I had a nice childhood, growing up. My parents were good to me. I know a lot of kids these days grow up with absent fathers or with fathers who beat them. I can’t stand either: the abusers or the deadbeats. As my dad always told me: a man who abandons his family isn’t a man. He was always reliable, my dad: as if a craftsman wrench had a baby with a Smith and Wesson. Dad got home just after six every day, and always took the time to play with us kids before Magnum, PI came on.
My parents were simple folks. They weren’t radicals or anything. The Silent Generation, you know? Dad went to Vietnam and came back alive. That was enough. All the protests and violence at home hit my parents hard. People were marching in the streets as if they didn’t already live in the greatest country in the world. That’s just not enough for some people. Don’t get me wrong, things were pretty bad down South. They had Jim Crow Laws and everything. But that was a long way from Chicago. My parents watched race riots happen in Chicago, can you imagine? Black folks destroying their own city more than 400 miles from the nearest Jim Crow state. Some people just want to break things.
I’m not a racist or anything. No, no no, racism is a disease of the mind. It means you hate other people for being different. Like some people just hate blacks because they’re black, and some Chinese hate Koreans. Did you know non-whites can be racist too? It’s true. You wouldn’t believe it if you were listening to CNN, but Asians, Hispanics, and blacks can be just as racist as slave-owners were.
Obviously, I didn’t grow up downtown. My parents moved out of Chicago when they saw the way the city was headed, so I grew up in the suburbs. It was beautiful, let me tell you. Tree-lined blocks, white picket fences and grassy lawns. It was like something out of a dream. The German society held a bier-fest most weekends, and there was line dancing every Wednesday over at Dick’s Longhorn Saloon. We never had gang bangers rolling through town or thugs loitering on every street corner. The closest thing we had to a drive-by was when the Oberweis dairy truck took a turn too quickly and spilled 3 cases of milk all across the Murphys’ front lawn. We always felt safe there, you know?
There weren’t a lot of African Americans in my school growing up. Not because of segregation or anything. There just weren’t many around. There was one in my class, though, Will Smith. Funny, right? Obviously he wasn’t named for the movie star. They’re probably right around the same age, though. Anyway, my Will Smith was named for his dad, I think. They do that a lot. Will didn’t act really black or anything. He always seemed totally normal to me. He didn’t have dreads, and he never watched BET. Plus, his parents were doctors. Amazing, right? Just goes to show, people can do anything in this country if they’re willing to work hard enough.
My dad travelled into the city every day for work. He always came back with stories. He told us how people in Chicago lived in constant fear. There was a shadowy veil over the whole city. It was like a dark cloud: like a big, black burden that the whole city had to bear. You could get shot on your way to the grocery store. Dad said he hadn’t seen fear like that since the war. People were paralyzed by it. My dad made sure we knew how lucky we were to live in the suburbs. The highest risk venue in our town was the skating rink on Saturday night. Man, people sure knew how to get wild.
Looking back, I think I always wanted to join the force. I grew up with Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Death Wish, Rambo: movies about men who put their lives on the line to do the right thing, to defend society from criminal elements. Men who knew when to abandon the rules to protect law and order. I wanted to grow up to be just like them.
Most people don’t understand what criminals do to a society. They’re a tumor, slowly taking over a host. If you don’t strike early and cut away the cancer, it’ll spread. It’s like fighting the hydra. Every time you slice off a head, two more take its place; so you gotta keep chopping off heads or it’ll overwhelm you.
Every day we go out and confront crime and violence on our streets. If you watch the main-stream media you might think that cops kill African Americans all the time. But do you know how high the black-on-black crime rate is? It’s up near 90%! 90% of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. And we’re supposed to worry about a few hundred police shootings a year? Look at the evidence, I say. Numbers don’t lie. So let me know when cops kill more African Americans than blacks do. That’s when I’ll start to worry.
Look, I don’t know how it happened. But in this job, you can’t second-guess your instincts. The only thing that matters is that you come home alive. If he moves, you’ve got a split-second to respond. Less than a second, between life and death. He might be going for a gun, grabbing a knife, tying his shoes, picking his nose, anything. You need to be able to shoot first and ask questions later because there’s no time to wait and see. These aren’t boy scouts out here. We’re not talking about the next Martin Luther King. You’re not…
You’re not dealing with a human, it’s an infectious disease. And if you’re not willing to do what needs to be done, it’ll kill you.
People don’t understand what it’s like. It’s a war out there. Kill or be killed. When I strap up every day and I walk…well, drive onto the field of battle, I go out ready to take a life. When you go to war, they don’t give you a gun and then tell you to go play nice with the other kids. You gotta be ready to fuck shit up. Fear is the only thing some people understand. They spend their days causing terror in decent, hardworking people. You need to be willing to fight fear with fear. It’s only when they’re truly scared that they finally start to respect you.
What else do you expect me to do? Play patty-cake and hopscotch? Ball up with punk kids who haven’t seen the inside of a school in years and learn to pop, lock and drop it? Spend week after agonizing week getting to know people who won’t give you the time of day and act like you give a shit about their problems? Fuck that. I have better things to do. I have bad guys to bust and people to serve and protect. Sure, mistakes are bound to happen. But you can’t focus on the mistakes and let them take away from the important work we do here.
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Look, what I’m trying to say is, I feared for my life…