Being a Cop Fulfills Dreams and Steals the Tenderness : Police: Being a cop in a society as savagely violent as ours doesn’t leave much room for innocent feelings.

I was sitting that day in the dilapidated building they called 77th Street station, completing a statement regarding a homicide I had just responded to, when I heard that a victim of a robbery had been shot down the street. I raced to the scene only to see a slightly built Mexican man lying on the ground with a gaping six-inch hole under his left arm. A sobbing man told me that two men had robbed him and his friend of the money they had earned selling oranges on the freeway off-ramp, then shot his friend.

The morning was very cold. As the man’s blood oozed onto the cold sidewalk, small clouds of vapor rose above him. As I knelt beside the fallen man, he weakly touched my gun and in broken English asked me to end his misery. I remember watching the vapor clouds, thinking it must be his soul going to heaven.

As the distant sirens grew louder, I shut my eyes and thought about being back home in my small Colorado town and coming to California to go to school. I always wanted to be a cop, and eventually joined the L.A. Police Department. Months later I was assigned to South-Central Los Angeles and immediately was introduced to the savage crimes so common in this poor and drug-ridden community. Being present at countless murder scenes, including a rock concert where four people were killed, somehow stole the tenderness and innocence of my youth. I recalled the years that followed--the killings, the beatings, the verbal abuse I suffered at almost every ticket I wrote and every family dispute I handled, and wondered why I didn’t stay in Colorado.

By now the paramedic was tapping me on the back, “Sarge, Sarge, we got him now. Go get cleaned up.” I stood up and announced to no one in particular that I’d like to kill the person responsible for this murder. By now the vapor had wisped away and the man was dead; he must have completed his journey. I went home and gave my wife my canned response: nothing had happened that night.

To be a cop in Los Angeles is to fulfill a dream--followed closely by a loss of innocence and tenderness. For a few cops, this means finally catching some miserable soul and beating him half to death. I can’t excuse the officers’ beating of Rodney King, but I understand it and can confidently say such things will occur as long as our society is so incredibly violent. What is needed is progressive discipline and intervention by management to ensure that officers are not about to break.

Mindless comments by morally bankrupt “community leaders” only serve to fan the flames of discontent. Calls for “investigations” should turn to calls for understanding, counseling, discipline, training and mandatory rotation of assignments. Black leaders claim that the community is at the breaking point. But the community and the police must come to terms and unite before the “gang in blue,” as we have been called, has nothing left to give and the streets are left to the real gang members.