BLUES FOR A POLICEMAN
By
Theophilus Green, Psy.D.
Police Psychologist,
African American Police League of Chicago

Presented to The Chicago Literary Club

January 22, 2001

For much of the last four years, the nation's three largest cities have been embroiled in police scandals that have questioned the public's right to trust their uniformed officers. Whether it was the New York officer ramming a broom handle up a rectum in a local police station, the rogue officers falsifying evidence in Los Angeles criminal trials, or the inexperienced officers shooting the unarmed black student and female bystander in Chicago streets two years ago,--- the message has been loud and clear . The public, and particularly minorities, face an uncertain future in the hands of those sworn to protect. New York Mayor Rudolph Juliani received far more criticism for defending the police in a controversial shooting than he ever received for criticizing them. With the possible exception of Atlanta, whose Mayor and police chief are of the same minority culture, criticizing urban police officers is considered part of the job of a big city executive.

Lost in all the controversy is the fact that the job of the big city police officer has grown exceeding complex over the past dozen years. Police officers are not by definition a flawed group of people. It is the impact of the growing demands on the job that has compromised public safety. Despite it's failures, Chicago has one of the best, if not the best, police force in the nation. The credit goes more to its unions than its political leaders.

If O.J. Simpson had been arrested in Chicago, he'd still be serving time today. The Chicago Police's Department's chain of evidence has few flaws, despite complaints about the crime lab itself. If Rodney King drove Chicago streets, he would be in jail as well, with no threat of a riot. The coordination of police, fire, education and SWAT personnel have kept a Littleton, Colorado slaughter a remote and distant possibility in Chicago. Chicago's major weakness and chief vulnerability lies not in the inadequacies of its police force, but in the lack of adequate support services it provides for public servants: the Police Employee Assistance Program is a local joke, the police and fire discipline procedures are a politically connected nightmare. Despite some very valid criticisms, its officers are more than adequately protected by the aggressiveness of the concerned and caring Fraternal Order of Police and the ramshackle leadership of the tiny African American Police League. The fact that neither organization lets their members feel neglected has made more than a world of difference. It has been the difference.

Chicago's hearings on the police shooting of an unarmed woman car passenger two years ago highlighted, not so much police negligence, but administrative confusion. It was additional evidence of the failure of the police review board to operate independently of the most powerful, and arguably most effective, mayor in the nation. The hearings changed little about the effectiveness of the total force to perform with excellence.

Yet if New York, Chicago and L.A. are any example, every major police chief and every big city chief executive is in a crisis like virtually every officer themselves over the changing demands on the modern day police officer. When they first joined the police force, the average applicant considered it a job like any other, albeit with great benefits and a decent pension.

They were wrong.

The modern urban police officer is the ultimate civilized man, in armed revolt and justified anger, to all the unfairness in life created by others. It is He, or She, more than anyone else, that separates Capone's Chicago of the twenties from Daley's City That Works. It is He, or She, that separates The Godfather's violent New York, and Dashille Hammitt's corrupt Los Angeles from being the way of life we live today. Whatever freedoms we have in American are not due as much to the wisdom of our laws, but to those in our daily life who protect them. With the possible exception of a soldier in war, police service is the only job in American society in which death is a very real possibility, every day.

The job of today's centurions are not simply to "serve" the Emperor and "protect" his right to taxes. The logo on most police cars today, "We serve and Protect" never originally referred to the public in ancient times. It referred to the officer's job to "protect" government, however flawed, unfair and prejudiced they might be and "serve" its leaders' every whim. Today, by virtue of U.S. Supreme Court edicts, the New Centurion must be lawyer, doctor, soldier, psychologist, nurse, psychiatrist, computer operator, judge, weapons specialist, bailiff, social worker, detective, minister, priest, immigration officer, marriage counselor, sex therapist, big brother, little sister and warden. He must interpret Ebonics, Spanish, Polish, gang signs, rap and Freud. He must possess the patience of Job, the power of David and the mediating wisdom of Solomon. He must anticipate the courts, translate the statutes and know the laws before they are written. He must be all things, to all people, at all times with unerring perfection. If there is any time left, he must be husband, father, lover, banker, driver, coach and scribe all before he can be alone with himself. In the public's mind, it is a very simple job.

