Why I Love Cops

[Repost From Old Site]
Back when I was a teenager, I thought I hated cops.  I had absolutely no real-world basis for this opinion, it's just that most people hated cops.  You tend to hear mostly bad things about cops, so it's easy to dislike them.  But I wasn't much of a troublemaker in those days, I was a straight-edge punk who spent most of his time writing.  I never really had any run-ins with the law.
In college, I was even more certain that I hated cops.  I was an advanced troublemaker at that time, and most of the things I did for fun were frowned on by the law.  I definitely had one rather dramatic run-in with the law, one that ended up with me in cuffs for the first and only time in my life.  The cops, while not particularly brutal, were less than cordial, to be sure, and definitely had difficulty seeing things form my perspective.
But in recent years I've put all those activities behind me, and in retrospect, I thank my lucky stars for that run in with the cops, because it diverted me from a path whose ending I can surmise would be much less fulfilling than the one I currently walk.  And in further retrospect, when I reflect on the type of people I associated with in college, I realize that I disliked most of them.  I wasn't a born criminal, like so many I knew in those days.  I was born into privilege, by worldly standards, and had much to be thankful for throughout my life.  My forays into trouble making were at most, a dalliance, a brief tarry on my way to a normal life.  Many with whom I associated in my tarnished past had a lot less to be thankful for, and had decided to take it out on the world.  I was never like that.  At worst, I rationalized a long string of selfish, short-sighted choices.
But some people - people I've met - are born scum.  It's possible to forgive some of their low-life activities, because, as I said, they have little to be thankful for.  But I am a person who believes in being responsible for one's own choices and actions, and in the final analysis, most scummy people choose to be scum and refuse to rise above it, even when given the opportunity.  Some people make only selfish, short sighted choices.  Some people never become aware of the consequences of their actions.  Some people take and refuse to give.  Some people believe that they have the right to use violence for personal gain. Some people, at a deep level, choose to hate the world, and therefore have nothing to lose.  And for these people, crime is a habit, an occupation, a lifestyle.
Not every criminal is a homicidal maniac, but the vast majority of them are some level of scum.  The vast majority of them are selfish, short-sighted people.  Even when I was acting like one of them, I knew they were bad news.  The negativity you feel in the presence of bad people is a tangible thing.  It's no wonder we call them scum; it's almost as if you can smell it on them, as if you can feel it on your skin when you're around them, as if they leave a trail of it wherever they go.
The police, while flawed in their own right, are society's only line of defense against these people.  In my personal opinion 90% of what is wrong with law enforcement is merely a side effect of high dosage scum exposure.  The scum leaves it's mark on many well-intentioned cops.  The most level headed of them still emerge with a grim view of human nature, and who could blame them?  I was surrounded by scummy people for a few years, and it nearly robbed me of my innate positive outlook on life.  Being friends  with scum has damaged me.  Can you imagine being their enemy?
One of the biggest problems with cops is that they treat everybody like they're a criminal.  If you were knee-deep in the filth of humanity day in and day out, you might make such snap judgements just as easily.  But in a cop's position, safety is an issue as well.  Not only is it easy to assume that a given person is scum because that's all you see, there's also the fact that if you do give someone the benefit of the doubt and you're wrong...  it could mean your life.  It's not safe for a cop to assume that people are just people.  It's not safe for them to look at me and see the nerdy, jovial kid who just smoked pot one too many times; they're forced to look at me and see a violent, hardened drug dealer who hides behind a harmless facade.
So I raise my glass to any decent cop who has managed to wade daily into human cesspools and return with even a glimmer of positivity in their eye.  I couldn't do it.  For those who are ruined by the job, who end up hating humanity, or who become so immersed in the scum that they turn out scummy themselves, I have only sympathy.  It's not their fault.  Few, precious few, who elect law enforcement as a career do it because of some inferiority complex, or a propensity for violence.  Few walk into that world with malicious intent.  The rest are just victims of the worst job on the planet.  They can hate me all they want, they can judge me unfairly, they can puff out their chests and act like they're better than me... so long as they keep me alive when I accidentally stumble into Inglewood in the middle of the L.A. night, or when I cross the river in St. Louis, or if I wander south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Just keep me alive, and I'll always give the cops the benefit if the doubt.