By: Barbara A. Schwartz
As a police officer, you cannot make a mistake.
You cannot make a mistake in the performance of your duties. And if you do it will get captured on video, go viral, be the top story on the evening news, and you may be indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison.
Police officers are held to a different, and higher, standard than any other profession.
In this country, every year, hundreds of patients are harmed or die from medical malpractice. Doctors get sued, but very few are criminally indicted, put on trial, or sent to prison for making a mistake. More Americans die at the hands of doctors than by police officers, yet no one protests those deaths. No demands are made to defund doctors or overhaul the health care system. No new laws are enacted regulating doctors’ practices. No endless rhetoric from television talking heads about reforming the health care system. Nobody throws rocks and bottles at doctors.
Cops get treated differently.
Pilot error has caused aviation accidents and passenger deaths. Pilots may face civil liability, but not criminal prosecution.
Neither doctors nor pilots wear body cameras to record their every action. Holding cops to a higher standard is not new.
Back in the sixties, Jack Webb played Sergeant Joe Friday on the iconic cop show “Dragnet.” During the course of the show, Joe Friday made many speeches about the plight of police officers that have become part of law enforcement folklore.
In a 1968 episode titled “Public Affairs,” written by Burt Prelutsky, Sgt. Friday and his partner, Bill Gannon, appear as panelists on a TV show along with a hippie who published an underground newspaper and a left-wing college professor. People in the audience step up to an open mike to ask the panelists questions.
The subject of cops making mistakes comes up. And Friday makes one of his famous speeches.
Friday says, “We’re not machines. If we were, maybe we’d never make mistakes. We’d never overreact. Never make errors in judgment. Unfortunately, we’re human beings, not computers. Now, the book tells us to use the force necessary to apprehend the suspect. How much force is necessary? No computer can make that decision when you’re chasing an armed suspect down a dark alley. A man has to make that decision. And he has to make it fast. Sometimes he doesn’t use enough, and he gets himself killed.”
The moderator of the TV show says, “A man with a gun has no business making mistakes.”
Friday responds, “We try not to, but we all make mistakes. Maybe it’s only a matter of putting the carbon paper in backwards in the typewriter or burning the toast or missing a business appointment. You make that kind of a mistake you say, ‘well nobody’s perfect, I’m only human.’
“A police officer’s mistakes are a matter of life and death. His decisions are made in a split second. Give him some credit for having the guts to make those decisions. His job, and his life, are riding on each one of them.
“Keep in mind, he’s not asking for your applause. He knows you reserve that for ball players and movie stars. He’s only a guy doing his job. All he would really like is a little common courtesy and some respect.”
“Respect?” The hippie asks.
Friday answers, “We know that you respect those American boys who go across the world to protect us from enemies eight thousand miles away. Is the police officer less entitled because he’s risking his neck to protect you from enemies in your own home town?”
The episode ended on those words.
You cannot make a mistake because your job requires you to carry a lethal weapon and the law gives you the right to use it in the course of your duties.
Everything you do is captured on body cam and if you don’t perform flawlessly you can risk getting disciplined, indicted, sued, or prison time. No other occupation puts its employees under that intense scrutiny. Not even surgeons who are armed with a scalpel.
Society expects cops to be machines, robots who don’t feel, don’t make mistakes, aren’t human.
Headlines won’t read that an armed suspect took shots at police officers and would not comply with requests to put down the weapon. The headlines will state that the police shot and killed somebody.
Most, if not all, of the recent incidents where a person died at the hands of police, that person failed to comply with lawful commands given to them by a certified, licensed police officer. If they had complied, they’d be alive today.
That fact gets lost in the telling.
The more we expect officers to be machines the more will resign. Recruitment is down. Retirement and resignations are up.
In this climate of no mistakes, not many humans want to do the job.
Let’s respect and honor those men and women who remain steadfast. Who come to work each day carrying a firearm not to take a life, but to protect life.
That fact also gets lost in the telling.
Officers report to work knowing that one mistake can cost them their career, reputation, financial stability, future retirement, emotional health, and ultimately their life.
They need our support and respect.
[You can watch the “Dragnet” episode “Public Affairs” at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lfcD_C1pb8]
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Copyright© Barbara A. Schwartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in any manner without the expressed written consent of the author.
About the author:
Barbara A. Schwartz has dedicated her life to supporting, and advocating for, the brave officers of law enforcement. She is certified in first responder peer support by the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF) and the Law Enforcement Alliance for Peer Support (LEAPS). She specializes in grief after trauma, injured officer support, suicide prevention, and traumatic stress reactions and injuries.
She proudly maintains memberships in the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) and the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA.) Barbara has been a volunteer for the Houston Police Officers Union for 30 years. She has written for law enforcement publications for four decades. Barbara became involved with Calibre Press in 1999 and has attended many of their outstanding training classes and regularly contributes to Newsline.
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