Yet good officers don't develop over night. There are five stages of growth the new recruit will pass in his first three to seven years before he can carry his badge with any validation. From the naive recruit (1) with all his childish enthusiasm, he immediately becomes a (2)loser. Once he takes the job, he loses many of his close relationships. For many, a new police officer represents too much authority too close,--- like an informer in the house. Formerly close friends quickly will trade his friendship for their privacy. They do not want to be close to the police. The recruit will go through a phase of (3)denial, where he attempts to deny the changes in is his life are real, followed by (4) a period of depression and confusion. He is forced into an invisible emotional and physically protective cocoon to make adjustments in his life that were not planned or expected. When he emerges he must complete his personal struggle for acceptance (5): community acceptance, department acceptance: political acceptance, and finally, self acceptance. It's the ultimate born again experience. Every police officer must successfully resolve for himself each stage of his professional development, if he is ever to achieve job satisfaction and success.

Every officer must also successfully survive the Big Five of Crises. The first, there is the Law and Order Crisis. Here he must confront challenges to be bribed, to steal, or to tolerate those that do. The second, is the Department Crisis. He comes to witness the fickleness of those responsible for administrative support and conflicts that come with protecting lives, versus protecting career. The third is the Family Crisis, where his family, children, friends and all his primary emotional support system make adjustments to the life he has chosen. It's either that or they force him to alter their priority in his life. The fourth is the modern day identity crisis:-- Which TV or movie star will best represents his approach to the job? Is his job a script from "Kojak", "Dirty Harry", "Hunter" or a combination of "Barney Miller" and the "Hill Street" zoo? There are more movies and television shows on the approach to his job than any other profession. The modern police officer is always being compared to someone, somewhere on the screen, ---for good or worse. Whether he likes it or not, the fantasy of film is how the public measures the reality of his life.

His last Crisis, is the Life and Death Crisis. He is never a full member of the police community until he comes to accept the reality he could lose his life on the job; his actions directly affect the lives of others, particularly police officers.. He must discover he can survive without family support, department support, community support and individual weakness, --- and still do his job. The experience leaves every officer with a more important realization: he cannot exist with out the support and respect of the rest of the men in blue. In the final assessment, they are all he has. The bond of one officer to another is often so strong, that they will risk the rejection of their family before the rejection of their peers. The stories you on television regarding the alienation of police family members are based on a daily reality.

Life on the job is not like rookie school. There is no rule for every occasion, the textbook theories are only guidelines, predictable human behavior doesn't exist. Emotionally, he learns to restrict his feelings to those that help him survive: empathy, sympathy and threat. Any other feelings create fatal vulnerabilities. He learns to ignore them.

The first time the average man is fired upon by a gunman , he experiences a sense of shock, then surprise, then relief. The first time a police officer is fired at, he moves from surprise that it could happen at all, to astonishment at his own survival. The power that lies in his gun becomes real. But it doesn't stop there. He has fantasies of alternative lives, some safer, others more exotic, all less meaningful. He has visualizations of his own funeral, filled with the voices of family pains and departmental eulogies. Some men come out of the experience with a sense of invincibility, of being bullet proof. They are the unlucky ones.

The lucky ones learn they are alone; departmental shrinks are inadequate, helpful

psychotropic medication, if not carefully hidden, will get him fired. Civilian therapists are to be avoided;-- they overemphasize one's weaknesses, understate one's strengths and completely ignore the need for emotional armor. No one without a uniform ever fully understands a world with constant chaos or acute, chronic and unexpected pain and violence. When an officer realizes that there may come a day when he could die, he also realizes there will be no one to support his family if he does. Along with the financial crisis, widowed police families are never understood, and therefore rarely supported. With the realization of death, comes an officer's best friend--- perpetual, ever-present, caution. It is this suspiciousness, often quite justified, that civilians mistake for a police officer's lack of trust in mankind.

