For What It's Worth

*** This post is dedicated to the memory of Poughkeepsie City Police Officer John Falcone, and to "Scribbler."***

The Stephen Stills song "For What It's Worth" starts like this:

"There's something happening here
And what it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there"

It's the beginning of one of America's most popular songs to have come out of the sixties. On its face, though, it could very easily be the set-up for a call that goes out over police radios thousands of times every year in this country.

"Unknown trouble."

"Man with a gun."

"Shots fired."

And off they go. Off they go.

On Friday, February 18th, Poughkeepsie City Officer John Falcone received a "shots fired" call over his radio. He was just a block away. The call was hot, as they say. He keyed his mic, indicated that he was responding, and he gunned the engine of his radio car. What he saw when he pulled up at the scene was a man waving a handgun. This scenario would present the responding officer, an eighteen-year veteran, with quite a challenge-- possibly the challenge of his career. How do you deal with an armed man? You draw on him from behind the safety of your door (that hopefully has a ballistic panel) and you command him to drop the weapon.

Sounds simple enough, right? But there's a little wrinkle with this particular event. See, the suspect in question has a gun in one hand, and a three-year-old child in the other.

When he sees Officer Falcone, he turns and runs. Falcone gives chase. It is procedure. It is instinct. It. is. heroism.

It would have been a heroic act even if Falcone had not been shot dead by the suspect. Sadly, though, he was, which is why it made the news. The officer died, but not before wrestling the child out of the suspect's arms, and handing the child over to a bystander. He then engaged the suspect in a struggle for his weapon, a struggle that ended in Officer Falcone being shot in the head, and the suspect, as they so often do, taking his own life. The original shots fired call was prompted when the suspect shot his estranged wife in the head, also killing her.

Officer Falcone's parents will now have to stand by as thousands of police officers from across the country bury their 44-year-old son. It isn't supposed to be that way. This three-year-old child will have to grow up and learn the tragedy that culminated in such a stinging bloodbath on a Poughkeepsie street one Friday afternoon. It isn't supposed to be that way.

When I listen to people who content themselves with criticizing "The Police," as if they're criticizing some homogeneous, corporate entity like "McDonalds" or "Rent-a-Center," I cannot help but get my back up. Maybe it's because I'm older than they are. Maybe it's because I have stood in my EMT uniform, a black band across my badge, and saluted the lifeless body of a Philadelphia Police Officer shot in the head for no reason other than that some shithead with nothing more to lose decided to John Wayne his way out of one more spot of trouble. Maybe it's because I've seen widows, barely old enough to be married, stumble out of churches sobbing hysterically on the shoulders of their fathers, bewildered at how their lives are falling apart just as they've begun.

Maybe it's because I'm a privileged, wealthy, caucasian whose mind has been successfully infiltrated by left-wing mass media and right-wing propaganda. Or is it right-wing media and left-wing propaganda?

Meh.

Maybe it's because I see a middle-aged man risking everything to save the life of a three-year-old child. Maybe it's because they see a cog in the wheel of corruption and oppression doing his job like the governmental tool that he is, the occasional good deed amidst a thousand pilfers from the evidence locker, the roughing up of suspects, the planting of dime-bags in the pockets of baggy jeans, the perjuries and the abuses.

If you've read the posts in this blog for any number of weeks, you know that you are reading the words of a cop wannabee. I tried. Oh, God, did I try. I hit the gym. I lifted weights. I was at the firing range-- unloading .22s and .38s at target after target. And I got pretty good, too. I ran my lungs out at the track. I trained. I tried.

But it wasn't enough.

I couldn't lift that barbell with 83% of my bodyweight on it, and that's the sad truth, because we're not talking about a lot of weight to begin with. I didn't do so hot on the written tests either. The FBI rejected me after I answered a long series of questions about situational judgment and my belief-structures, which, apparently, do not align themselves with a successful career in law enforcement.

The funny thing is-- in the job I do now, I do something very police-like, and I never really thought about it until just now. I'll be standing in the chart room at the hospital, joking around with a nurse or a doctor, and, cutting through the air, is the alarm that sounds when somebody pushes the panic bell.

There is trouble.

I'll let loose an automatic expletive and dash out the door, along with my coworkers, towards the trouble. It could be a patient in medical distress. It could be an assault or a suicide attempt in progress. Whatever it is, somebody thought it was emergent enough to summon help. And I go, because, when the bell goes off, somebody is in trouble and needs help. Plain and simple.

"You don't have to answer the bell, you know-- there's paperwork to do. There's other people here to answer it," my supervisor said to me once a couple months ago. I laughed in her face.

"And if everybody said that to themselves when the bell went off, nobody'd answer it," I retorted. "When that bell goes-- I go."

Because, in this life, there are the people who need help, the people who answer that call, and those who offer either support or critique. And maybe my tendency to offer support makes me naive or manipulated, and, if that's the case, I very much prefer it that way.

For what it's worth.

Our Choice

It's nice to know that, at thirty, I can still be surprised. Not just surprised by just anybody, mind you-- like some lunatic in a clown wig and no pants on jumping out from behind my kitchen cupboard or by someone on reality television saying something coherent. No-- surprised by my wife.

