Shit..

What qualities characterize a great police officer?

Congratulations! Today is your day. You're off to great places! You're off and away!

You have brains in your head...

Fair and even-handed. An officer obviously has to know the law, but he or she also has to know how to most effectively enforce it. You can't ticket every offense and arrest every offender - you'd be a stat fiend, but you'd be a terrible police officer. You can't be friends with people on the street, but if you nuke your goodwill, nobody is going to let you in. Sometimes the people you would have written off first provide you with the best information.

...you have feet in your shoes...

Physically fit. The application process and academy will weed out the worst; but even if you get through, if you completely let yourself go, you're not being responsible. It's not about you losing a foot pursuit. If you need to back up a colleague who's throwing down with two guys amped on uppers, you're not bringing much to the table if you're gassed when you finally get there.

Out there things can happen, and frequently do, to people as brainy and footsy as you.

Articulate. You have to be able to articulate everything you do as a police officer. Everything. If you make an enforcement decision, you'd better be able to defend why to your sergeant and lieutenant. If you complete an investigation task, you'd better put it in the report, or it didn't happen. And you'd better handle yourself well on the stand when you're testifying in court - that's where the rubber meets the road. Hundreds of man hours can be for naught if you bomb in testimony.

And when things start to happen, don’t worry. Don’t stew. Just go right along. You’ll start happening too.

...yet accessible. If you work in an area characterized by low income and low education levels, you've got to both be able to understand what they're saying and tell them what you want them to do so they can understand. I was once trying to mediate a dispute over the ownership of a mangy cat on the west side, and made the mistake of asking a female if she was "going to relinquish" the cat. I got crossed eyes and a vacant, "Huuh??" My streetwise sergeant piped up and said, "Are you going to give her the damn cat or not?" Issue solved. The street is an intellectual bizarro world where descent takes the most work.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Sympathetic... when you work in the long shadow of depravity every night, you have to take measures to make sure that the job doesn't devour your soul. It's a simple matter of scarring.

Classic domestic assault case. Hook the dude and stuff him into the patrol car. Victim's blotting tears from her black eye. You give her the case number, explain the process, give her resource information, and offer transport to a shelter. She declines, saying she's going to stay with her mom/sister/friend until she can get her possessions. Won't be long, though, because she is leaving that bastard. She stomps her foot and clenches her tear stained fists for effect.

You take said bastard to jail. Nine days later. Same address. Same call. You walk in to find bastard and black eye sitting on a couch across from a newly minted crater in the drywall.

Black eye is now yellowish-purple eye with a sore back. Bastard is still a bastard.

You exchange a look with her. She remembers her vehement proclamation, since obscured by a fistful of cheap flowers and a patronizing apology, followed by spirited but unsatisfying sex that she hoped would bring closure, but which he knew merely served as a waypoint of validation marking another spin in his cycle of bastardry.

She averts her gaze. You ruefully whip your handcuffs out, knowing that no matter the rhetoric, your next ninety minutes of work will be a complete waste of time. She'll come back.

And so will you.

You can only do that so many times before every suspect is worthless and every victim hopeless. If you don't fight it. For a number of people on the street, a great police officer will need to ensure that he or she keeps and guards a soft heart.

Except when you don't. Because, sometimes, you won't.

...yet unaffected. A great police officer has to differentiate his uniform from his civvies. You'll have punk teenagers spit in your face. You'll have drunks crow about how violently they ravaged your wife and how much she liked it. You'll have church going soccer moms say things in response to a ticket that they would disown their children for saying. You'll have suspects tell you that they're going to abduct and rape your kids. If you allow yourself to believe that they're saying it to you the person, the husband, the dude who loves Jimmy Eat World and deep dish pizza, you will die. Hopefully not in the self-inflicted gunshot wound way, but in some way, and to some degree, you will die. If you instead realize that they're talking to the badge, that no matter what lifeform was inhabiting your uniform at that moment, they would be indiscriminately spraying spittle and vitriol on it, then you're well on your way to greatness.

And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

Decisive. The motto of field training is a stern admonition: "Make a decision." When you pin that badge on, forget Truman's desk - the buck stops with you. There is no other recourse. When someone calls 911, they are in essence admitting that they are completely out of options and/or their immediate environment has gotten completely shot to hell. When you roll up to a scene that's out of control, there is nobody else to ply, no consensus to build. You are the law. You are order. As Paul Harvey once said, you have to make an instant decision which would take a lawyer months to make. But make it you shall, for it won't make itself, and the people you're looking at are in a rapidly descending handbasket.