For the female officer, the search for relevant models is delimiting. There are many to chose from, none of which work: acting like a man, competing with a man, competitor to man, equal to man, denied by a man, being without a man, superior to man, being a part of a man's system, alienated by men, accepted as a individual different from men. None of them obviate the fact that in a man's world, she remains a woman not a man. Most, if not all, of the lady cops on television are divorced, abandoned, ignored and neglected and generally unhappy. They never go to commercial break triumphant.

Unlike other professions, a police officer's family joins the force with him whether they want to or not. The job changes the lives of every one associated with them, particularly their family. The job affects his children's friends, his neighbors, his business relationships and his loves. They must all assume greater authority, confidence, self -esteem and control. Every one knows his gun has the power over life and his word could cause real pain, if not incarceration The soliloquy asked by his children always begins, "Why must I be different." The answer is always the same, "Because I am". Because the parent has taken the burden of protecting society, his children must never threaten to threaten it.

His is a stress that is unique to public servants; there is no widely accepted word for the experience. Freud did a real service to man by charting his emotions, their dysfunctions and needs. As did Alcoholics Anonymous with drinkers, and God with religion. They all added a vocabulary to a troubled portion of human experience and thus made it more manageable. But the real issue facing police officers is not characterological dysfunction, alcohol, or Biblical disobedience. It is the prolonged, intensive, overwhelming stress of being responsible for someone else's life-- every day. Poorly managed, it is the unrelenting stress from doing the job, not the job itself, that leads to the dysfunction and loss associated with Freud and AA.

Freud called his profession's unique stresses counter-transference. AA calls theirs denial. The best that comes to mind for police officers is the Blue Flu: the failure of anyone outside the job to understand an officer's need to grieve the job he does and decompress from the internal questions it creates and yet be adequately paid and emotionally supported for it all. Every officer has his own private, but similar opinion, as to why there is no accepted term for their experience. The generally accepted perspective is simple -- "No one cares."

As a forensic psychologist, I call it"charcoal stress".

Ever wonder what makes Jack Daniels such a popular drink? It's not just that it is aged in fine oak barrels. Jim Beam does that. Jack, in all his wisdom, filters his mixture through ten feet of burnt, blackened, wood charcoal. The charcoal takes the impurities from the liquor, leaving the drinker with a smoothness that defies the average hangover. The charcoal retains the impurities, much like the police officer retains those of society. A police officer's "charcoal stress" is as valuable to society as Jack's discarded charcoal wood chips to his liquor.

Those who survive best under the demands of police work have a spouse like a "surgeon's wife". To do the work a surgeon does, to deal life and death on a daily basis, requires a special mate. Outside of the clothes he wears under his greens, the surgeon makes few personal decisions. The "surgeon's wife" chooses his food, his clothes, his home, his vacations, manages his children and all his investments. In a world without guarantees, certainties and trust, she is both, always and forever. In return, she enjoys a life that shares the fruits of his.

Officers who live to retirement, and are healthy enough to enjoy that retirement, have a "surgeon's wife" to credit. They can never do it alone. She keeps the demands of his job in perspective, coordinates the family's emotional support system, looks after his health, sees that he exercises regularly and keeps every family member spiritually involved. She remains wisely naive about his weaknesses. There is tremendous personal satisfaction and fulfillment in her subordination to his job and needs, when appropriately rewarded. When the marital contract of men in crisis works, so does life.

When it doesn't, life becomes painful, and difficult and tragic. Some years ago a feminist social worker told a generation of young Chicago recruit wives, not to tolerate abuse from a spouse on the force. She didn't address job stressors, point out any prevention strategies, suggest any helpful books or remind them of their husband's dangerous jobs. There were no testimonies from wives who survived the "Widow Walk" or the "Love Expressed as Anger and Fear Phenomenon". She never used the word "stress", didn't discuss "decompression," ignored words like "support", "caution" and "judgement". In the young social worker's mind, she was speaking to a group of women, just like the PTA or the local church social. But these were not any group of women, these were police wives. Their husbands carried guns, dealt in death, abandonment and abuse every day. Those trusting little women all made the mistake of listening as if they were any other group of women.

