Law enforcement officers in DC and the rest of the country will be observing Police Week until Friday. May 15 is designated as Peace Officers Memorial Day under Public Law 103-222, enacted in 1994. The flag of the United States of America should be flown at half-staff from sunrise to sunset on this day.
Flying the flag at half-staff is only authorized for four days per year, absent a presidential proclamation. Considering the gravity of the other three (Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, Patriot Day, September 11, and National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, December 7), we should feel pretty special. The word "hero" and its derivatives will be used a lot this week in reference to law enforcement officers. That's a good thing, because many people regard cops as a nuisance, or as thugs, or in some other capacity they don't like. There are certainly heroes in this line of work, and it's appropriate that we remember and honor them.
Even so, I think that "hero" word is tossed around a bit too freely these days. My dictionary says that a hero is "somebody who commits an act of remarkable bravery or has shown an admirable quality such as great courage or strength of character." I have known a lot of cops that fit this definition. I have known more that didn't.
When a cop is killed in the line of duty, we automatically and naturally sanctify them. It doesn't matter much what they were doing when they died, as long as they were in an "on duty" status. Their transgressions are forgiven, their shortcomings forgotten. This sends a dangerous message to the living, especially the young cops that are still forming their professional core values. All that is needed to rise to hero status is to die in the saddle.
We all want to be admired, and every cop has indulged in fantasies where he or she is the champion, the savior, the rescuer. We save our partner or an innocent citizen in the shootout; our photo is snapped as we are carrying the baby out of the burning building. That's not going to happen for very many of us.
Roughly half the cops that die in the line of duty each year do so while they're behind the wheel of their patrol cars. About half of those are killed in single-vehicle accidents, where the car is found upside down in a ditch or embedded in a tree. Some of those are just it's-gonna-happen things, but the majority occur when the driver goes way outside his competence and training and loses control of the vehicle. It's very rare when that death is used as an example of ego and thrill-seeking taking over from judgment and intelligent assessment of the situation.
I worked with an officer named Jesse. When we had the situations where all the cops were behind cover, pointing guns at the bad guy, Jesse was famous for sprinting past everyone, to the focus of the incident, and jamming his gun in the crook's ear. It was a local joke. He always got away with it, and he lived long enough to retire. Because he got the bad guy and had been doing it that way for as long as anyone could remember, no one called him on it.
No one considered how the situation would have been had Jesse ever run out of luck and gotten plugged before he could reach his objective. He would be wounded and out in the open. His gun, ammunition, and radio would have been available to the crook. In order to rescue him, one or more of the cops with better sense and tactics would have had to place themselves at greater risk. But Jesse would have been the hero.
Those of you reading this who have enough experience to have known some cops who died on duty are probably aware of deaths caused not by bravery, but by stupidity. It's not good to speak ill of the dead, and even more of a taboo to condemn the actions of a fallen "hero." Sooner or later, though, you are going to have the opportunity to discuss that incident with someone who is looking to you as a role model, someone who will integrate what you tell them into their model of what a cop should be. You can carry on the hero myth, and let them believe that doing reckless, unnecessarily dangerous things is heroic. Or you can make them understand that a dead hero is still dead, and not able to help anyone.
And, on this concept of courage and bravery: true courage is when you really, really don't want to do something, but you do it anyway because it's the right thing. Courage can be a factor when you're running after the bad guy in a foot pursuit, but if you're like most cops, you live for that stuff. You wouldn't be anywhere else. That's not so much courage as thrill-seeking behavior, which is pretty common among cops.
It takes a lot more courage to tell a fellow officer that he's doing something shameful, and you're not going to ignore it. It takes courage to go against peer pressure and the desire for acceptance, and do what you know is right. It takes courage to remain at your post when far more entertaining things are happening elsewhere. You are unlikely to get any medals for that kind of courage, and your "reward" might be your greatest fears being realized. If my experience is any indicator, the times when I didn't display that kind of courage are the ones I regret most.
Honor your heroes, whoever they may be. Pick them carefully.
Be safe and be well.