PAX Centurion - January / February 2014

www.bppa.org PAX CENTURION • January/February 2014 • Page 23 cate to tell them the very facts which would help them to understand our anger. Perhaps you would have understood if your father was a “hollerer,” one of those cops whose wife always complains that he “takes the job home with him,” the guy who yells and rants and gets it off his chest and then goes back the next day to do the job again. Maybe your pop needed that kind of ventilation to void himself of the frustration he felt, and the humilia- tion and painful criticism of his work at the hands of the self-styled “community leaders,” who by their visible and vocal presence purport to represent a community whose decent, hard- working people do not share their views of the police, but who are more concerned with day-to-day existence and survival in a poverty area than they are in politics or com- munity affairs. When he came home late for dinner with a few drinks on his breath, maybe he had to stop off so that he could open his heart about some painful aspect of the job to brother officers who could understand what he was saying, rather than to inflict pain on those of you who he chose to protect. Perhaps he underestimated the strength of you and your mother, who might have willingly shared the pain and commiserated with him; or perhaps it would have been too much for you to handle. Who knows. Your father has listened to the station-house rhetoric for years. He knows the old timers who claim to have given up, but who still fight you to get up the stairs first on a gun run; he knows the young buffalos who bitch beyond reasonable bitching but still do the job; and he knows the angries, the men who never seem to feel good about themselves because of the seemingly endless struggle against an unrealistic bureaucracy that demands so much of them and offers so little in the way of reward or compensation. After all they are “only” cops.Your father has sat in the back room of the precinct and listened to the negative remarks and ethnic slurs of his colleagues which, to an outside observer might indicate a deep-rooted hatred for the people of the community. But he tolerates the remarks, not because he’s afraid to take a stance, but because he knows that cop’s true feelings, and that the same cop who is doing the bad mouthing would not hesitate for one instant to crawl into a burning tenement and risk his life to save a child of the same ethnic minority which he was defaming a few hours before. He has shared the joy of birth - in fact, there are kids walking around the neighborhood bearing his first name, just as you do - because he delivered their mothers of babies in a taxicab or in an overcrowded sweltering tenement apartment. He has smiled with his people, and he has grieved over the deaths, the shameful waste of precious life, which is part of the life style of his community. He has stood in the rain with tears streaming down his face as they buried yet another of his brothers who was killed in the line of duty. You never heard about it, but he lost a piece of himself each time it happened, and it happened far too many times. Your “only a cop” description tells me that perhaps you think your old man isn’t too smart; yet he had the wisdom to insulate you from the hardships and hurts of his life and to try and raise you in an atmosphere of normalcy that was denied him for at least eight hours a day for the greater part of his adult life. Now son I’ll get off your case. I can understand your feelings, and so can your old man, believe it or not. I am not looking to lay any guilt trip on you. Maybe your father didn’t talk to you enough. Maybe you weren’t listening. As the song says, “There ain’t no good guys and there ain’t no bad guys.” But I’d like you to take a step back and take a good look at your old man again.You’re looking at a man who has seen more of the evil and negative side of life than anyone else you have ever known, and yet he is still able to be sweet and gentle when the time is right to be soft. He is a strong man, With a strength born of surviving a steady diet of painful episodes, any one of which might shatter a lesser man. He has been through the fire that can destroy or purify, and he has emerged as tempered steel. Try talking to him sometime about the theory you have learned on the way to your master’s degree.You missed something somewhere along the line in your educa- tion if you can say that as a working cop your father “never did anything important.” Maybe if you can communicate with your pop and combine your formal learning with his street wisdom and knowledge of the real world, you can get something to get that will give you the impetus to effect the changes necessary to create a viable criminal justice system at some point in the future. The one we have now isn’t work- ing too well, I’m afraid. It’s you and the people like you who will have to be the catalyst for change. Just remember as you proceed in your career that your pop is, as all cops are, part of the thin blue line that each day preserves our civilization as a misguided society systematically places frustrat- ing stumbling blocks in his way while protecting the rights of the criminal element and virtually ignoring the rights of their victims. It’s an awesome job, and yet he can still come home at the end of a tour and kiss mom on the cheek, ask you how things went in school, go on with his life, and go back into the pits again tomorrow. I guess being “only a cop” is a pretty worthwhile thing to be. Harry T. O’Reilly, known to his friends as “Harry-O,” is the direc- tor of investigative services training and educating project, Aurora, Illinois. He commutes frequently from NewYork City, where he is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Law and Police Sci- ence at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Since his retirement in 1977, he has been affiliated with the Criminal Justice Center of John Jay College and serves as the director of investigative services. A 20 year veteran of the NewYork City Police Department, Mr. O’Reilly served as a Detective Supervisor in robbery, burglary, homicide and sex crime units. He was decorated 23 times for outstanding police work and had published numerous articles, texts, movies and televi- sion scripts dealing with police related subjects. He also lectures to police audiences throughout the country. This article originally appeared in the “Police Badge” magazine, of which Mr. O’Reilly was an Associate Editor. From Cop on page 15 Only a cop