Good Cop, Bad Cop.

Since people first came together in groups around campfires, there has been the problem of crime.   By it’s very nature, society begets criminals.  Some people just want to take advantage of other people.  It’s the way things are, it’s the way things have always been.  We learned long ago, that we can not rely on people to police their own behavior, so the idea was born of selecting a chosen few from among the masses to decide what rules we should follow as a society.  They were then tasked with enforcing those rules.   We try to carefully chose the most upstanding people among us to be the enforcers of our rules.  But despite our best efforts and intentions, like anything else, there has never been a way to perfect this process.   History has proven time and again that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Our law enforcers are not exempt from these rules.  They are the rules of the universe and that’s the way it is.  We try our best to weed out the corrupt, but the process can sometimes be difficult despite our best intentions.

You don’t have to turn far these days to see the headlines, webposts, tweets and newscasts screaming about the latest Police Officer being accused of use of excessive force or abuse of authority or even outright corruption.  Yes it’s happening.  It has been happening since the dawn of society.  There have and always will be people who abuse the authority vested in them by the rest of society.  As a Republican society, it is our duty to point out these people, call them out and do our best to weed them out of the positions of authority.  It is our responsibility as the harbingers of free speech to point these things out whenever we can.  Our founding fathers built our Constitution around this very principle. They thought so fiercely about it, that they made sure that the very first amendment to our Constitution protected the right to call out our elected and appointed representatives.

In our society, our media is a for profit business.  As such, the competition for advertising revenue is pretty fierce.  The historic trend in media has always been to look at what the most successful guy is doing and steal his ideas.  Right now, the most successful trend in media appears to be pointing out the abuse and corruption in our law enforcement and bringing it out into the light.  This attention is probably long overdue.  For way too long, our media has allowed too many incidents of abuse to fall by the wayside without the attention it deserves.  For some time, the media has had no interest in covering such events and have been more interested in making sure they keep up with their competition.  But now, the demand has come for stories about Police abuse, especially if we can mix some racial stuff in there with it to stir it up a bit.   If it’s a story about a white cop appearing to use excessive force with a black person, it’s going to sell.  It’s the story of the week.  That is just the trend in media right now.  News agencies appear to be attempting to make up for years of ignoring these stories by bombarding us with as many as they can, as fast as they can find them. 

While I absolutely applaud and approve of any effort to expose and remove any people from positions of authority who are abusive and corrupt, I have been starting to take exception to some of the stuff I am seeing floating around, especially on the internet where there is no standard for fact checking or accuracy in what people post and report. I see stuff posted every day that is postured like a news story, but lacks any actual quotes from witnesses or officials.  There is no evidence that the author ever asked for, or looked at any official reports. These posts are always chocked full of conjecture and hearsay and a whole lot of opinion, but usually pretty sparse on actual facts.  The end result of this is a lot of misinformation and innuendo being spread like a fire around corners of the internet.  I see way too many people that I respect and admire taking these so called reports as absolute fact without considering the source of the information.  I love the freedom and instant access of information that the internet provides, but these are the kinds of things that lead to conviction and sentencing of an accused before our society ever has a chance to give them their due process.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS ENTIRELY OPINION BASED SOLELY ON MY EXPERIENCE IN MY PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE.

(Not to be confused with websites pretending to be actual news outlets since this is a blog based entirely on my personal opinions)

As the “wife of a Police Officer”, I have had many opportunities over the years to see how much of the law enforcement process works.  I will state without hesitation that there are absolutely corrupt and abusive people in law enforcement that should not be where they are.  We need to weed them out for sure.  But there is something else that you are not seeing.  Something that I see every single day.  Something that will happen a hundred or a thousand times today in cities across the country.  It happens in every law enforcement agency in the United States with so much regularity that it becomes just another activity.  It goes mostly unnoticed and unmentioned.  It’s usually covered up by the perpetrators and hidden from view by the brothers on the thin blue line.  They will fiercely protect a fellow officer and lie about it to keep their secret.  If you ask about it, most officers will just shrug and give you a stupid look and turn away or change the conversation.

