A story that reminds me of any book about cops written by Joseph Wambaugh, only true and set in the present day. Eric Tansey was in the military until he met The One, who told him she couldn’t marry a Green Beret, so he quit and followed her home. Every time she appears in this narrative confirms he made the right choice, so good for him. But now he needs a job.
I wanted to continue to serve, so becoming a cop made perfect sense. And after all, after spending time in combat with special operations, how hard could it be being a cop?
Real hard. Real. Fucking. Hard!
From his first day on the job, when he is attacked by a very large and soon very naked lady who twerks on the flag and then tries to take a dump on him, to his last eight years later when he receives a life-saving award and is fired on the same day, it is a rollercoaster of a ride. Some of it is very funny but some of it is so painful and just so damn physically, mentally, and emotionally hard you wonder how anyone, first, takes this job, and second, survives it.
He certainly doesn’t get a lot of help from the higher ups. This includes the AI “Karens,” the chief who reacts to Ferguson by essentially stripping the local police of the ability to get any bad guys off the streets of SED (the Southeast District of Raleigh, North Carolina), the Lieutenant Queen Bee (the less said about her the better) and all her useless fellow lieutenants. In Tansey’s telling none of these people are a damn bit interested in serving and protecting, only in climbing as high as they can as fast as they can and in so doing maybe score some face time on the news. This isn’t what the good people who live in the SED want, but nobody asks them.
Think about it: If you live in a community with high crime, you’re always worried about gangs and violence and drugs being peddled to your kids. And if the police do show up, act professional, and let anyone that isn’t a piece of shit off with a warning, you’re pretty happy. You realize the police do, in fact, care about you and your community. Once you trust the cops you see every day, you want to see blue lights. In a way, that sort of trust-building is the heart of what people call “community policing.”
All the real help he gets is from his fellow officers, who recognize his commitment to their community and take him under their wing, which is when he begins to feel like he might maybe know what he’s doing at least some of the time. He writes with honesty and agony of the times he failed, like when he wrecked his cruiser chasing a murderer. The murderer got away to kill again.
Oh my God. Someone’s dead…I could have stopped it…If I had been calmer, driven better…if I would have just taken my goddamn time!…I could have prevented this–should have prevented this!
I let those innocent people down.
I wasn’t the cop they deserved.
But he does talk that kid off the bridge, even if she does have to go back to her dysfunctional family, and other good things as well, and screws up again, too (he never should have pulled that car over with his mom on a ridealong, even if it was her idea). Like I said, a rollercoaster, and one that feels like it’s about to go off the rails and sail into the abyss on every other page.
Tansey also founded a podcast, Failure to Stop: True Crime. I just followed it.
Book Review Monday Chatter Eric Tansey Nick Palmisciano Pig Latin