I wish I had a dime for all of the times that people came up to me on the street while I was working and asked me about becoming a cop.  I would have retired a long time ago, I can assure you!  Let’s break this down, shall we?
What is involved in becoming a cop?  What is the work like?  What is the level of danger (everyone wants to know this one)?  How do I get a police agency to hire me?  How do I get on S.W.A.T.?  How do you get to ride a motorcycle and write tickets all day?  Do chicks really dig cops (the uniform thing)?  Are there classes in school that I can take to become a cop?  Do cops really like donuts that much?  And on and on and on…

On my website, I will answer these questions and dozens more like them.  This is the place to do it.  Just send me a blog and I’ll do my best to address those areas of reader interest.  Remember, this is interactive, so let’s interact!

What do you want to talk about first?  What’s it like being a cop?  Shall we start with that one?  Ok, fine by me.

It seems that police work is one of those job fields that everyone and their mother thinks they could do better than the officers actually on duty.  Everybody has an opinion or a “feel” for how to be a cop, right?  Now remember, these opinions come from people who have had zero actual, real life exposure to doing police work and, obviously, no formal or even informal training.  Let me be blunt here (this will happen quite often I’m afraid!) but the average Joe doesn’t know squat about doing actual police work.  Period.

So where does this opinion or feeling come from?  Where do people acquire their very casual, unconfirmed information about being a cop?  Well, you know.  Yes, this is an easy one — Hollywood and TV, right?  Ah yes, those daily purveyors of fantasy are the prime source for making the images that people absorb about being a cop.  There is no other profession that interests the general public on such a consistent basis like the world of cops.  Think about this for a minute.  Every television season there are several cop shows, in one form or another.  Right now the big thing is C.S.I., right, and Bones (or something like that).  A jogger finds a pile of bones and within an hour the killer is tracked down, cornered and made to confess.  Good work considering the tight time constraints and commercials!   Maybe the public is actually getting smarter and they dig the science now, or something.  And maybe the lead male and female actors on the show find time to fit in a little romance too.  Hey, why not?  It’s fantasy, remember?

One of my “favorites” is the long running show Cops which has had a huge viewership since its inception.  I watch Cops and all I see is people standing around talking, which after all is what most of what police work really is.  I think it’s a good show in comparison to the typical junk sitcom that you might also choose to watch in the same time slot.  And, like real police work, the foot pursuits, building searches, barricade situations and actual appreshensions that are shown really comprise a very small amount of time in an actual shift.  So maybe in that sense what the cops are shown doing on Cops is pretty accurate.  Oh, and they sure skip the hours of paperwork.  No point in showing the public that.

Let’s go back a few generations.  Remember Dragnet and Adam 12?  How about Car 54 (Officers Toody and Muldoon)?  These three shows showed both the serious side (“Just the facts ma’am”) and the silly side (“Car 54 where are you?”) of two of the largest police departments in the United States, the L.A.P.D. and N.Y.P.D.  Granted, those shows lived in a more innocent time, when the common man didn’t think of himself as an expert on every subject and the pervasive cynicism that we see today didn’t exist.  But still Hollywood was putting those images out there for all, young and old alike, to see and maybe believe.  Personally, I don’t watch much television in my daily life but if I have a choice to watch Sergeant Joe Friday in action versus the current line up, Joe Friday wins every time.  Ok, so I just dated my self.

What I’m saying is you have to separate fact from fiction when you think about the daily life of a cop.  Actually, that’s so true about everything today, isn’t it?  The average person has cop videos on You Tube to view, snippets of news coverage to see about daily events, and the writings of serious authors or blatant pundits describing cop behavior, depending on your political orientation.  That’s just to mention a few.  There are many more sources of so-called “information” about police work out there in cyberspace.  Does it tick me off more than a little to know that my profession is viewed in this way?  You betchya!  My response to that is to just think of the countless guys and gals who actually put it on the line each day to keep the American public safe and feel the love that I have for them.  It makes me very proud to be one of the faceless, overlooked working stiffs in law enforcement who truly make the difference every minute of every shift every day all year long.  If you want to delude yourself by believing what Hollywood has made up for you, go ahead.  But just don’t doubt what you read here because this comes from the true heart of law enforcement.

Here’s another example of which I speak.  A few years ago, a friend asked me to stop by the filming location of a new weekly show.  The premise of the show was hostage negotiation.  (Now, maybe I didn’t mention this in my first page as part of my intro, but one of my collateral duties for many years has been as a highly trained crisis negotiator.  Again, much more on this in future postings.)  So I show up and get introduced to the production people, the producer, the lead male and female actors and other hanger ons.  I’m ushered into a nearby trailer for some serious conversation about what the real life of a hostage negotiator is like, and what a negotiations operation center might look like while in use.  The conversation begins and the actors (one of which played a major role in “Band of Brothers”) ask me questions.  I answer them and they listen intently.  They run preposterous “what if’s” by me and I comment on the lack of reality in those scenarios.  For example, would a male and female negotiator ever hook up?  Maybe, but probably not.  Usually not likely.

As this conversation is taking place, writers and other production types enter the trailer and listen in.  One or two also ask questions which I again answer from a true life perspective.  This goes on for a little over an hour.  I end up enjoying the encounter, despite my obvious distrust for serialized television.  But what the heck, maybe I can set them straight.

A short time passes and I begin to see advertising for this show.  Hey, it made the cut and at least a few episodes will be aired.  I think, this should be interesting.  A few more weeks pass and it’s on TV.  I already told you that I don’t watch this type of show.  So, true to my roots, I spend my time doing something more valuable (I don’t remember what, probably working!) and I don’t see this show.

What do you think happened?  I see my friend soon after that and he describes the action.  Well, it seems that the first episode contained several of the “for sure doesn’t happen” aspects that I had discussed with the production folks and the actors.   Was I surprised?  Not a bit.  Remember, I’ve been around a while.

So there you go, first hand experience of Hollywood’s penchant for turning reality into fantasy.  Keep this in mind when you watch cop shows or movies.  This will become an important theme in future articles about job interviewing and use of force issues.  More to come…

So how does one sort through this pile of stuff which purports to actually be a good source of information?  Well, you can come straight to copcorner.net and get the real skinny from me, an actual working cop near the end of a full and varied career.  That’s one way that this website is so fun for me.  I get to add my voice to the other numerous and varied informational sources describing daily police work.  And you, dear reader, benefit from seeing the real world through the eyes of a real working police officer who interacts with you, the public, many many times each working day.  Now, how’s that for good stuff?

So keep it here on copcorner.net for what you really want to know about cop life.  I will be as open and honest as I can (remember, we respect the general rules of decorum here!) about my world, and I hope you enjoy reading about it.  I am not trying to sound arrogant or full of myself when I say this, but I have learned over my twenty three-and-a-half year career that everybody seems to want to know about what I do and have done.  I get this at partys, from the checker at the market, my doctor, close friends, acquaintences and even arrestees.  Yes!  On the five to ten minute ride to jail, I’ve been asked countless times, by the drunk and sober alike, “Hey ocifer, what’s it like bein’ a cop?”  Now, come on, doesn’t that make you laugh?  It has me, many many times.  I love my career, my chosen field and I hope I can interest you at a real look into the life of a cop.

Thanks for reading what I have to say.  After all, I’m doing it for you!  See you next week!

All the best,  Tim