IF

Funny comment from a "fellow cop" the other day. He or She e mailed and said "if the people you worked with were so bad and the people you worked for were so bad, why did you stay? OR was it that it wasnt that bad and your just angry? Let the anger go.....
REALLY? .....You read my book and this is what you got from it?  The book Curbchek isn't about my anger. Anger over all that was wrong, anger over all that happened, anger period. It is about the reality of what being a cop is and does to you. If( and this is a big damn IF!) If you worked the street and did not hide in the cemeteries at night sleeping, If you actually patrolled your area and looked for more than the calls that were given to you. IF you crawled your fat ass out from behind the radar gun and stopped giving mom and pop traffic tickets and went out and actually battled on the street. If you were not in the LTs office telling him once again how you really wanted to transfer off the street into a specialty so you could have an office.If you didn't sign out on every parking problem as soon as an in progress felony call came in. IF..... I could go on... but why? IF what you took from reading Curbchek is that I am angry? that's cool. We may have worked the same streets, same department, but we did not work the same way... are not the same kind of cop. Go back to watching Dragnet, John Wayne, Barney Miller etc... go back to patting yourself on the back about how amazing you are. That is cool too. Others have read the book and cried, relived old painful memories, grieved and heard the point of the book. We are all in this together...in case you missed that point.

Am I an angry guy? You decide. ZF