CSotD: The inestimable value of a well-placed cynic
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Before "Pros & Cons" was called that, it was called "A Lawyer, A Doctor and a Cop." Here we see the first and third of them in not much of a conversation.
Kieran Meehan has a merrily twisted view of reality, but it doesn't keep him from having created characters with well-established and consistent personalities. Stan, the cop, tends to cynicism while Samuel, the lawyer, is a bit of a Ted Baxter — shallow and upbeat.
Now, most times, you can look at a comic strip and immediately say who is the butt of the joke and who is the, for lack of a better term, hero; the one who gets mud in his face and the one who comes out clean. In this case, however, the humor is not so much in a gag about who is right and who is wrong as it is in the simple laying out of a situation.
There is a difference between being cynical and being jaded. There are, indeed, too many jaded cops, who see everybody on the street as a "perp," who assume that anybody brought in for questioning is guilty. They need to get out of the business or, at least, step back and seriously refresh their perspective.
But cynicism is a necessary part of the job. There are people who do bad things in this world and, while there may be all sorts of reasons they are the way they are, sympathizing is not the role of the police officer.
Samuel Johnson famously said,"If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards."
The role of the police is to take care of us, while it is the job of the lawyers and the shrinks to pity the state of the madman's mind. Later.
I had a friend who became an FBI agent and, at one point, was babysitting a mobster who had turned state's evidence. The guy told him a story about how his family had gone down to the Jersey shore for the summer and his teenage kid went into town, fell afoul of some townies, and got his butt kicked. The guy was going to shrug it off as kid stuff, but his wife wanted "something done," so the mobster made a phone call and had someone lined up to whack the teenaged townie, until, at the last minute, his wife relented and he sent the guy home.
And my friend's response was, "You know what? I'm not your friend, I don't like you, and I don't want to hear any more of your stories, okay?"
I find the story fascinating, and I'd want to pick the guy's brain for more, but I'm a writer, not a cop. Obviously, my friend found the repulsive story interesting enough to pass along later, or I wouldn't have heard it. But, at the time, his job was not to like the guy or to hate the guy. It was to keep him secure so he could testify. There was no reason to muddy the waters with emotions of any kind, and several reasons not to.
Bad guys aren't always bad company. I interviewed a guy a couple of years ago who was a suspect in a murder, and he was a very nice guy. He invited me into his apartment and we sat at his kitchen table and talked for more than an hour while his girlfriend and her kids played in the next room and their cat rubbed up against my leg, and he told me all about himself.
When the story came out in the paper, the police subpoenaed my notes and wanted me to testify before the grand jury. We had a little go-round about that and it didn't happen, but, later, the lead investigator asked me, off the record, if I thought the guy had done it.
I said that I didn't have any reason to say one way or the other, but that I wasn't going to base it on whether or not the guy was pleasant. There are cons you would invite to your kid's birthday party and cons who scare the bejabbers out of you from the start, but that's not a factor in their guilt or innocence.
Eventually, the guy admitted he'd done it and they put him away for a very long time. And, to be honest, I'd have a lot more pity for the state of his mind if he hadn't been so pleasant and forthcoming. I think the guy is a psychopath and I'm glad the police knocked him down before he hurt anybody else.
People forget — or don't want to know — the reason we have laws, which is because of the chaos which ensues if you fail to distinguish between keeping order and taking revenge. That's why cops have to be cynical enough not to be distracted by a pleasant demeanor and a chatty style, but not so jaded that they feel compelled to knock down everyone who looks like he might possibly be a madman with a stick.
They certainly must not mistake their role and begin to think of themselves as Dirty Harry, taking revenge on "punks" for a society that declines to indulge itself in vengeance.
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is a limit, not a prescription. That is, it does not dictate that, when someone puts out someone else's eye, it is necessary that they lose an eye. It means that you can't take more than that. You cannot allow the need for justice to morph into the blood lust of a vendetta, in which things ratchet up and up until you've got the McCoys and Hatfields making chaos of your community.
We have cops to prevent revenge, not to enact it. In order to do that, they have to remain detached.
Let the doctors, the lawyers and the journalists do the chatting with these fellows. A cynical-but-not-jaded cop is a valuable part of a well-regulated society.
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