21 Comments

1. Christopher Kachouroff:

   You have a baggie of white pills and you don’t know where you got them? Please. Come up with a better story. I’m a former cop and that is just sheer nonsense. I’m quite sure when you packed your suitcase you knew what was there and what wasn’t–especially after several days of travel. Clearly you were trying to goad law enforcement by playing dumb.

   I doubt you would do that with the likes of Felix Dzerzhinsky. You simply wouldn’t because if he asked you, you would pee your pants like some proletariat wanna be.

   MODERATOR’S NOTE: Clearly, like most cops, you have decided matters of intent and motive even in the face of a long explanation to the contrary. Just like a cop. I just checked Felix Dzerzhinsky. He’s dead. The country he worked for is dissolved. And he didn’t shoot Amadou Diallo, didn’t beat the shit out of Rodney King, didn’t kill Sean Bell or Anthony Baez, didn’t almost fatally rape Abner Louima with a plunger handle (which cops then stuck in the bleeding victims mouth, saying “Eat your own shit, nigger!”), didn’t run the Ramparts Division of LAPD or Troop C of NYSP, etc etc. These were home grown; along with fabrication lof evidence, coerced confessions, false arrests, etc etc. Was it Felix Dzerzhinsky who did the elaborate frame up of a whole Black community in Tulia, Texas. I never met Dzerzhinsky; but I met one ex-cop in the army who told me about how he killed a suspect by running him over with his cruiser (and got away wit it); and I talked with a cop once in Oak Ridge, TN who told me women could not be raped, because a small woman he tried to arrest once almost beat hell out of him. We all saw NOLA PD members alternate between looting and abusing people in the quarter after Katrina. I myself have twice resorted to asking for police help when a female member of my family was being abused by a male partner; and in both cases the cops took the man’s side (once arresting her). With these counterpoints lightly listed; we might also point out that any time a guy’s guy gets pissed off and defensive, he resorts to “feminization” of the bad writer via infantilization of women, just like this guy did with his “pee your pants” remark. Just remember this Anatole France quip: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich as well as poor from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.”

   28 May 2007, 7:49 pm

2. Dick Cox (Yes, that's my real name.):

   Hammers and nails.

   29 May 2007, 11:03 am

3. derrick Jensen:

   Hey All,

   Christopher Kachouroff wrote:

   You have a baggie of white pills and you don’t know where you got them? Please. Come up with a better story. I’m a former cop and that is just sheer nonsense. I’m quite sure when you packed your suitcase you knew what was there and what wasn’t–especially after several days of travel. Clearly you were trying to goad law enforcement by playing dumb.

   I doubt you would do that with the likes of Felix Dzerzhinsky. You simply wouldn’t because if he asked you, you would pee your pants like some proletariat wanna be.

   ***

   I would like to sincerely thank you for precisely making my point: that many cops (and evidently former cops) are paranoid and hostile. Even after I lay out the case precisely, you STILL don’t believe me, but believe that I was “trying to goad law enforcement by playing dumb,” in other words, that I was abusing the poor defenseless police. And then you tell me that I’m lucky it wasn’t some other specific cop, because that person would have terrified me even more. Thank you. That’s my point. Your attitude is precisely the point I was trying to make. And it contrasts with the response of every non-cop to whom I have told this story, which is that the police were absurd and abusive, and that they too have had cops treat them in this same manner.

   Thank you for manifesting the hostility and suspicion that characterize the attitude that police have toward those who are not members of their club.

   Derrick

   29 May 2007, 2:54 pm

4. manchineel:

   Part of the internal problem with being a cop is that sometimes (often?) you can only do what you are told if you believe certain lies. Lie #1 is that people who look suspicious to you are always guilty. I am sure that Derrick lied about the pills because he was lonely after all the plane travel and just wanted to talk to some sexy cops (that is lie #2).

   Really the most reasonable explanation is Derrick’s. Why would he cause himself such hell? Cops pull this shit on people all the time. I can be generous and understand the cops point of view. But every single time I do that, I get burned by the cop turning around and being a complete jerk and assuming the absolute worst.

   If the officers at the airport had more common sense then they would have caused themselves and Derrick less headache and wasted a lot less time and money.

   29 May 2007, 3:21 pm

5. James M:

   Thanks to Derrick for his insights.

   I’d like to relate my own cop story, which I think is pretty anomalous as it doesn’t conform to the usual narrative. (Audrey prompted me to do so a while back, but I never got around to it.)

