had a sort of personal epiphany:

As a profession we aren’t heroes, but as individual officers we are and can be.  The cops are not heroes, a cop is a hero.

It has been pointed out over and over that in a city of 800,000 people there will be some actors whose motivations, actions, and behavior isn’t up to snuff.  I do understand that this city is supposed to be the best of us; vetted, given immense responsibility, an insane amount of measured power, and full of people who are supposed to keep a noble air about themselves as part of this city. But this city is made up of human beings, filled with errors, misjudgments, biases, preconceived notions, and all other quirks that make people….well, people.

However, we aren’t allowed to be bystanders in this city, because while it sounds like a great place to live, its nothing more than a line item on a person’s resume. Its simply the profession of law enforcement. Where we are tasked with addressing other people’s problems “now-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-now-and-about-which-somebody-better-do-something-now” (Egon Bittner).

To me that simply means that in whatever moment I find myself in, and whatever moment a fellow cop anywhere in the US (or the world for that matter) finds themselves in, we have the option to play the hero or the villain. Some days I connect more with Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker than I do with any version of Batman, and I think a lot of cops that have been dragged around by this profession can too. But what separates us out from becoming the villain is we still find the good out there.  We can make that choice as to how we look.

But it's hard.

We still hand out stickers, wave to kids, take pictures with people, and accept the thanks for our service and what we do.

But that choice is still hard.

It took me a while to remove the moniker I applied to the police profession that we are heroes because of the profession. It was the individual who pinned on their badge, star, or shield and went out and took an action as a human that made them a hero. It is the person in the uniform, not the uniform, that is the hero.

I have seen too many tarnish the profession, be the actual villain in how they acted, or didn’t act.

But I’ve seen more, way more, who have rushed into danger with little regard for their own safety. Kicked in doors on burning buildings while wearing no protective gear, ran after armed criminals who have wreaked havoc on the innocent, sped after murders, booted doors in on kidnappers, or just took a moment to stop by, take a seat on a stoop, and talk with a neighbor.

While in comics the heroes' names we all know, we all love, and we all hold in high regard. It is the villains we forget normally, we don’t idolize, and we blame society’s woes on.

The reality is while I still view cops as heroes of mine, even as a cop, I had to realize that there will always be those to bring into question that notion of what a hero is in a noble system filled by failable humans.  

I just know for myself that I will try my best to hold myself to that hero standard I placed on cops as a kid growing up.  

Will I ever really be a hero?

No, not because I don’t want to be, but because I can’t give myself that label. And I can’t give that to my brothers and sisters in blue. It is something that has to be earned and bestowed upon us by the people we both represent in our power and serve as their guardians.

While I may never be a hero, I do know I won’t ever tarnish my badge. But if I do, I deserve every consequence that comes my way for playing the villain I never wanted to be, and never should have been.