Every single day, Officers will dig into their own pockets to use their money to help someone in need.  They will buy food for a hungry person.  They will rent a hotel room for a homeless mother who has no food for her three children.  They will use their own time and resources to do their best to make sure she has some kind of foothold, any kind of foothold to get her started on the road to self reliance.  Officers will stop and help someone change a tire.  They will help someone cross the street, carry groceries for an elderly person despite the 45 pound gun belt they are already dragging on their hips.  They will dig clothes out of their own closet to bring to people at a hidden homeless camp in the woods because they know that the weather is about to turn.  They will take up a donation among the squad of underpaid road patrol officers to purchase a bicycle for an autistic boy because his parents are both struggling to pay the bills.  On his way home, that officer is going to bring a teddy bear that he purchased with his own money to a young boy at the hospital that was in a serious car accident yesterday.  There won't be any cameras there for that.  If there are, he will turn away and come back later after they leave.  It has been my experience that this kind of activity happens with far more frequency than abuse of authority.  I have personally witnessed these things hundreds of times, but pictures of an Officer fixing a tire apparently does not sell newspapers. That officer will go home at the end of a 12 hour shift, and turn on the news to a story about another officer abusing their authority, and they will sit and shake their head with the rest of us.  

With the sensory bombardment of “Cops being bad” it becomes very easy to allow ourselves to become enraged about the abuse of authority.  We should be enraged when it happens.  We should also reserve ourselves to responding with the appropriate jurisprudence for the situation. Bad people do bad things.  Sometimes good people do bad things. We need to remember that the media is in the business of selling us stuff. They are going to put their best spin on it to get us to buy it.  Rage is a pretty strong sales tactic and the media loves to use it.  It starts to become easy after a while to become jaded to all persons tasked with law enforcement positions. Especially if all we are seeing is stories of abuse repeated indefinitely only to be broken by the occasional commercial attempting to sell you the latest trendy prescription medication.  It becomes hard to remember that not only are Cops people too, they are almost invariably the people who go out of their way to help the guy next to them when there is no reward or gain in it for themselves.

So the next time that you are sitting in front of the television and you see a story come on about a Police Officer accused of using excessive force on someone, being corrupt or even being accused of general maleficence; just remember, there are probably dozens of law enforcement professionals watching the same story in front of their own TV's shaking their heads with you.  It is incredibly demoralizing for them because they know that not only does it cast a negative light on their entire profession, but it also washes over anything positive they have striven to silently achieve while no one was looking. 

Meaghan

Her name was Meaghan.  She was going into shock.  I was standing on the side of the road in northern Alabama holding her up so that she did not fall down again and hurt herself.  I urged her to sit down on a safe area off the side of the road and stood up thinking I should run to the truck to fetch a blanket.  Just minutes earlier, I had been following her and several other drivers down Highway 72 near Athens Alabama.   There was another semi in front of me so my forward visibility was somewhat obscured.  Because of this, I had been giving the truck plenty of room in case we needed to stop in a hurry.  Sure enough, without warning, I saw the two white cars in front of the semi flip end over end several times.  They had made contact at high speed in the middle of the roadway.  Plastic and glass rained down on the pavement and the smell of burning rubber filled the air.  

The truck driver in front of me and I both had the same reaction.  We braked as safely as possible and pulled off the right side of the road.  As I was slowing down, my mind raced to remember where I had stored my medical kit.  I cursed out loud when  suddenly remembered that I had gotten lazy about it and stopped carrying one just over 2 years ago.  As my truck glided to a crawl, my left hand instinctively reached down to unlatch the fire extinguisher that I keep there.  I glanced up and surveyed the situation quickly.  There was no immediate indications of a fuel spill or a fire.  I made a quick decision and spared some seconds to forgo the extinguisher for now.   This was far from the first time I had witnessed such and event, and I knew that time could be pretty critical right now.

