Cops

[H2O Man]

Years ago, in a nearby small village situated near a large highway, a new village police officer exhibited some rather curious behaviors. When he would pull over a vehicle for speeding at the edge of town, he would approach it with his gun drawn. While it would have been easy to dismiss this with a “Barney Fife” joke, area law enforcement recognized that it was serious, and had a tragic potential. Shortly after this officer was dismissed, most of the local law enforcement departments began having prospective employees screened at the mental health clinic where I was employed.

Around that same time, my younger son was on a “pee-wee” soccer team. The coach was a state police officer, who impressed me as the type of adult that worked exceptionally well with children. I served as the assistant coach. One afternoon, I noticed that this gentleman seemed on edge. I told him that he seemed a bit tense with the kids, and asked if everything was okay? It turned out that he had spent the past two days in a recovery effort. A vicious male had kidnapped two high school girls in Dryden, NY. He took them to an isolated cabin, raped and murdered them. He then put the bodies through a wood-chipper, and scattered the remains in a corn field. The coach told me that the police literally had to watch for crows to land, in order to find parts of the remains.

I tell these two stories, of course, as part of this forum's discussions about the police at the OWS and related protests. For sake of discussion, my comments here focus on male police officers. I'm using these two examples to illustrate two of the general personality-types that are drawn to police work: bullies and alpha-males. Let's take a closer look.

Bullies are attracted to police work for the most obvious of reasons – they want “power” that is backed up by a badge and a gun. They can be best seen as a sub-group within the larger “authoritarian personality” type. They get a perverse thrill from exercising an ability to “punish” people. Under pressure, they quickly resort to either bending the rules and regulations of their job, or outright breaking the laws they have sworn to uphold.

Their baseline mood is “uptight,” and escalates quickly to paranoid. They resent others who do not share their rigid belief systems. The combination of these two unattractive features results in their eagerness to injure people who are simply exercising their Amendment 1 rights to protest.

On the other hand, the alpha-males are drawn to police work for very different reasons. While they tend to enjoy the general structure of groups that include the police and military, it is because it allows them to exercise an internal sense of self-discipline. They work in law enforcement because they have a strong sense of right-versus-wrong, and want to serve their community by protecting the public.

A true alpha-male does not expect others to exercise that same high level of self-discipline they set for themselves. They do not resent people for taking part in legal activities, such as exercising their Constitutional right to protest. Under pressure, they try to act at their highest personal level. While they are not perfect – no humans are – they not not seek a parasexual thrill from assaulting defenseless victims.

There are certainly other personality-types within law enforcement. More, intelligent people can hold very different views of the ratio of bullies to alpha-males in law enforcement. Each of us here, for example, has opinions based upon our personal experiences – which can include from our family life to our own interaction with police. What I hope we can all agree upon is that unless those in the higher offices take action, the bullies with badges will have license to act upon their inner frustrations and rage, and injure the public protesters. And that holds a tragic potential.