During the course of writing my previous book, Burden of the Badge - A Year in the Life of a Street Cop, I found the diary format I had chosen for that book lended itself toward being somewhat monotonous. I was okay with that because that particular book was written with the intent of giving prospective cops a chance to see wat the job is like. Indeed, policework is made up of long periods of monotony punctuated by heart-pounding moments of intense action. To that end, Burden of the Badge achieved its goal of being truthfully informative.
Throughout the writing of Burden, the format offered few spots where, as a writer, I was able to get into meaty story telling. The homicides, serious shootigns and car chases in Burden gave me a chance to go into deep detail and tell a story, but there were relatively few of those stories in relation to the boring day-to-day stuff. Three stories from Burden were interesting enough and gritty enough that I thought they would make for good chapters in Beyond Hope? Trick or Treat is one of those chapters.
The call itself occured on Halloween night 10 years ago. Halloween night! How creepy is that when a life-and-death car-crash and shootout occurs on the scariest night of the year, and you and your best friend have to climb into a fiery automobile and try to save two guys from, literaly, burning to death?
I tried very hard to bring out the intensity and chaos of this call because that’s exactly what is was - intense and chaotic. From the point that we saw the vehicle on fire, to the point where we had both passengers extracted was nothing more than a blur that seemed to last only seconds. In reality, the scene stretched out for several agonizing, slow-motion minutes.
The best part about this incident was - and most cops have these moments several times during their careers - I was able to answer for myself the question of “Would I risk my life to save another?” Regardless of how much you are taught in the academy and how much you learn on the street, you just never know how you will react to a life-threatening situation until you are put in the middle of it. I was proud of the fact that, without hesitation, Matt Ward and I both reacted as we should have. But I like to think most people - civilian and sworn - would risk their life to save the life of another if presented with the opportunity to do so. Oddly enough, years later Officer Ward and I were on patrol on Saginaw’s north end when a call for a child trapped in a house fire was put out. We were only blocks away and arrived quickly. The house was nearly fully engulfed and the child was trapped in an upstairs bedroom. In desperation, neighbors were even spraying the house with garden hoses when we arrived. While Matt looked for a way to get the child out the window, I ran for the front door, entered and was immediately driven back by the flames. Through the flames, the heat and the heavy smoke, I knew there was no way I was going to reach that child alive. The fire department pulled on just at that moment, and a firefighter in full gear was able to get inside with the aide of his oxygen tank and his fireman’s equipment and retrieve the child from upstairs. I’m not sure I could have lived with myself had that Saginaw Fire Department not arrived at that moment to rescue that child where I clearly had failed.
There was an interesting side note to this chapter that presented itself a few years after this incident took place. My wife was taking classes to attain her Master’s Degree along with a couple other co-workers. The group they took classes with, if I remember correctly, consisted of 15 or 20 people. During one course, the class had to spend a half day watching what was then a new movie, titled Crash. Crash, if you have not seen it, is an intricately weaved story that tackles the topics of racism, stereotypes, urban crime, police ethics and a multitude of other underlying themes. The story presents perspectives several characters of several different ethnicities, and their views of each other and the world around them. In this film, Matt Dillon plays the part of a white LA cop with unmistakable feelings toward blacks. At one point, he basically sexually molests a black female passenger during a traffic stop in what appears to be his way of asserting his self-perceived superiority, in terms of both gender and race. In an ironic twist later in the movie, Dillon crawls into a flipped over SUV that has been involved in a crash on the freeway. The car is seconds from catching fire and exploding and the driver is trapped. As Dillon struggles to free the woman - yes the same woman he molested on the previous traffic stop - he is forced to put aside his personal bias and do his job. In the end, he pulls the woman from the vehicle and - in typical and predictable Hollywood style - gets her to safety just as the vehicle explodes.
After the movie, the class was asked to discuss, at length, the issues that presented themselves within the film. During the discussion, a group of black women in the class commented how that scene was not believable to them, and that there was no way that a white cop would risk his life for a black person.
My wife was understandably offended, and offered the story from this chapter as evidence that people (even cops) can put aside their differences and just do their job (the two passengers that Officer Ward and I pulled from this burning vehicle were black males in the age range of about 18-21). Apparently, the women refused to believe my wife and, for the most part, inferred that the story she told them -this chapter from my book - did not occur because they simply would not accept that a white cop would risk his life for a person of color. Certainly working where I have for the past 16 years, if I am going to risk my life to save anyone during my on-the-job experiences, that person is probably going to be of a different color than me. The area of Saginaw where I work, you see, is probably less than 5% white.
Looking back on my wife’s experience of debating this issue with her classmates - all grown adults enrolled in a Masters Degree program - there are a couple things evident to me: 1.) Many people tend to view those of a different ethnic background as not good people, or at least not as good as they believe they themselves are, and 2.) There still exsists, even among many educated minorities, a deeply ingrained distrust of the police, even to the point where they cannot fathom a police officer doing the right thing to help someone not of the same skin color as the officer.
Based on personal experience, and having seen heroic acts of blacks, whites and hispanics helping others of different enthnic backgrounds, I tend to think most people, if given the chance to save a life, even at risk to their own, would help any other person, regardless of their skin color.
I guess it’s a matter of believing that, in the end, good will triumph over evil. As a cop, if you cannot believe in that, why even come to work?
Thanks for stopping by.