I love being a cop, although I've only been doing it for three years. Being a cop is very different from working in the corporate world and you literally have no idea what you're going to be facing on a daily basis.
But, where it is very much like working in the corporate sector is, you can get in trouble not for doing the wrong thing, but for doing the politically wrong thing.
Police departments are an extension of city, county, or state governments which are run by politicians. Politicians don't like being embarrassed and will hang anyone out to dry to avoid it ... including cops.
Lot of friends are cops, I couldn't do it. Not into the BS.
I was going to be a cop after high school, taking classes. But pay sucked. Today pay is great but youre fodder. In my day you shot dangerous drivers fleeing in cars. Today you can't give them a ticket without being charged with something.
It's not quite that bad. There is a lot more fact-based information that goes into police procedure these days. It turns out that shooting at a moving vehicle is a bad move. You can't disable a car with a 9mm, but you could cause it to go out of control and kill a bunch of kids crossing a street. At the end of the day, is it worth civilian casualties to catch a couple of crack heads who refused to stop for police?
My sergeants tell me often that if we let someone go today, we'll catch them tomorrow. The one thing all bad guys have in common is that they can't stay off police radar. They will always get caught.
Our policies concerning use of force, non-lethal options, community engagement, are no longer just the opinions of street cops, they also include a lot of well-conducted research and study and that's a good thing.
For the record, I give out tickets all the time and while I've had to go to court several times if they're contested, they always have to pay the fine and I've never been brought up on charges.