For a police generation, whenever the husbands of those women had family problems, their wives called the police like any other woman. They filled their husband's work place with all their family gossip, most of it soiled, for everyone to see. The privacy laws protected their personnel files, but not the minds of those who came to know. Their husbands faced a war on the streets, with their supervisors, with the public, with the politicians, and when they came home, they met a family that was never understanding.

For a police generation, the city lost a lot of potential bright and shining stars. For a generation, the war in the streets was greater at home and real lives and real careers suffered. For a generation, a lot of those same women's children didn't make it to college with family help.

The critical determinant in a functioning personality, Freud's theories not withstanding, is not the past or the pressing situations of the present. It is the percentage of conflict and the percentage of pain divided by the presence or absence of kindness and support. Let me repeat that. The critical determinant in a functioning personality, Freud's theories not withstanding, is not the past or the pressing situations of the present. It is the percentage of conflict and the percentage of pain divided by the presence or absence of kindness and support. In any given month, the average officer walking a beat gets more verbal abuse, more threats of physical abuse and more actual hostile physical contact than the average person in a lifetime. Veterans call it the "Bobby Knight In Your Face All Day Syndrome". It is the experience of having to maintain a placid professional exterior when you really want to rip off the head of the guy in front of you. Indiana Hoosiers know it well.

Together with the "Take Out the Garbage Honey Complex", the "Let me Drive Daddy Cry", the "Help Me with the Home Work Cough", and the impossible to follow Departmental Directives of "Do Not Offend the Blacks", "Be Nice to the Jews", "Don't Ignore the Hispanics", "Don't Upset the Gays" and "Smile at the Women", they constitute a typical stressful day. If a police officer has a supportive spouse, close friends and understanding children, the conflict and the job dissatisfaction are by comparison, minimal. The longer and stronger the support, the better the officer. When those entities are in conflict, his job, as well as his personal safety, are at serious risk. The longer and stronger the conflict, the more he is at risk,--- mostly to himself. Suicide among police officers, and lack of family support, is rarely viewed as fruit from the same family tree.

Police officers have only one natural enemy. It's not the bad guys they incarcerate, the public that misunderstands them or the demon drink that is often their only support. There is only one entity that forces a strong and courageous officer into corner bars and shakes the boots of the most seasoned veteran equally with that of the new recruit. It's not career climbing reporters, intrusive cameras, or facts falsely reported.

It is politics.

Politics puts inexperienced doctors in the medical office to deny an officer disability for real and debilitating injuries, most of them emotionally related. Politics puts ministers and teachers who have never broken a fingernail, on police procedure review boards. Politics gives naive "civilians" the power to change the lives of whole families with the same weight they give the cream in their coffee. Politics rips the guts from the union with its payroll deduction policies and bends with public opinion for the benefit of the politician in charge. A good cop today is a pariah tomorrow for no other reason than Jesse Jackson is in town. A wise and independent police chief can be reduced to a sniffling, whimpering child, fearful of his pension-- - by politics.

Every city has a political horror story like Chicago Englewood Commander Jon Burge in its past. When gangs, drugs, violence and police killers were rampant, he was told to clean it up-- no one asked how. He did. Years later, they learned how. He was summarily fired, despite the protests of his union, a full parade down the center of the city and the cries of "foul" from the families of the officers who were killed. The politicians who gave the orders had moved to higher office. Only the officers, like Burge, who made the city safer could be found, like charcoal after a picnic. It was, of course, not politic to share the responsibility for his actions upward, or mediate his punishment. Nevertheless, Burge remains one of the few disgraced police officers discharged as a result of pubic controversy,--with his pension intact. That too, is politics.

To be fair, not all the fault should fall on the shoulders of politicians. Today's crime fighting tools, like DNA, behavioral profiling and forensic psychology did not exist in Burge's day. The crude and unconstitutional tactics that he, and others like him used, were all that they had against Miranda and the U.S. Supreme Court. Almost everything a police officer did 25 to 35 years ago violated some law or statute. Almost every thing he did got him in trouble with someone. If not his commander, then the public. If not his wife, then his children. If not his political benefactor then someone, somewhere, who found fault with their conception of the way he exercised law and order. If he were a different race or sex from someone he was arresting, trouble was inevitable.

