I Am Become a Dinosaur

I am a dinosaur, a relic, an anachronism. How, you might ask?

The simple, inexorable passage of time.

I served for twenty years on the East Providence Police Department. And while every department claims to be the best, I would submit that there is a mountain of evidence to support the claim for EPPD.

And yet, my time there is but a shadow of the past. I was a cop in the 20th century. The last century! How did the time pass so quickly?

What brought all this to the forefront was an annual tradition of a dinner for 20+-year veterans, retired officers, and civilian police department employees.

It’s been several years since I was able to attend one, since I was in Arizona the past few years. But now that we are back in RI, I was able to attend one this week.

To say I was shocked by certain realizations is an understatement.

It dawned on me that there are officers in the department with more than twenty years of service who were born after I retired! I have become one of those ancient guys who used to call me “kid” and remind me how they’d been doing the job when I was still in diapers.

How things have changed.

The uniform is still the same. The equipment is very different. But the job, I hope, still carries with it the same rewards and satisfactions it did when I was there.

There is a common misconception, due to the ad nauseam repetition of incidents on social media and news sources, that the job is inherently more dangerous today than twenty or thirty years ago.

This is not accurate. The job was always dangerous. The difference is that, with the proliferation of cellphone cameras, the daily incidents that never would have made the news are now broadcast, edited, commented on, misrepresented, and repeated, flooding the news feeds.

All of this went on before; it just wasn’t visible. If an LA cop got shot in 1979, it might make the national news. If there is a shooting of an LA police officer today, there is live streaming of the incident before the investigators or medical personnel are even on the scene.

And it is shown over and over and over. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that every second, an officer is shot. This is not to minimize the violence often directed at cops, but it is to illustrate the dangers of using anecdotal evidence to draw conclusions.

I hope the cops of today can learn the same lessons I did from the guys who came before them. Good cops learn there is a big difference between a bad guy and a guy having a bad day.

Good cops know that some of the best moments of their career will never make the news.

I hope the job is still fun. By fun, I mean satisfying in the sense of accomplishing things, catching some actual bad guys, righting wrongs, and, perhaps, even administering some modicum of justifiable street justice when appropriate. There are those moments.

And there are moments of humor.

To this day, I can still see this 80-year-old woman, dressed in a sequin gown and mink stole she probably wore the day World War II ended, absolutely hammered on New Year’s Eve 1979. A lieutenant came upon the woman in her car, stopped at a light, and she sat through two light changes.

The lieutenant called for another unit, and two of us showed up. By this time, the woman was out of the car, and the lieutenant was trying to talk her into getting into one of the marked units so we could give her a ride home.

She was having none of it.

The lieutenant took her gently by the arm and tried to steer her toward the car. Not happening. The woman yelled something like, “Get your fucking hands off me,” and slapped the lieutenant right across the face.

I can still hear the echo of her hand on the shocked face of the lieutenant.

He started screaming, “that’s it, lock this bitch up.”

We couldn’t. We were laughing too hard. The lieutenant was screaming, the woman was yelling at him, cars were driving by, people were wide-eyed at the circus, and we were trying to stop laughing.

Eventually, a neighbor drove by, recognized the woman, and offered to give her a ride. Using the discretion available to us, we negotiated an alternative resolution to the matter. What else could we do? Can you imagine the look on the judge’s face when this eighty-year-old woman, now sober and looking like everyone’s grandmother, is brought into court for assaulting a police officer? Discretion is the most powerful weapon in an officer’s inventory.

We laughed for the rest of the shift.

So, when I see these officers who look too young to have a driver’s license, I have to remind myself that was me once, centuries ago, in a time long past.

I am become a dinosaur, and I hope every officer serving today gets to experience that feeling in the future.

And I hope they have their own war stories. They get better every year, trust me.