   I was in San Francisco for the protests against the start of the war in 2003. Near the end of the day, the large group of marchers I was with came to a point where we were herded by cops into one area, for what reason I don’t know. Wanting to get an overview of the crowd, I rather foolishly hopped up onto a low wall from which I had a good vantage. The foolish part of it was that this wall ran along some stairs leading deep down into the subway, meaning a fall backwards would’ve, at the least, injured me very badly.

   It wasn’t long before a phalanx of cops in riot gear aligned themselves in front of me; their formation seemed designed to surround and pen in the demonstrators. The crowd started chanting anti-“pig” epithets, and the hostility was palpably ratcheting up. The cop nearest me sized me up, and a devious grin spread across his face. He leaned in and said, “You better be careful up there.”

   “Why’s that?” I asked.

   “Because if this situation turns chaotic, I’m gonna knock you backwards over that wall and your skull’s gonna get cracked.”

   I have to preface the next part of my story by assuring the reader that a) I was not feeling suicidal, and b) I was not high on drugs. I had been, however, meditating earlier in the day, and I suspect that brief diversion from monkey-brain chatter had led me to a kind of altered state or perspective on the situation.

   So my response was, surprisingly, not one of fear or hostility – just curiosity. I asked him, “Why would you want to do that?” He explained that he’d been working all day and was agitated, that he hated my kind of people, and that he was sick of having to tolerate anti-cop sloganeering by the protesters. I replied that I’d had a thought while perched up on the wall, surveying the interaction between police and demonstrators, which was that everyone there seemed to be playing roles – being actors, following a script. The demonstrators, with their chants, were doing what they’d been enculturated to do; the cops were doing the same. The implicit rules of the game dictated behavior.

   Still calm (surprising as that seems in retrospect,) I asked him his name. He told me, and I told him mine. I told him I’d like to have a conversation between individuals, not between actors in predetermined roles. I explained to him my talking points for why I opposed the war. I asked him what he thought of that, and he said it made sense, he’d never thought of it that way. Gradually the situation between us and with the larger crowd de-escalated, and I hopped down and started to move on. His parting words to me were, “Take care and good luck, James.”

   I still marvel at the surreality, the breaking-from-script of that interaction. In hindsight, I tend to think less that I was spiritually enlightened, and more that I was a combination of lucky and naïve in that interaction. Another cop might have been less willing to throw out the script, and more inclined to knock me backward. But maybe not? Audrey said something to me before, about how deviating from your own script tends to throw people from theirs, leaving them with no preprogrammed way to react. The open space, where personal volition has a chance to emerge, can (I think) sometimes lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

   I’m not, by the way, trying to lecture anyone or minimize others’ stories of abuse at the hands of cops; not trying to say it will all be okay if we just try to understand each other … though I guess Derrick’s essay is, in part, an attempt to get the cop-mentality to understand how the “civilian” feels. In any case, the point of writing this was just to share my anomalous bit of experience.

   29 May 2007, 5:42 pm

6. Chris:

   I want to link to a story I found via cursor.org about “Cops being Cops” and the numerous “minor” incidents piling up in NYC:

   “BOB HERBERT: Small Incidents Are Creating a Big Problem With the N.Y.P.D.
   These are small incidents, but they are accumulating by the tens of thousands, and someday New Yorkers are going to be shocked by the power of the anger that these seemingly insignificant incidents have generated.

   The principal of Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn told me about a student who was gratuitously insulted by a police officer at a subway station the other day. The girl had lost her MetroCard and was carrying a note on the school’s letterhead asking that she be allowed to ride the train. This was fine with the token clerk, but the clerk told the girl to show the note to a cop on duty at the station.

   The cop, in front of several onlookers, told the girl she was the oldest-looking high school student he had ever seen. He demanded that she tell him the square root of 12. He loudly declared that she was stupid and refused to let her board a train.

