A Cop’s Life: True Stories from the Heart Behind the Badge by Randy Sutton was published in 2005.
Tthe positive and the negative sides of law enforcement often collide within this particular account of this cop’s life. For instance, the chapter named “Her Name was Jackie” shows a nine-month-old baby bleeding to death as the result of two men inside a Buick firing into a car. The story inevitably turns out to be an example of the good that is being a cop. The instructions relayed to the author were simple: wait until the paramedics arrive. And yet, the author fully admits to violating that directive, breaking the law, and getting the baby to the hospital with another officer behind the wheel while he is administering life-saving first aid. He happens to get extremely lucky and the baby survives and that is how what starts out ugly turns entirely into a positive portrait of a cop.
The author of this work, Randy Sutton, is not just a police officer, he is also a technical advisor for shows like Cops and America’s Most Wanted. A huge aspect of America’s cop problem is that since the invention of the movie camera, cops have been portrayed as almost always being the shiny knights in blue. True, cops on the screen often get violent with suspects—but when they know the suspect is actually guilty beyond any doubt, much less a merely reasonable doubt. On those occasions when a fictional cop actually is dirty and knocks some innocent people around, he is clearly situated as the villain. The long-term effect of this one-sided portrait of law enforcement only just started becoming evident in the early decades of the 21st century with the pure shock of having one’s expectations upended expressed by those exposed to video after video showing cops at their worst.
This is the main problem with A Cop’s Life and it is peppered throughout the book in even the most mundane and seemingly inoffensive of ways. The closest this book comes to featuring a negative description of the police is a description of patrolling around in his cruiser on a hot day as he ponders the worst of his work: getting spat on and developing a lack of inhuman concern toward the mass of those who don’t appreciate all they do. He admits to feeling “the cumulative effect of twenty years of pushing a black-and-white around the sweltering city while being a frontline witness to the carnage, greed and general nastiness that the people we try out damnedest to serve and protect engage on a daily basis.” Or, in other words: an intensifying lack of empathy toward other human beings is their fault, not his.
A Cop’s Life contains the word “hero” multiple times, but it is difficult to write a genuine and authentic look at the life of a cop when all its author seeks to offer is more the same: a one-sided demonstration of the goodness of cops in the face of the ugliness of everyone else.