With the possible exception of licensed hunters and competitive sportsmen, everyone who buys a hand gun expects to shoot someone, sometime. (Too often, it's themselves or someone near. Guns purchased for self defense, "accidentally" kill more owners than bad guys.) On the day they actually do kill someone, most have been thinking about it for quite a while. They deserve what the courts will give them.

No police officer begins his day with an intent to shoot, kill or maim someone he has not met. Nor does he predict that he will deprive a mother of her unarmed child. When obscene events occur during the course of their job, it is as much a result of the officer's protective armor being pierced as the accumulated frustrations of hundreds of Bobby Knights, Family Demands and poorly conceived Departmental Directives. When an unexpected public death results, few consider human uniformed error or the failure of departmental leaders to adopt police stress prevention programs. As Mark Furman observed during the O.J. Simpson trial, police administrators never relate an officer's professional or written cries for help as being in any way related to the unwanted consequences that follow. Police officers remain the last major minority group in America without a voice or a champion.

The public, safe in their homes, does not understand the Police Fugue, --the inability to break off a pursuit in the heat of a chase. The police should stop all chases at a red light, even if the bad guys don't. The police should let the bad guys shoot first, it says so in the movie script. The police should turn the other cheek, the Bible tells us so. No public official has ever told the public, "Please obey the police when confronted by them. You may not be around for a court room appeal of your rights. They may not respect all of your rights, but they are there to protect all of ours. Be careful out there." Rodney King did have choices. The fact that he ignored them should not have made him wealthy suing his city, at the expense of the careers of the officers who arrested him to protect others.

The law recognizes that a bad childhood resulting in insanity demands a sentence set aside for treatment. Alcoholics get a treatment program if caught driving drunk the first time. Even murderers admitting to the heat of passion, warrant a sentence reduction called manslaughter. But the Fraternal Orders of Police, the African American Police Leagues, the Asian American Police Councils, the Indian Tribal Police Congresses, the Hispanic-American Police Unions, all lament one inescapable fact of police life: An average officer, with an average record, doing an unspectacular job in a violent world, who makes a mistake in judgement, that is either violent or criminal, is sentenced as a first offender with the same law and the same spirit of vengeance as a multiple convicted career killer. He gets no credit for babies kissed, lives saved or felons arrested, sentenced and jailed.

It is lost on the public that the events that brought him to his punishment began with an oath to serve and protect followed by a period of doing just that. Although he failed in his current assignment, he is a still a different felon from the man who began his day with violence and menace aforethought,--- and could afford a better lawyer. If anyone one is entitled to a hearing for mercy and mitigation, it is the man whose day began with roll call. More to the point, police officers should never be tried by their supposed peers. They have none. The "civilian" procedural review board member who has never faced death and the uncertainty of a midnight alley, in pursuit of an armed felon, is not the peer of anyone who has done just that. The experience changes the man, those whom he works with and those whom he lives with. Police officers should never be tried by local courts or even civilian review boards.

They should be tried in a specialized federal court, outside of the emotion of community passions and the compromises that come with local elections.

Yet taken together, police officers are a most cohesive group in their individual approach to the job. A foul mouth, in a Mark Furman has much less relevance to a police officer than the passionate protest from a popular minister before assembled cameras. To a man, every officer will agree that when a citizen alone, at night, on a dark street, faces four angry and unemployed felons, the black, white, brown, yellow and red Furmans of the world will be as effective and as professional as the popular Officer Friendly. Blue is, after all, the one true constant in the sky. The minister, by contrast, is likely to send a prayer from the safety of his car.

At the end of the day, a police officer's feelings suffer as painfully as others; their blood flows just as quick. There will not be an annual parade in their honor like those given war veterans. There will be little recognition of his deeds by those who didn't benefit from them. His war and his war losses will always, for the most part, remain private. Yet a man or woman, like any other man or woman, who does a job that most men or women could not or would not do, has survived another day. The rest of us will sleep well this night because they were there.

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