   The girl left the station devastated and in tears. No big deal. Certainly not newsworthy. Just another case of cops being cops…”
   There’s much more and far worse if you follow this link:

   http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/05/bob-herbert-small-incidents-are.html

   29 May 2007, 6:14 pm

7. r graves:

   hey stan et al, check out a short video some friends made of the IVAW street theater in NYC this weekend.

   http://www.meerkatmedia.org/?p=738

   29 May 2007, 7:05 pm

8. Adam:

   I’d laugh at Kachouroffs comments if I didn’t know lots of cops myself, both personally (my brother has been one for decades) and professionaly (I spent time up the river). Conversations I have regarding the escalating power of the cops certainly goes one of two ways :
   1)Yes, bad experiences with cops happen all the time.
   or
   2)If you ain’t doing nothing wrong you ain’t got nothing to worry about.
   I won’t even get into the architectural, racial, economical reasons for the abuse of power as this has definately been written about in length by some pretty bright folk. What I wonder is if the ones who so illogically defend these abusive people are simply missinformed, or if they know exactly the level of control in which we are headed/in and find some comfort in the idea. THAT is what frightens me.
   As to the pill story Derrick Jensen talks about…Let me share this little tidbit.
   I was in my third month of administrative segregation while incarcerated by the state and had a somewhat heated discussion with one of the COs on duty (I admit I instigated the incident as I’d been out of human contact for months and would do anything for some attention). The next day we had a shakedown. Incredibly, it was determined that I had a pornography magazine in my cell. Let me be clear about this : You are stripped naked and lift/seperate/cough twice before you go to the hole. You bring NOTHING with you. While contraband was available, I by no means had the capability to smuggle a magazine into my cell. I was sentanced to fourteen more days in seg for this plant. Fourteen more days in that environment is an eternity, if you didn’t know. When I saw the magazine it was unfolded and nearly pristine. I was frightened, honestly. The officer who I had argued with was in the room with me when I was sentanced. I remember hearing him breathing over my neck. This wasn’t the first time I understood how little control I had over even little things like following the rules.
   While I could discuss the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between cops and COs I won’t, as I’ve rambled on so long. I just want to add that in the nearly four years I was locked up, not only did I witness the absolute hoplessness of the men around me, but I saw what power can do to average people when they decide to use it against those they find to be a threat. Fear, on both ends of the spectrum, is a powerful thing.

   29 May 2007, 7:22 pm

9. Rick:

   [quote]
   I doubt you would do that with the likes of Felix Dzerzhinsky.
   [/quote]

   I didn’t get the memo, when (and in what context) did the Communist secret police become the standard by which reasonable social conduct is judged?

   If the matter were less serious, I’d be tempted to say something frivolous, like, “Expressing sympathy for Stalinism, comrade? I doubt you would do that if Lech Walesa were here,” but that would be ridiculous.

   I can put up with some communists nowadays, since it’s evident that conventional standards of anti-Communism have led to atrocities. (E.g. the Contras were supposed to be good guys and all the evidence says they weren’t.) But I still have a problem with people who say the Cheka was a nifty organization.

   29 May 2007, 9:35 pm

10. Audrey:

    I’m about as clean as they come; I’ve got no need to worry. And yet, I’ve had a Ziploc bag of random pills in my car for well over a year now. Some of them I remember what they are for, some of them I don’t – they might be from my kid, I don’t know. One of the blue pills got loose during my first trip to the gulf and rode around on the tailgatey part of my car for half a year, but I didn’t throw it out because it reminded me of the trip. I can’t even imagine trying to explain that to a cop. (That pill there? I keep that in my trunk for sentimental reasons.)

    I used to have a bottle of headache stuff tucked in my computer bag – sometimes the childproof lid came loose, the pills would escape, they got crushed a bit. So there’s random white powder coating the inside of the bag. Sometimes I use an old army ammo box as a lunch box – it might have traces of explosives on it still. From a cop’s perspective, I likely belong behind bars.

    James, I was thinking of that story of you and the cops on Monday. One of the groups I’m involved with printed out the faces of the Michigan troops that were killed in Iraq, and held them along the parade route for Memorial Day behind the spectators – not as an official part of the parade – just on either side of the street. Nobody holding the photos wore any clothing that identified our politics. I wasn’t sure how it would be received – we aren’t exactly the bluest area in Michigan.

    I saw one of the cops go up to our group on the far side of the street. I figured we were being told to put the faces away, or threatened with a ticket or something. He’s a cop, we’re engaging in free speech, I expected the worst. Afterwards, I found out he went to thank them for putting the focus where it needed to be, and said they should have been in the parade, not on the sidewalk. A lot of people thanked us, and some said they were sorry they didn’t know we’d be doing this – they would have helped. Some people cried, looking at the photos. One person said it was the most important thing there. I had the overwhelming sense that the people who talked to us – no matter where they fell on the political spectrum - recognized that the parade was somewhat devoid of meaning. We go through the motions, we watch the junior high bands and Shriners in their miniature purple cars, and it makes a nice spectacle. And we go home empty.

