If it comes up in conversation I usually say that my job isn’t hard. I explain I’m not paid for what I do… I’m paid for what I can do…  I’m a police officer working as a street cop in a medium sized city.

Whatever you think of police (and all the goofy negative press we’ve gotten recently) isn’t really any of my business.  My business is the “people” business.

Roughly 80% of what I do is engaging with and talking to people…. I help them find solutions for situations and crises that they don’t otherwise have solutions for.

The other 20% of what I do is:

1. documenting what I did or did not do and
2. training for what I do or do not do.

Like I said, it’s relatively an easy job.

I’ll admit, policing does have challenges:

• Dealing with people on the worst day of their lives
• Not having a “fix” when the public thinks I should have one
• Being constantly targeted by real bad guys or people that would harm me because of my uniform
• Being under a microscope 100% of the time
• Either being run down by boredom or freaked out by extreme stress
• Working shift work on a 24/7 clock (holidays, birthdays, anniversaries etc)
• Being unable to be in all places at all times
• Facing all the weather elements
• Other drivers and traffic
• Seeing things that can’t be ‘unseen’
• Dealing with the seedy under-belly of society
• And a 1,000 other challenges

But these are run-of-the-mill challenges.  The hardest thing I do is deal with kids.

Yesterday we responded to a fight in progress.  The caller reported two men fighting in the grass.  We found a father wrestling his 11 year old son to prevent the son from running away.  The boy was angry, sullen and almost non-communicative.  I thought he was mentally delayed or autistic.  He was not.  He’s just angry…. At 11 years old.  Dad, a non-English speaker, wanted the boy to go to a juvenile facility because of his aggression.  True, the boy was aggressive– he tried to kick and strike a police officer– but there is not a police solution for an 11 year old.

I could only wonder what issues created this aggression in the child.   As a father and an old guy, my heart was wrenching with his pain.  But there is no solution.  It was hard, but we finally got the conflict resolved for the moment….  Father and son climbed into the family van (where the rest of the family had been waiting for 90 minutes) and left back to a neighboring city where they reside.  It was hard to witness.

I got a call about a 13 year old who was ready to hang himself.  This was not the first suicide attempt…. He’d tried before at 11 years old…. but was unsuccessful.  There were marks on his young neck from the attempt 2 years ago.  Mom and step-dad were yelling when I arrived.  Yelling at each other and passive-aggressively including sniping remarks about the boy.   They were concerned about how much it was going to cost them because “he’s f***ing up again”.  I wanted to take them to jail…. but I couldn’t.  I drove the 13 year old to the hospital to get some help….. I checked back a couple of weeks later and the family moved out of town.  It was hard to not be able to follow through and help more.

My partner and I walked through the dark woods to a tree house about 200 yards from the home.  Up in the darkness was a 15 year old boy.  The tree house sat beside the creek and there was a rope swing across the creek.  The boy fashioned a noose out of the rope swing and had it around his neck.  He was gathering the courage to jump and end it all.  We were able to talk him out of the tree house to safety and get him help.  The hardest part was knowing how close we came to finding a dead 15 year old swinging in the darkness.  All because of parents selfish and ignorant rejection of his sexual identity and confusion.

A neighbor called in at 5:45am one morning…. Two kids (ages 5 and 3) were going from door to door knocking because they were afraid.  A rat ran through their apartment and there were no parents home.  I found the kids were alone since about 9:00pm the night before. Apparently this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.  Dad was off in another city on a construction job and mom had a new boyfriend.  Mom decided to leave a 3 year old girl and a 5 year old boy alone because she needed to spend time cheating on her husband with a new, more exciting man.  It took 10 hours to get mom to return the phone calls.  Child service workers, police detectives, even her husband tried to get her to call but she would not.  Yes, she was arrested, but it’s still hard to know these beautiful sweet kids probably don’t have a chance with a mom like this.

The 11 month old baby was alone screaming in the child seat in the back of the car.  As much as it disturbed me, I was happy to hear the child scream.  The child had wriggled around in the seat and she was close to getting her neck caught in the webbing of the car seat and seat belt.  Once caught in the webbing the child would have strangled. Then there would have been no screaming.  As officers broke into the car to rescue the baby I went into Macy’s to find a parent.   She was an apparently cosmopolitan mother who was “just making a return” on an item.  She was in the store almost 40 minutes (according to the security video I found) when she came shrieking out the door.   She saw all the police lights and activity around her car she was mortified… Not that she’d almost lost a child…But that we would take her baby out of the car….Apparently police were ‘interfering’ in her life.

A next-door  neighbor called because the kids across the hall weren’t in school.  I found 3 kids there.  They’d been alone 2 days.  They were 5, 8, and 11 years old.  The house was wretched, stinky, and unsafe.  There was fetid meat rotting on the counter top.  Flies, gnats, and maggots were buzzing and crawling in the over-flowing garbage can. Bags of rancid garbage sat beside the full canister. The kids hadn’t eaten in 2 days.  They had munched on dry cereal and tortilla chips. But the cereal and chips were all gone now.

I found fresh eggs and cheese in the fridge. I scrubbed a fry pan from the filthy sink.  And while my partner tried to find mom and I waited on child services to arrive, I cooked.  In my uniform, on a crud encrusted stove, in a nasty apartment I was a hero to 3 kids.  They were amazed that a man (much less a cop) could and would cook for them.  The kids ate a dozen cooked eggs with cheese.  With some coaching, the kids cleaned the apartment and took out the trash.  When mom was finally contacted she asked “What’s the problem?”  The hardest part was …. well you get the picture.

And the list goes on:   the 3 year old lost on a busy street…. the autistic girl wandering away from the park… the boy who hits his mother and aunt and is then beaten severely by dad….the 12 year old ‘fire bug’ who stole his grandpa’s lighter… or the girl smacked in the face with a wooden spoon (because she cried)…. or dozens of other stories… And knowing what I do makes only a little difference…..That is the hardest thing I do….

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Dr Jay