As the air brakes popped in the two trucks, we were both out and on our feet in a full run before our engines fully shut down. There were also people already streaming in from several directions out of the businesses that lined the side of the road.  The driver in front of me veered left to the minivan that had landed in the middle of the median on its side.  Most of the other bystanders were also running in that direction.  So I turned my attention to the other vehicle.  The white Hyundai had rolled at least once and had veered off the right side of the road and about 150 yards down a pretty steep embankment.  Thankfully, it had landed on its wheels.  As I ran towards the car, a much younger man ran past me and down to the vehicle.  As we made our way down the slippery grass slope, a young lady exited the drivers side of the car and promptly fell down.  The young man in front of me reached her first and helped her up.  As they attempted to distance themselves from the wrecked Hyundai, they both took another tumble together.  I reached out and grabbed the young lady by the arm as we both asked her frantically: “Is there anyone else in the car?”  “N-N-No”.  She replied through her sobs. 

I pulled the young girl up to the shoulder with the young man right behind her.  He was a bit frantic and wanted to drag the poor girl down the roadway in the direction of the gathering crowd.  “No” I insisted.  “She could be going into shock and she needs to sit down before she falls down again”. He looked at me and nodded and ran off to some unknown direction.  I sat the young lady down and asked her name.  “Me-Meaghan” she replied, still crying.  She had a pretty, oval shaped face with long blond hair.  She could not have weighed 98 pounds soaking wet.  I asked her if she was OK.  I gave a cursory glance for any wounds and checked for any obvious compound fractures.  Still crying, she managed to let me know that she didn't believe that she was seriously hurt.  “How old are you kiddo” I asked.  “18” she said and drew another breath to continue her fit of anxiety.  I assured her that things were going to be OK.  At this point I looked up to see an middle aged woman trotting in our direction with some purpose.  I could see that this girl would be in good hands if I needed to run off to fetch that blanket.  I told the woman the young lady's name and that she might be going into shock.  “I’m going to run back to my truck and see if I have a blanket”.  I said, and quickly trotted back in the direction of my vehicle. 

It was right here that my little world suddenly crashed in on me.  As I looked up at the crowd that I had first seen running to the scene, I noticed that almost all of them- some 30 or 40 people, were all standing around in an almost semi circle, cell phones in hand, taking pictures and video of the event.  I looked over at the minivan still laying on it’s side in the median.  There were two or three people aggressively trying to get the drivers side door open.  Immediately behind them, some 25 or so people, arms outstretched, crowding in while holding their little black devices and pointing them at the action.  At once, I felt my lunch try to take leave of my stomach.  I suppressed the notion and realized that in my haste, I had not even thought to grab my phone out of the truck.  Now completely sickened,  I started back up in the direction of my vehicle.  Panic almost struck me as I started to wonder if any of these people had actually bothered to use those phones to call for help. 

I picked up the pace and ran past the first truck driver who now had his safety vest on and was directing traffic around the crowd.  Just as I reached my truck, I heard the sirens and breathed a heavy sigh of relief.  Someone had the sensibility to call after all.  As I climbed up, a police cruiser and two ambulances pulled up to the scene.  I watched two EMT workers head over in the direction where I had left the girl sitting on the side of the road.  Filled with confidence that she was now in better care than I could provide, I decided that myself and my truck were now more in the way of assistance than rendering it.   I sat down and started the truck and started to carefully ease it back into traffic. 

As I passed the scene, I noticed that the crowd of novice film producers were still aggressively working to hone their craft.  The sight once again sent tremors through my stomach and I was eager to depart the scene as quickly as I could.  As I drove away, I could not help but contemplate the absurdity of the things I had just witnessed.  Then the reality of it hit me full force: “They learned it from you” the voice in my head whispered. As I thought back over all the accident scenes I had photographed and documented in my 20 year career as a journalist, it sank in.  We taught these people this.  We showed them that there is some artificial value in documenting human misery and putting it on display for the our own sick satisfaction.   A new feeling washed over me: shame.  I was ashamed of what “media” had become.  The mad rush to get the next “thing” on your Twitbook page first so you can get some fake internet karma.  

I drove off wondering if what we have created may be our undoing.  If our instant information society may be more harmful in some ways than helpful.  I started to understand where the feelings of disgust and aggravation must come from that first responders exhibit toward this new breed of instant journalists.  I was reassured by the knowledge however, that there are still some people who can assess the situation and figure out what needs to be done: The people who worked to extract the driver from the minivan, the other truck driver, the young man who can run faster than this old man, and of course the first responders who arrived way faster than I thought possible.  I drove away knowing full well that I will probably never see that young lady again. I know that I left her in good hands and not much else about her.  But I do know this: Her name was Meaghan.  Which is a lot more that the people gawking at her picture on Facebook today will ever know about her.