    If we’d been wearing political shirts, even worn a single peace button among us, we would have fallen into our prescripted roles, and spectators – and the police - would have fallen into theirs, reacting based on how their set of people interacts with our set of people.

    I’ve been rolling this over in my mind since the parade, because I have it in my head now to create what they asked for - a sort of walking memorial project for our area - and publicize it for anyone, making it a requirement that politics are put aside at events, so the focus is on the troops; not on us. The last time I publicized something with no restrictions or suggestions as to who could work with me, I got a very different group than what I’d envisioned, and we each got more than we bargained for as a result.

    We all recognize that other people need to step out of their preconceived roles. It’s a bit of a twist contemplating whether I need to step out of mine more.

    30 May 2007, 6:14 am

11. skol:

    My family calls them sharks, the ones waiting for speeders in inconspicuous locations. Lately they’ve started posing as highway surveyors in WI (in blaze-orange, using radar guns posing as surveying equipment), which is apparently totally legal.
    Just traffic cops, but…Uugh.

    30 May 2007, 9:21 am

12. Required:

    I doubt you would do that with the likes of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

    This is classic abuser behaviour. Me and my younger brother have always been close. But like a lot of older siblings I’d use to use my power to attack him. When I did I used to say “your lucky your not Adam’s* brother”. Adam was a friend of mine who was exceptional brutal towards his younger brother.

    30 May 2007, 9:35 am

13. DeAnander:

    This is classic abuser behaviour… thanks Required, I was thinking that very thing — though I would have said “classic abuser reasoning” — but waited to see if someone else would say it. The typical self-justifying claim made by the abusive husband/boyfriend is that “you’re better off with me than you would be…” — on the street, with that other guy, at the mercy of men in general, without my money, without my “protection”, etc.

    The relationship of cops to citizens, absent the quality of commensality, love, genuine responsibility and community feeling, conviviality, intersubjectivity — is the protection racket model familiar to abused women and children. And their excuses (and the excuses of their sympathisers) for bad behaviour are, for structural reasons, likely to be the same or similar: you’re better off with us than the other team, we’re only doing this for your own good, blah blah.

    30 May 2007, 12:24 pm

14. Stan:

    What James describes, as do others, is also occupier behavior. That he defines it as a role brings to mind the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students were given playacting roles as prisoners and prison guards, and the experiment had to be closed down way early because the guards had become dangerously sadistic.

    The “occupier” role exists only because of the mandate to control. It is not merely circumstantial; it is the circumstance. ‘I, an American soldier, am here in Iraq for the purpose of controlling you.’ ‘I, a cop, am wearing this uniform and this gun for the purpose of controlling you.’ There are no alternatives in these roles, even if an individual decides to opt out (whereupon a replacement is hired).

    The mere act of saying “no” (we should all reflect on the permutations of experience associated with “saying no,” positive, negative, and neither/either) carries with it an implicit willingness to back that NO up with lethal force. [That’s why people like me need to be very careful about accepting positions of authority. We’ve been enculturated such that the act of saying NO triggers an internal dynamic of preparation for deadly conflict. It takes a conscious effort for the rest of our lives to dis-associate all the ways we have to say NO in life from preparation for lethal conflict.] Maybe some sensitive soul will write a small book on all the different ways we experience saying NO. Or a one-act play.

    That occupier-abuser-turnkey role is constructed atop another, far more deeply rooted and difficult-to-change role: male. It is this early socialization that begins to snip away at our capacity to experience intersubjectivity. We genuinely fear in some preliterate dimension that we (men) will somehow lose our status as human beings if we risk losing this “male essence” (masculinity).

    For another bit of introspective sociology, we might seek in ourselves the ways we react to the experience of fear. The boys-fight-girls-squeal expectations get pretty well reinforced over time, because the roles, and not the circumstances, often determine whether we fight, squeal, or do something else.

    There are appropriate times, I think, for fighting, for screaming and running away. But the context is stripped away by these gendered expectations; and nothing is left as point of reference except the gender-scripts. We are never off-stage (as the Bard once observed).

