A real hero doesn’t look like a basketball player, or a baseball player, or a football player.
A real hero doesn’t star in movies or make platinum albums.
A real hero doesn’t make the big bucks or the big fame or the big name.
A real hero looks like a 24 police officer, just 15 days out of field training, who puts her body between a gunman and an 11 year old girl, at the expense of her own life.
God bless you, Officer Jillian Michelle Smith. You are the embodiment of “protect and serve.”
Officer Daddyman learned a saying at some point in his law enforcement career: You either write the ticket or chew the ass.
What does that mean? Well, for a cop, it means that when you pull somebody over for doing something stupid and breaking the law, you either ticket them for it or lecture them sternly about it, but you don’t do both. Write the ticket or chew the ass; it’s poor form to do both and cops who do are one the kind of guys (or gals) who just reinforce that cop=jerk stereotype in so many people’s minds. With both the ticket or the lecture, the person breaking the law is receiving the negative consequences of stupid and/or illegal actions. Punishing them with both the fine/potential jail time of a ticket AND a fussing-at is just mean.
Daddyman has pointed out that this is also an excellent philosophy by which to parent. As a parent, when your kid does something stupid, you either mete out consequences (or discipline or punishment, however you term it) or a lecture, but if you do both, it’s overkill. I confess that I am sometimes the parent who both writes the ticket and chews the ass, because, well…I’m wordy and can’t help but chew the ass. It’s an areas I’m working on.
Of course, the real question is when to write the ticket and when to chew the ass…and whether or not I can recognize which one I’m choosing before the horse is already out of the barn! If Captain Science is lollygagging through his school work and misses out on going somewhere fun as a result, he’s already received his consequences; he doesn’t need a lecture on top of it, so I need to make a point of not making some “See? Now you’ve missed out! If only you’d…” talking-to on top of it. If I’ve just given him the “respect your mother” lecture after he’s said something rude, I can’t turn around and send him out to run two laps to burn off the sass. That’s a good thing about viewing my parental responses to infractions in light of choosing ticket-writing or ass-chewing: it forces me to take a moment to decide whether natural consequences will ensure, whether those will be noticeable enough to make a difference to the kids, and whether those are serious enough to drive the point home. Sometimes I write the ticket. Sometimes, I chew the ass.
Write the ticket or chew the ass: a parenting (and policing) philosophy to live by. I do discourage you from bringing this up with your local law enforcement the next time you get pulled over, however, unless you’d really like to get BOTH.
This is not a post about where I was on September 11, 2001.
While I remember that day in great detail, my experiences and emotional responses on 9/11 became stunningly irrelevant just shy of three years ago, when Officer Daddyman graduated from police academy. By the time the next September 11th rolled around, what I thought about on that day, what I feared, had changed.
Here’s the thing: when you’re the wife of a police officer, every cop is your cop. This seems to be fairly consistent across the board for the officers’ wives I’ve met. When an officer dies, even if s/he was in another department, another state, hell, sometimes even in a movie or on TV, you take it personally. After all, that officer probably wasn’t doing anything significantly different than what your own officer does. Sure, larger states with bigger metropolitan populations are more likely to have a higher number of officer deaths, but as the ambush and murder of the Lakewood officers showed us, an officer can be in danger any where, solely for putting on the uniform that day. Any officer could pull over someone harboring extreme anti-government sentiment, could go out to a call that turns ugly, could end up in a completely unexpected situation. As Officer Daddyman puts it, there is no such thing as a “routine traffic stop,” and as a cop’s wife, you can’t help but take it to heart when an officer isn’t going to make it home to his family.
Every cop is my cop. That’s what I think about now on September 11th.
Seventy two law enforcement officers died on September 11th, 2001, including 23 officers from the New York City Police Department, three officers from the New York State Office of Court Administration, five officers from the New York State Office of Tax Enforcement, 37 officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department, one officer from the US Department of Justice, one officer from the Department of the Treasury, one officer from the Department of the Interior, and one fire marshal from the New York City Fire Department (fire marshals are both fire fighters and certified law enforcement officers). A staggering 343 fire fighters and EMTs also died that day.
These men and women didn’t “lose their lives,” a saying I have grown to strongly dislike. “Lost” implies something being misplaced, a lack of intent. While I’m sure none of these officers began their day, let alone their career, with the expectation of a terrorist attack that would kill almost 3,000 people, they didn’t stumble accidentally into their profession. Some of them became cops because they wanted to help people and serve their community, some were following in the family tradition, some were just taking the best job they could get with their skill set. They were regular people, working a profession that is often thankless, often unrespected, usually underpaid, usually overworked. They did exactly what I know my husband would have done under those terrifying circumstances. They did their job and some of them didn’t come home.
The police officers who died in 9/11 aren’t a list of numbers and names. Everyone one of those officers was a person — a father or mother who didn’t make it home to children; a spouse or girl/boyfriend who didn’t make it home to a partner; a child who didn’t make it home to a parent; a brother or sister who didn’t make it home to a sibling. Any given officer isn’t all that different from the ones who died getting people to safety on 9/11. He puts on a bulletproof vest and sidearms instead of a suit and tie. She walks up to your car knowing there is no such thing as a routine traffic stop. If a horrible tragedy occurs, their job is to run at it and not away from it. They do their job and sometimes they don’t come home. That’s the knowledge they put on every day, along with their uniform. I wish people would think of that the other 364 days of the year.
Every cop is my cop on September 11th…and every other day.
