8/28/00 12:50 p.m.
Real Cops, and Others
Don't believe the cops' photo ops for Gore.

By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department

prediction: Between now and election day you will see, perhaps several times, images of Vice President Gore addressing an audience while standing before a backdrop of uniformed police officers. Mr. Gore will speak of the thousands of new cops who will soon be patrolling your neighborhood through the beneficence of the federal government. He will speak of trigger locks and waiting periods and the success of the Brady Bill at "keeping guns out of the hands of criminals." All of this will be demonstrably false, of course, but at every suitable pause in the speech, at a cue from some unseen handler, those police officers in the background (who will surely represent both sexes and all races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations) will dutifully applaud and enthusiastically lend their image to the absurd notion that Mr. Gore enjoys the support of law enforcement from sea to shining sea.

The careful viewer, having been here educated, will note that though the guns, uniforms, and badges worn by those officers are indeed authentic, the officers themselves are not in fact Real Cops, at least not in the same sense as that guy who gave you the speeding ticket last year. (I know, everyone else was going just as fast.)

Take those nicely pressed uniforms, for instance. Notice how unfirm flesh spills over some of the collars. Notice how some of those buttons are severely taxing the tensile strength of the thread securing them, threatening to maim some unlucky spectator or the vice president himself should the officer breathe too deeply or applaud too vigorously at Mr. Gore's latest thoughts on gun control. That uniform has likely been hanging in a locker for years, only to emerge for this occasion and to remind the officer that it's time to cut back on the Krispy Kremes.

In police departments large and small there are any number of specializations: patrol, traffic enforcement, detectives, SWAT, and a host of other subspecies of Coppus Americanus. But all those subspecies can be broken down into two basic types: those who put crooks in jail, i.e. Real Cops, and those who don't. The police officers you see clapping and carrying on over Mr. Gore's shoulder are those who don't, and they are viewed with varying levels of disdain by those who do.

When a cop has worked the streets for a while there can be a tendency toward burnout, and if his spirit is unalterably depleted he begins searching for niches within his department where he might find deliverance from the grit and tumult of a job in which he is expected to run toward gunfire while all other sane people are running away. When he reaches that point in his career, there are a number of avenues from which to choose. He may become an administrator, in which case he will supervise those poor wretches unlucky enough to remain in the trenches. He may become a DARE instructor and teach the dangers of drugs and gangs to schoolchildren. Or he may seek office in the police labor union and become a burr in the saddle of city government. In short, he becomes a government bureaucrat, a schoolteacher, or a union hack. To put it even more simply, he becomes a Democrat. And soon he finds himself standing in the hot sun, crammed into a uniform that no longer fits and applauding the inanities spewing from the lips of Al Gore, while the Real Cops assigned to crowd control stand at the back and avoid the cameras, biting their tongues at the silliness of it all.

I am a dues-paying member in good standing of the Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers at the rank of lieutenant and below, but every time an election comes around I am amazed, even appalled, by the endorsements printed in the union newspaper, The Thin Blue Line. There is apparently no candidate too far to the left to win such an endorsement, which is in turn used to blunt any soft-on-crime criticism from Republicans. The League endorsed Gray Davis for governor of California, though I'd bet a paycheck that no more than five hundred of its 9,000 members actually voted for him. In private conversations, some League officials admit voting for Republican Dan Lungren even as they were publicly extolling Davis. As has been recently and gloriously demonstrated by Joe Lieberman, political exigencies can inspire a certain elasticity of conviction.

Once elected to office, police-union officials happily shed their uniforms and begin jabbering on cell phones, consorting with left-leaning pols, dining at nice restaurants, and traveling to places like Las Vegas and Miami for "important meetings," all at the expense of the membership. In other words, they begin behaving like any other group of labor meatheads. In police unions, as in the Teamsters or the A.F.L.-C.I.O., vociferous support of the "working man" is one of the surest ways to avoid actually being one.

So don't be fooled. Real Cops will be voting overwhelmingly for Bush. So should you. And if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself at one of these campaign appearances, wear your sunglasses — those buttons can put out an eye.

To read Jack Dunphy's diary
from the Democratic National Convention
during his scout assignment among the protestors,
click here for Among the Lunatics, Part I
and here for Among the Lunatics, Part II.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.)