    These roles are further reinforced by the fact that dynamic context calls for many responses… so when intersubjectivity, for example, is needed, males drop out in defense of their “manhood,” and women are left to fill the void.

    There are good reasons we find little reference these days by popular media or even educators to the Stanford Experiment — which should be right up there with discoveries of new galaxies. It undermines the very basis of the dominant ways of thinking; and it invites us to see things in a very subversive way.

    At some point, when the dust clears out this way (literally, almost… we handled three tons of stone yesterday in the 95-degree heat, ensuring that we were nice and wet with sweat as the dust rose and settled, and I looked like a cinnamon-powdered donut when I came home… slightly different smell, however), I hope to tack together a “Homeland Security proposal”; one that calls for the transformation of the police and military as an essential step back from the abyss.

    31 May 2007, 6:25 am

15. John:

    A lot of cops DO abuse their power, regardless of what they may say. Obviously, they don’t admit to it because it would reflect badly on the whole force.

    “You seem to wonder why hundreds of people die - you’re writing tickets man, my mom got jumped, they ran!”

    6 June 2007, 12:33 pm

16. Christopher I. Kachouroff:

    I’ve tried to leave several posts here. How come I keep getting blocked????

    Could this be the CHE / CASTRO strategy of preventing the consequences wrought by the free exchange of ideas?

    CK

    REPLY: Chris, this is a privately run site, at sea among millions of others. It’s called pluralism, so it can’t really correspond to the red-baiting innuendo here to “totalitarianism.” The reason you are even back on probationary status (we can do that, because it is our site) is because I feel like cops, just as ex-soldiers like myself, ought to have the maximum opportunity to understand what they were involved in while there is still time to get on honest and responsible and caring terms with our own lives. The reason you were censored is that your first post was abusive and personalized, and all your posts have that male-dominant vibe that we watch closely here. Many people’s experience with that vibe in real life is one that is associated with real fear and trauma; and it is an offensive and unnecessary method for getting your points across. We are not interested in scaring people away from the site who are scared or offended out of every other public space (virtual or real) already. I don’t post redbaiting either, and not out of “fear,” but because the conversations that have to happen to come to terms with 20th Century communism require a LOT more than sound bytes to even scratch the surface of 20CC’s complexity. We moderate posts here; and there are posts that will not publish. There are even some “rules” available on the site.

    Check your machismo at the door, sir.

    9 June 2007, 1:15 pm

17. Marcilla:

    So many things I could say on this subject; where to begin?

    I served five years in a National Guard Special Forces unit. I can’t tell you the percentage of soldiers whose civilian job was in LE, but suffice to say it was not small. This provided me with a unique insight because while I was living as a heterosexual, Christian, white male (oppressor) at the time and was therefore viewed as one of “us” by them, they would let their guard down and you could have a glimpse of the “real” story. I’ll spare you all but what I found to be the most atrocious example of police excess.

    One of my soldiers was a local cop and was always ready with a story of how he had abused his power. The best example of the worst example I think was the time he told us about a domestic disturbance call he went on only to corner this “really big black guy” in the kitchen. He said he could tell the RBBG was thinking of rushing him, but decided not to. This officer was disappointed because he says he was planning to use deadly force due to the person’s size. He was lamenting the fact that he didn’t have an excuse to basically murder an unarmed man he had never met. And this was a story he actually felt comfortable sharing. WTF?!?!

    From a more personal experience, I can tell you I was sexually assaulted by a cop who then threatened to kill me if I said anything.

    I could go on, but hopefully we can agree there are gross offenses by these members of society who are afforded so much trust. But it is just too easy I think to make them into scapegoats. That serves no purpose but to give me an outlet for my frustration. Ultimately, I feel I must find my own level of responsibility.

    That responsibility, I feel, is in everything I do that perpetuates a flawed, corrupt system (paying taxes, etc). Ultimately, until the system enforces a fair set of laws in a just way, it’s a wonder any moral person even enters LE. My prejudice here is as an anarchist, so as you might guess I support limiting laws and other “wild” concepts like civilian policing, the specifics of which are best covered elsewhere.