But does she put out?

   In the six months or so since I started driving full time, I have had opportunity to learn many things.  I found out about being screwed.  I learned how to bend time.  Truck stops aren't what they used to be.  (They are generally cleaner with a lot less hookers and drugs).  I have also learned that if you commit to your cause and get on with the right company, they will reward your hard work well.  After several bouts of musical chairs, I finally landed myself into the seat of a truck that I am proud of and really enjoy driving,  Like most guys who land a sweet ride, I spent some time deciding on a a name for my new sweetheart.  I settled on “Dixie” for a variety of reasons.  I’ts a ritual that goes back as far as we have been riding horses to name your ride.  While pondering the reasons why guys always name their ride after a girl, I suddenly wondered: “If trucks were actually girls, what kind of girls would they be”?

KENWORTH: 

KW’s would be the athletic girl.  She is in reasonably good shape.  She looks pretty good.  She can run hard sometimes.  But she believes that she is way hotter than she really is.  KW looks ok in jewelry (chrome) but starts to look slutty if you give her too much.

PROSTAR:  

The prostar is the virgin.  Kinda cute but homely.  No makeup, fun personality but she is not fast or loose.  Good luck getting to second base, especially if you gotta travel uphill to do it.  Light jewelry for her-anything else looks silly.

FREIGHTLINER:

   Freightliner is the girl next door. Sometimes she is hot in a very subtle way.  Sometimes she is homely and would look a lot better if she cleaned herself up a bit.  She is sometimes carrying around a lot of baggage and because of this she breaks down a lot.  But she is easy to pick up and she will give just about anyone a cheap ride.  Even though she usually is not the best lookin girl in the bar, she is the Rosie the Riveter of the trucking industry.  She endures because she works hard for her money

VOLVO: 

 

The Volvo is the kinda hot foreign exchange student.  She is a bit exotic and different and fun to be around.  Easy to get along with and likes fancy clothes.  Problem is her fancy clothes cost a LOT of money, and when she has a breakdown, she loves to go shopping-with your money. Jewelry is optional

INTERNATIONAL EAGLE:  

The Eagle is the Catholic Schoolgirl.  Pretty simple clothes, generally charming and proper.  Easy to get along with. Every once in a while you can find one that’s fast and loose, and when you do, lookout.  Jewelry is sinful—no jewelry.

PETERBILT 579. 

  The 579 is the cute and reserved librarian chick.  Does not wear fancy clothes or show off her body.  Does not like jewelry in public.  But get her alone in a dark room with some jazz music and she will show you her inner tiger,

LONESTAR: 

 The Lonestar is the girl who wears way too much makeup.  She never fails to make herself look slutty. She is trying way too hard to be a prom queen when all it would take is to clean herself up a bit to look nice.   Guys always give her way too much jewelry to try to make her look like a stripper.

MACK.

  Macks are the bull dykes.  Enough said.

PETERBILT 379.  

 The 379 is the stripper at the club.  You know: the place where you can look but don’t touch.  Sometimes shes really hot, sometimes not so much.   To put it bluntly, she is the slut--every guy has been in her. Looks great in jewelry.  Has her own clothing line. You can see the jealousy in the eyes of the other men as you leave they club with her--but the jokes on you, you're gonna be sticky, broke and confused in the morning.

WESTERN STAR:

  The trophy wife. Looks great in everything.  Fantastic body.  You have never spent any time with her because you cant afford it, but you can tell just by looking that she is fast, loose and fun.  And the guy who hangs out with her is in debt up to his eyeballs, but he still manages to draw your envy.

CABOVER: 

 The cabover is the cougar that is hanging around the bar at 2:00 AM looking to score with some young stud.  You know for sure that you are not the first guy she has been with, but you might be the last. She can teach you things you never thought you would need to know. Every once in a while you see one that looks pretty hot, but generally, she is just a shadow of  her younger self..