Many readers are scoffing as they are reading that sentence, like it's painfully obvious that I could never be police. I am weak, I am irresponsible, I have issues with authority. All true. But other times, I think, well, maybe. Like, I sincerely enjoy dealing with the general public, even in stressful times, and I think I could bring a measure of civility and calm to those situations. I think I'd be good at that. I'd like to have the opportunity to better my community, and if I was a police officer, I would have the ability to do that substantially more than I can now.
Let's be real though. I could never ever be a police officer. I should stop deluding myself.
I was a few minutes late to witnessing a police shooting right outside my office building today. No humans were injured, but a dog is dead right there on the sidewalk. I'm looking at the scene from my desk as I type.
Allegedly, two homeless guys were tussling, and police were on the scene because Family Court is right down the street. The fight escalated to the point that the homeless guy who owned a dog let the dog loose to attack the other guy (this is all hearsay from my building's security guard, by the way). I guess the one cop felt threatened in some way, and unloaded his gun on the dog. It's not a pretty scene down there, from what I can see. Bloodstains all over the sidewalk.
I'm not saying that there aren't scenarios in which police should shoot a dog. I'm the son of a mailman who has come close to macing my friends' dogs in the past. I get it; personal safety is paramount. And it was a decent-sized dog down there, so if the dog truly did try to attack the officer, I guess it was okay to defend himself. It just seems bizarre to me that it would escalate that much. Are tasers effective on dogs? According to PetMD, tasing a dog could be deadly, but isn't necessarily so. Certainly less deadly than shooting a dog.
Did the police officer use proper procedure by grabbing for his gun before his taser, or baton, or mace? Probably not. Especially considering that you're unloading a gun on a busy city street (the same street that certain wayward bloggers usually ride their bikes down around the exact same time the gun went off).
But I'm trying to put myself in that position, imagine if I was the police officer. Would I have overreacted in the same way? Probably. Like I said, not good under pressure like that. If it was me, I probably would have shot the gun and missed due to incompetency. Probably smash a window or something in the process.
The difference between me and a lot of people who become police officers is that I can acknowledge that I would be a terrible police officer. And I think it's my responsibility to never become one. Even though I think I could bring a lot of positive to the job, the negatives are too great and grave. A lot of young idiots truly believe they are fit to put on the blue uniform, only to find themselves shooting a kid who's holding a toy gun or some shit like that.
I'm not trying to downplay any of that, or minimize the real impact a fuck-up officer can have. I am 100% against corrupt or incompetent police officers, and I 100% support more training for good cops and full accountability for bad ones. I'm really only writing this blog post because the victim here was a dog, not a human, and so the stakes are a little lower.
I wonder if the police officer who pulled the trigger today is going to reflect on whether he did the right thing. I wonder if it will be determined by security footage that he took the correct course of action, or if he fucked up. I wonder, if it's determined he fucked up, but is ultimately unpunished, if he'll still at the end of the day able to reflect on the fact that he killed a dog, took another life, killed ostensibly the best friend of a poor guy on the street. Or if he'll be unrepentant and pose a threat to other living creatures in the future.
Then again, in all probability, this rather large dog posed a sincere threat to the police officer, and he acted appropriately and took the dog down. Maybe the officer didn't have any time to do literally anything else besides grab a gun and shoot. Maybe shooting the gun was the only way to avoid serious injury in the jaws of a pit bull. If that's the case, you can't really blame the officer at all.
I'm not here to make the case either way, simply because I don't have all the necessary information. And that's not really the point of this blog post (is there ever a point?). I'm just trying to say that I know if I was in the officer's position, I probably would have fucked up big time. And so I'm really glad I'm not a police officer, tasked with life and death scenarios. Every time I foolishly believe that I would make a good Philly cop, I'm going to think back to the dead dog I saw this morning, because it has finally convinced me to put that very bad idea to bed once and for all. I will never be police.
Also, I can't be a cop because I don't want to shave my beard. But that's another blog post for another time.
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| Only a cop on the stage, never in real life. |
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