    So if I may also comment on the gender issue, I have again kind of a unique perspective as an m2f transgender woman now. I don’t mean to say you can extrapolate from an experiment where n=1 to the population at large, but I’ll just share my personal experience and opinion. I would have to say there are probably four chief factors in determining our gender-based response to a situation: brain sex, developmental genderizing, hormonal balance and societal expectations (based upon gender presentation). I list these in this order from least to most transient, and I list all four because I feel they do not neccessarily line up uniformly not only in transgender people, but also in others at times. Since this isn’t really the main topic of the post, I’ll save my argument and just give you my conclusion that it is generally a perfect storm of all four which leads one to violent oppression. The factor most out of the norm I would say though is probably the developmental genderizing in these cases. As we used to say, “some people just ain’t raised right.”

    STAN: Welcome, Marcilla. I believe we have a friend in common.

    15 June 2007, 2:52 am

18. Amy:

    Speaking from a professional view, both counseling and law, I think the one missed point is the origin of police aggression. Psychological studies have shown that cops typically continue their childhood bullying into their adult life; meaning that a certain breed of people, those who bully by nature because they have no other “talent,” are the exact same breed of cop. Let’s face it, cops aren’t exactly the most educated bunch of folk. Where most people find their self worth from positive actions, cops, after graduating (sometimes…a GED is all that is required) from high school, they soon learn that their playground scare tactics simply don’t work on more mature and well-developed individuals. So what do they do? The get jobs with inherit power, a gun, and the ability to harass everyone. The only way for them to feel important is to continue to instill (or try) fear in others. They simply can not comprehend the difference between “respect” and “deference.” I certainly do not comply with cops out of respect…or trust for that matter. I comply because, as the good ole boys system works (although, yes, they now include women in the club), they’re going to cover one another’s butt if it comes down to challenging one of the bullies. The saddess and most pathetic part of it all is that cops are seen as, wholistically as a “profession,” good and honest people. Honestly, when I see a badge, for the good or bad, I automatically think “enemy.” In addition, I don’t believe I’ve read anything yet about the tradition of cops lying to protect “their own.” Studies have also shown that cops lie not only to witnesses, accused, etc but also lie on the stand, under oath, more times than not. All in all, cops are not respectable or trustworthy people.

    18 June 2007, 10:47 pm

19. Stan:

    Actually, what you describe - the conflation of fear with “respect” - is far broader than armed institutions. It’s commonly held to constitute masculinity.

    19 June 2007, 4:59 am

20. Sam:

    I found a four year old child today who had been missing for almost 15 hours, arrested a drunk for beating his wife and holding her head in the toilet, and landed an emergency aircraft to remove three critically injured family members involved in an auto wreck– and still, I have another three hours before I can go home to hug my wife and daughters. You guys make me sick, its no wonder most cops can’t stand you. News flash, this is a rough world, and most cops survive emotionally by creating distance between themselves and those they deal with. Any thinking cop knows that crime can be eradicated, but for the fact that it is a useful tool for politicians to use to justify further measures to enslave the honest population. Do your research and vote for politicians who believe in the Constitution. This is one “pig” who would someday like to be unnecessary. Sam

    6 August 2007, 4:57 am

21. Elaina:

    “You guys make me sick, its no wonder most cops can’t stand you.”

    Actually, no. Most cops I’ve known just can’t stand to have the social validity of their jobs questioned.

    Sam, I don’t question the “toughness” or liability you have to face in the course of your job. But please don’t try and make it sound like every cop out there is spending all day every day prying children from smoldering cars with the jaws of life and busting bad, bad criminals at gunpoint, or whatever. I mean, please. It happens, but it ain’t all that y’all do. You all do a lot of standing on the side of the highway pointing radar guns at speeding cars and also a lot of other things that are far more banal.

    There are also other “tough” jobs out there- nursing, teaching, custodial work, any sort of caregiving or emergency medical tech job, where people risk their safety and their lives without the added protection of a sidearm. What if those folks decided to “distance themselves from those they deal with?”

    But Sam’s reaction is illustrative of the larger point, I think- masculinity isn’t supposed to be “questionable,” just like the “noble-ness” of a job in law enforcement is supposed to be a given.

    And I don’t appreciate the tone here. Where’s the moderator???

    [DeA: the moderators have been a trifle busy and distracted. “Sam” does sound a bit trollish to me. I wonder if anyone has ever run the stats on domestic violence, wife-murder, marital rape etc, and determined whether being a cop is — statistically speaking — any more dangerous a line of work than being a wife? iirc, being the wife of a cop is more dangerous than being the wife of a guy in some other line of work, since cops (so I have read) tend to take out their job frustrations (and fears) on their families. ]

    8 August 2007, 8:22 pm

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