If they are 'odd', let's have more off-kilter cops

Police officers get a lot of bad press. Some of it is deserved, most of it isn’t, in my experience.

I know that I’ve never wanted to be a cop. That’s partially because I am a coward, but mainly because I know I wouldn’t have the fortitude to handle the stresses. Most of us wouldn’t.

There surely are benefits to being a peace officer, such as shooting bad people. The rest of us have to put up with crap from evildoers but a cop can just whip out the old 45 and blow the MF away. Oh, I mean, he or she would have to give a reason for so doing, but it would still be empowering.

I am, of course, being tastelessly flippant. Cops hardly ever like shooting people and sometimes have to go through intensive psychotherapy if they have fired their sidearm in a terminal manner.

It is normal for the youthful to have attitudinal antagonism towards the police. You can’t really blame them for that. It’s the lot of kids to be pushed around by those in authority, and they don’t have many defences against parents, bullying teachers and sometimes pushy cops. But with maturity I found, as do many, that the gendarmerie has a vital role in maintaining societal well-being and as long as they are scrutinized to guard against the odd and very rare case of excess, then they are to be cherished.

That said, I haven’t always been proud of the confrontational attitudes of some of the younger representatives of my own erstwhile calling; newspapering. Young reporters seize on tales of police excess and their impotent and pandering eyes light up when they get to inform readers about cops-gone-bad. Can eyes be impotent? Odd turn of phrase that I used. Never mind. Let me just say that bent coppers are manna to callow scribes. But, blessedly, the attitude changes with age. Much as many of the political attitudes of the very young are downright silly and reactive, so are their feelings about the police in our relatively democratic states.

In my middle age I was given the police beat for my paper. I must confess I absolutely loved it. I cherished the fact that the men and women in the local detachment recognized me as a known (in a good way, not as in ‘known to police’ way) commodity Indeed, our mutual trust built up to the degree that they even permitted me to be ‘embedded’ with them on a few occasions. They did this because they trusted me. So, I donned a flak jacket and went on marijuana grow operation raids with them. I scoured the local hills with a seasoned cop and a delectable young female constable whom I would have run off and married had we both not happened to be married at the time. That time I even was issued a 12-guage shotgun – for bears, I was told, but I suspected it was if we were actually ambushed by villains in our quest for their hidden drug caches. I didn’t need to use the gun, I might add.

Anyway, it was all heady stuff. It didn’t make me want to become a cop, but I really enjoyed hanging with them, swapping stories, expressing our joint admiration for the late and cherished Jerry Orbach’s depiction of tired old detective Lenny Briscoe.

Last night a number of us got to interact with some very special cops. They are members of a unique Vancouver Police Force body known collectively as the ‘Odd Squad’. Their beat is the wretchedly dysfunctional and terrifying patch known as the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Vancouver is Canada's third largest city, but comes in at numero uno in terms of drug addiction level.

There they ply their policing trade amongst the junkies, crack and meth heads, hookers and the severely mentally ill denizens of a few square city blocks known, and not hyperbolically, as the poorest chunk of city real estate in North America. The wretched inner city squalor of the place makes a Hogarth engraving look almost Eden-like in comparison. Definitely a chunk of turf the government of the province is 'not' going to want the poobah jocks and other notable visitors paying a call on during the over-hyped and over-costly Olympics next year.

Last evening the Comox Valley Community Drug Strategy Committee, of which I am a long-time member, brought two reps of the Odd Squad to won to make a presentation to parents and their kids about the realities of a life of drug addiction and depravity in this terrible place. They spoke and they showed clips of the denizens of this dreadful ghetto. Some of the clips – most of the clips – were shocking. They are designed to be so. For, aside from working with these pathetic souls, the Odd Squad also sees it as part of their duty to do some prevention presentations. For the cleanly scrubbed kids of this smaller community it had to have been an eye-opener.

It might have also been an eye-opener for the kids in terms of preconceptions about police officers. For, the one thing that was apparent is that these boys in blue – for one of them it has been his chosen beat for 20 years – carry out their duties with a great level of care and, dare I say it, love. You couldn't do it otherwise.

I hope that message wasn’t lost on the kids.