2008, October 3: When a Cop Checks Out for Good.
[For Oct. 3 – 10, 2008]
WHEN A COP CHECKS OUT FOR GOOD
From the cruiser he keyed up the mike and screamed, “You all have F’d me over. Now F you.” And then every cruiser and dispatch heard the shot. This is a true story but not from any department in our area.
If you are in the blue long enough you are going to run into things that will cut to the heart. The hardest and most daunting will not come from the streets or from the administrative aspects of your job. They will come from the loss of the strongest and best – those whose work becomes the stories that cross generations; those who become the statistics of our profession. And these always, always, leave emotional and spiritual debris for the living to clean up.
Signal 1 is, at heart, about the stuff you may not see or consider in the busy-ness of your everyday life; until, that is, it will inevitably be interrupted. Instead, it connects to the stuff that either adds to your life or drains it dry. For instance, current research indicates that the number 1 precursor of PTSD is fundamentally spiritual – the interruption of your core values. That is, what you believe about life, God, the universe, your relation to it, relationship and trust, justice and fairness. Tank these and you are in trouble – unless you think you are the exception. There are mounds of solid social science research that indicate the same thing. It’s solid. So, we ignore these at our own detriment and loss of quality in life – and occasionally, life itself where more than anywhere else we are dragged back to the issues of faith, spirituality and connection. It is the absence of these which creates the vacuum of the dark night of the soul.
When that happens to someone we know and have worked with over the decades it is going to bite hard. It may be anticipated and then the shoe drops or it can come right out of the blue! But there are three things which, each year, push more cops to use their service pistols on themselves (not their off duty firearms, by the way) than the perps claim on the streets. Here they are: 1) Hopelessness, 2) Helplessness and 3) Uselessness. When you pull the handle on life’s “One arm Bandit” and these three come up on the wheel you don’t win anything. You lose the greatest gift God has given and literally lose it all. While it is a sinful use of the most precious thing you can have, it is fundamentally a waste of the stewardship God has entrusted; it is when the demons have won.
It is certainly more complicated than can be related in a few paragraphs and there are no OPOTA SPOs to give us a heads up about the demons which lurk in either our own lives or those of our brother and sister officers. But those three elements, hopelessness, helplessness and uselessness, give us a good starting point to acknowledge and act to fix at least one of the three. I can tell you from personal experience that while we cannot forget those we have lost, we must remember there are officers who work among us who are silent testimony to brother and sister officers who cared enough to fix at least one of the three. More than you and I can know. And that should ease the pain we carry for those we trust to the care and mercy of our God who better understands the dark night of the soul. For His thoughts are not as our thoughts.