You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.

Discreet. As a police officer, you will have Pandora's Box dumped in your lap most every shift. You'll learn lots of things about lots of people. Some of it will be very, very juicy. But you may say nothing. You will later be at a party and will be presented with a perfect segue into the revelation of your tidbit. But you may say nothing. Next week you will be having dinner with your family and someone will ask you if you've got any "interesting cop stories" to tell. And you do. You really do. But you may say nothing.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?

Prudent...lone wolves in law enforcement have a proclivity for winding up ostracized, depressed, disabled or dead. There are people around you for many reasons, and an important one is to keep you alive. You can play John Wayne or Matt Dillon...for a while. They're both dead, too.

Somehow you’ll escape all that waiting and staying. You’ll find the bright places where Boom Bands are playing. With banner flip-flapping, once more you’ll ride high! Ready for anything under the sky. Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!

...yet fearless. If it's time to roll, it's time to roll. Active shooter in a shopping mall. You're across the street. The next closest available unit is seventeen blocks away fighting wall to wall traffic. You're going in alone. Is it advisable? Safe? Sane? Nope. But you're doing it, because the happenstance of your proximity just turned you into a hunter of men. You're going to be outgunned. Probably outmanned. But you will win. Because you can't not win.

Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.

Well-adjusted. You need to be able to wash it all off in the shower after your shift and leave it in the locker room. You need friends who aren't cops, hobbies that have nothing to do with law enforcement, places to release pent up stress and aggression somewhere north of Serenity Now and south of your spouse's face. Sitting and listening to the scanner while you watch worn out VHS recordings of old episodes of Real Stories of the Galaxy Patrol is not a sign of dedication - it's a flaming red flag.

I’m afraid that some times you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.

An iron stomach. God in Heaven, the things you'll see. Of course, your academy instructors tried. Early in the process they pulled up the infamous gallery of death to gauge your reaction to the sight of physical carnage. The decapitated head of a drunk who stumbled onto the tracks and passed out, oblivious to the coming train. The suicide via a twelve gauge to the bottom of the chin. So odd. The result was a ragged, ghastly symmetry; the inside of the victim's head had been splayed open in a form chillingly reminiscent of the petals of a calla lily, as though Satan himself were leaving the faintest whisper of beauty in an otherwise horrifying form factor, a calling card fraught with tactless, tasteless irony meant only to taunt and haunt the living. I remember feeling guilty for noticing this.
...but there is no slide show that could prepare you for the five senses and three dimensions of life on the street. The immediacy was inescapable.

Viscous, frothy, bright red blood streaming from the right nostril of a drunk driving accident victim, as his passenger sightlessly gropes about in utter shock. It's so oxygenated - where is it coming from? Why is it holding its shape - it's the thickness of my pinky finger...and why only that nostril??

The cacophony of sirens begins its crescendo in the distance. You look up and see a rustle in the grass. It's the drunk driver, trying to flee the scene. He'd run, but his dislocated hip, his only injury, is making mobility a slight challenge - so he's content to crawl on his forearms into the ditch. And somewhere in the chaos of medical information relays and triage, you feel the crushing weight of an exasperated realization.

You can't decide which sight is more pathetic.

You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step, step with care and great tact, and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

An iron mind. You'll need space law in there. You'll need defensive tactics. You'll need arrest procedures, department policy, investigation steps, frequent contacts, supervisor names, phone numbers, and scores of other law enforcement arcanities. But you'll need something else. Something more.

And that indefinable something more is ultimately what caps off the characterization of a "great police officer." An uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. Begrudging cooperation from people on the street, even when it might not quite be in their best interest, because you've been working that street long enough to establish your intentions and have gained a functional trust. Maintaining an inspiring aura of calm in the presence of screaming and chaos and gore.

But it goes beyond the gears and levers of the street. Every police officer must make the conscious effort to allow their humanity to inform their profession, and not the other way around. An iron mind, welded to something other than your badge. Something sturdy and stable, something that will inspire you to keep pinning your badge on every night. What this is will vary from person to person, but it's incredibly essential. When the nights go wrong and the shadows grow long, you'll need its presence to remind you of why you keep going to the places you go.

And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed!

(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)