In Valor There Is Hope

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 6, Verses 12 & 13

"Let me describe for you a worthless and a wicked man:

first, he is a constant liar; 

he signals his true intentions to his friends with his eyes and feet and fingers."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Somewhere around 2003, I stopped going to police funerals.  I think, from 1999-2003, I had attended maybe 6 or 7 of them, from start-to-finish.  And that's no small feat, seeing as these are all day affairs-- especially the Catholic ones.  They go on forever.  When you ask 10,000 cops to come and accept Communion, you're pretty much guaranteed to be there, sitting on your bony ass in that pew for around four hours.  Getting from the church to the graveyard, in a procession of thousands of police cars, typically takes two hours just by itself, even if the cemetery is only a few miles away.  

Now, I didn't stop cold-turkey, mind you.  I tapered by going to a service or two only, and not staying for the cortege and burial.  Then I hit a couple viewings, and I went to a few of those maybe in 2005 and 2006.  This was back when I was an EMT, and I would go in my uniform, a black strip of elastic covering the center of my meaningless star-of-life badge.  

It's a weird part of my life to reflect on, looking back at it.  I would take off entire days from college classes to go down to Philadelphia, or Baltimore or... wherever to stand with thousands of cops from Maine to Texas to California, all lined up like tin soldiers, ostensibly to "mourn" somebody they never knew.  Of course, all cops "know" each other, or they think they do.  I started going to police funerals as research for a book I was writing during college.  But, once the book was researched, written, published, and released, I kept going.  Kept hearing the bagpipes and the crying widows and mothers, kept sitting up straight and standing up straight and watched pictures of handsome young men holding their families on a big screen TV.  Standing out in the rain.  Standing out in the sun.  

I guess you might say I got caught up in the poetry of the whole thing.  The ceremony.  The tradition.  It's alluring.  Police funerals always draw the media who come out and plant themselves in front of the church door to snap that all-important picture of the beautiful young widow clutching feverishly onto her freshly fatherless children.  Bonus points if one of the kids is a boy and he's wearing his daddy's hat.  The newspaper photographers stick themselves up on highway overpasses to get the perfect shot of a thousand patrol cars lined up with their light-bars ablaze.

With the exception for the weather and the color of the home-team uniforms, one funeral might just as well be interchangeable with any other.  The deceased officer and his/her family is stripped of any personality and individuality.  All the eulogies are the same.

"A cop's cop."

"A hero."  

"The bravest.  The finest."

"Let us remember him/her not for how s/he died, but how s/he lived."

They all quote "In valor there is hope."  Tacitus said that.  He was a historian of the Roman Empire, who, I don't think, knew any cops.  

After going to my fair share of these funerals, I don't know if there is hope in valor, or in anything else.  I started getting a bad taste in my mouth.  I started wondering about where everyone went afterwards.  Did they go out drinking?  Did they cavort in their hotel rooms?  Where five or ten or twenty thousand uniformed men and women surrounded the widow and her family for a couple hours, where was everybody a month later when she is on the floor of her bedroom sobbing and pounding the floor with her raw and furious fists?  Is the Patrolman's Benevolent Association there for her then?  Are cops from Canada there when she has to send her kids to school in the morning?  

Everybody goes away.

I started to wonder about these men and women whose burials I bore witness.  Who were they?  Who were they really?  You hear about their dozens of commendations and their awards and their stories, but, when a police officer gets killed, you never read about their civilian complaints.  You never read about their disciplinary record.  Can it be that only the bravest and the finest get felled in the line of duty?  That somehow the scumbags and bastards and maybe the just kind of average officers get found out and excommunicated or at least quietly put out to pasture?  Maybe this is just my good old fashioned paranoia, but is there some kind of unspoken rule in the media that whenever a police officer gets killed, his or her disciplinary record is sealed, shielded from the press, obscured or discarded because, really, who would benefit from tarnish on an already bloodied badge?  

There once was a New Orleans cop named Antoinette Frank.  She wore a uniform and drove a black-and-white and made traffic stops and arrests, just like any other cop's cop.  One night in 1995, she participated in a robbery of a Vietnamese restaurant, where she worked part-time as a security guard.  She and her partner-in-crime Rogers Lacaze shot and killed some of the restaurant staff (all family), and she also killed former partner, Officer Ronald Williams.  

When I read about Antoinette Frank, I couldn't help thinking-- if she had been killed the night before the Vietnamese restaurant heist and murders, thousands of police officers from all over the country would have descended upon New Orleans and mourned her as if she was their brother or their sister.  If it had been a different time and in a different geographic area, I might have been there, too.