After seven-and-a-half years of togetherdom, she still surprises me. I like it. Maybe it's because she doesn't do it by jumping out from behind the kitchen cupboard wearing a clown wig and no pants.

Though, I admit-- that would be surprising, even in this house.

"I don't want to feel guilty anymore for holding you back from doing what I know you really want to do with your life," she said to me on Sunday night.

What I really want to do. Sheesh. You have to dig to find the answer to that one, don't you? You have to rip through layers and layers of hurt and anger and despair and frustration and lots and lots of Band-Aids that have been applied to allegedly long-ago-healed wounds. But, if you're brave enough to look-- really look at what lies underneath everything that I've been, and everything that I am, and everything that I'd hoped I would be by now, it's not hard to see what I want to do with my life.

I know. You know. She knows. My mother, God bless her, she knows, too. She knows everything-- remember?

A long time ago-- God-- seven years ago, I remember jogging with my father on the track of my old high school. I was training to enter the police academy, and he and I had a very deep conversation, devoid of his usual bombastic humor and rants. I had been dating the woman who would become Mrs. Apron for about four or five months.

"Mummy," he said to me, "this relationship you are in is getting serious, and this decision to become a cop-- you cannot make it by yourself anymore, because it doesn't just affect you anymore-- it's two of you now. This is the end of you making choices just because-- fuck! I want to, you know? Maybe you will marry this girl, I don' know. But you will be two, not one. And you have to think about that. You have to think about her waiting up for you, not knowing if you're coming home-- if some crazy fuckin' asshole drug addict jump you in some alley. You have to think about what it's gonna do to her."

And I did. And I went ahead and enrolled in the academy anyway. And, at 23, I washed out. Chicken arms not quite strong enough, thank you, (they had yet to spend seventeen months on the street lifting 300 pound patients on stretchers all across Philadelphia). But my beautiful girl knew what I was doing. I had made the decision to enter the academy before I had met her and, so, when we met, my becoming a cop was part of the deal. It was part of what she had signed on for, no different than the other things about me she couldn't change-- the acerbic humor, the obscure Peter Sellers references, the affinity for neckties, the affection for my doctors, the tether to the community in which I grew up, my propensity for swearing, my lust to write.

It was all there for her to see. No hiding. No games.

On the track that day, in the summer heat, my father confessed to me that, without telling my mother, he had taken $80,000-- practically the sum-total of their lifesavings, and dumped it into his failing business to try to save it, which I guess he did because, seven years later, it's still here. My mother found out about it, and, well, it wasn't pretty.

"I can't believe I did it," he said to me as I stared at the beads of sweat on his head to keep from looking him in the eye as we bounded along the track, "but I did it, without telling my wife. I tell her everything, but I knew I had to do it. Don't ever do something without telling your wife," he warned me.

And so, in 2009, the bug not yet out of my system, I approached my wife with a police officer application for my home town department. She would not hear of it, and so, crestfallen, I tore it up and forgot about it. But not really.

Here we are, though, a year later and me about to finish three years at my non-profit, looking for something to do that has a career trajectory, something to advance to. Patrol. Sergeant. Lieutenant. Captain. After our talk on Sunday, where my wife released her hold on fear, on anxiety, on uncertainty, I put in two applications for deputy sheriff positions with the county. "It has to be a department that will pay to send you to the academy-- they've got to hire you first," my wife gave her condition, and I agreed. Practical to the end, and I love her for it.

It was a good talk on Sunday night. With minimal tears on both sides. It was a rational, logical, almost middle-aged discussion. "If you're going to do it," she said to me, cracking a smile, "you'd better just fucking do it, because you're getting old."

I liked our talk. I liked it a lot. Not just because I got what I want-- hell, I haven't gotten anything yet. I've still got to get an interview. I've still got the written test. The psychological test (pray). The physical agility test (pray harder-- some departments have added swimming). I've still got to get appointed a probationary patrolman. And then I've still got to get through the academy. Oh, and I've got to find departments who will hire me and then pay to send me there. It's a hell of a long-shot, and it may never happen for me, but at least I can take the long shot in the knowledge that we're really doing it together. Before, the choice was made by me, alone. Now, it's together.

I remember a different conversation about entering law enforcement, again, held long ago. My father and I. Again. We were in the living room of the house in which I grew up. He and I were on our knees together, holding each other fiercely, both of us sobbing hysterically while my mother hid in the basement, pretending to do laundry, probably crying just as hard.

"Why?" my father pleaded through his snot and his tears, "Why do you want to do this? Why? Why? Why?"

His impossibly huge hands and thick fingers dug into my shoulder blades and pulled me even closer to him, and the roughness of his jungle-thick stubble ripped against my cheek.

"I love you, Daddy," I choked out-- because that was the only answer I could think of at the time that made any sense. I couldn't think clearly enough to talk about valor or about justice, or service, or about bringing a clean face and clean morals and clean judgment to the uniform, of re-instilling a community's pride in its police, about delivering on a promise to serve not only the public, but the public image of law enforcement, about having people go, "Yes, he's my cop. He's mine."

I just couldn't think clearly enough to say all of that. Maybe, seven years later, I'm thinking clearer. But I still love my Daddy, and I still love my wife. And I still want to be a cop.

Now we get to see if they want me.