SB7: Thin blue line
I'm not a cop. While I get that cops think a certain way, I don't think like them, no matter how hard I try. You screw up evidence, you show a hint of impropriety on my scene and you're gone. I fired a guy for stealing jewelry off of a body once. I've gone toe-to-toe with the brass about wrongdoings within the City of Baltimore and lost. No one had my back, there was no 'line' protecting me from the fact that others fell down on the job.
Am I saying I don't understand why people cover for each other? No. I get it. We have dirty jobs. No one wants to do our jobs but everyone wants to criticize us for the way we do them. There are rules made by people governing our jobs who've never spent a day in our shoes. There's a difference, however, between falling down on the job -- doing something deliberately wrong, for your own benefit or screwing up because you can't hack it -- and bending or breaking the rules for the better good.
I've seen good cops give up their careers to make our lives safer. A close friend of mine helped take out a drug kingpin and paid for it with the one thing he loved more than anything else -- his badge. He understood that the squad as a whole was greater than his career.
Another friend -- ended up paying for a decision he made with his life. But at the end of the day, even if it was "breaking the rules", both of those men made the world a better place. Now people doing illegal things on the job for personal profit...like I said, different story.
Am I saying I don't understand why people cover for each other? No. I get it. We have dirty jobs. No one wants to do our jobs but everyone wants to criticize us for the way we do them. There are rules made by people governing our jobs who've never spent a day in our shoes. There's a difference, however, between falling down on the job -- doing something deliberately wrong, for your own benefit or screwing up because you can't hack it -- and bending or breaking the rules for the better good.
I've seen good cops give up their careers to make our lives safer. A close friend of mine helped take out a drug kingpin and paid for it with the one thing he loved more than anything else -- his badge. He understood that the squad as a whole was greater than his career.
Another friend -- ended up paying for a decision he made with his life. But at the end of the day, even if it was "breaking the rules", both of those men made the world a better place. Now people doing illegal things on the job for personal profit...like I said, different story.