Every Good Morning

 

 

I am the son of a Pennsylvania State Policeman. I know his stories. For the last year and ½ I have been volunteering with the State Police at their Museum in Hershey. A retired Corporal and I are recording the oral histories of other retired PSP officers whose ranks ran the gamut from Trooper to Major.  We are collecting their stories by filming them and hope to make them available in the Museum sometime soon.

Our interviews are conducted in a safe, familiar place, in a room of the PSP Museum which adjoins the Academy. The primary interviewer is a former Trooper whom many know from the Job. There is nothing adversarial about our approach. We are there to seek out their stories, to record them, to compile a living history of what it was like to do this kind of policing in this State over the span of their careers.

The officers we have interviewed are a generation younger than my father (he served from 1938-1973). Most came onto the force in the 60’s and 70’s. All have been men.  All of them came from the working class. Their fathers were steelworkers, mechanics, trolley car drivers. Many are veterans. The State Police promised a solid job, benefits, respect, a mission. Do not underestimate the power of a mission — of a job eventually becoming a calling rather than a simple routine one carries out in order to provide for a family.

They have seen and done things you and I never see or do  — men committing suicide in front of them. Men pointing guns at them and shooting at them and sometimes shooting their friends. Gathering themselves in preparation to batter down a door and enter a barricaded house where a gunman awaits. Making drug buys alone with dealers who would kill him if they knew he was a cop. Arresting a rapist who then brags about how good it was and how he much he, the officer, would enjoy it. Investigating the deaths of children and sometimes the murder of children. Coming into migrant camps filled with families brought up from Florida by a “boss man” to do the picking and seeing first hand what modern slavery looks like. They have investigated automobile accidents whose destructiveness and tragedy are staggering. One was called to a Christmas Day crash where two drunk drivers annihilated a family of five.

Every single one voiced scorn for “those who dishonored the badge.” One said, “I have no use for a dirty cop.” Many were involved in investigations of police corruption in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and within the State Police itself. One officer explained this code. He said, “I have the authority to pull your car over. I have the power to ask you to get out of your car. If I think I have probable cause, I can take your car apart. I can arrest you. I don’t want a dirty cop having that kind of power.”

All of them have figured out a way to separate themselves from some of their experiences. One said, “You have to forget your emotions.” In the cauldron of their experiences they make discoveries: “[You] think you are who you are, but you’re not.” The ones who last “grow a detachment over time”, but one also said that if a trooper becomes calloused, becomes unfeeling, can no longer register pity, then it is time “to hang the spike up” and get out. Some of them have bad dreams. One wept after he told a story of a friend’s murder 52 years after the event.

All of them also have stories that roar with laughter — a team tracking a burglary ring follows a moving truck racing down an Interstate with smoke pouring from its door, and when it is stopped and the door flung open, they find a man hunched over a big safe and trying to burn it open with an acetylene torch. he turns to them and says, “What’s the problem?”

A SERT team prepares to make a hard entry to a house where the resident has taken a shot at them. For hours the PSP negotiator has called his phone and then been asking vis bullhorn for him to answer his phone. Suddenly the door slams open, the man rushes out onto the porch, unarmed,  (the SERT Team gathered against the wall ready for the order to enter) and shouts, “I’m not coming out. Your hear me. Stop calling. Stop the bullhorn because I’m not coming out!” The Team jumps him, handcuffs him and takes him away.

I write about these men and their interviews now for several reasons. Their stories are worth preserving as a part of the PSP’s history, but they also show the nuances and complexities of the Job — gray is the primary color of their experiences, not black and white.  For example, some of them had kind words to say about some criminals they arrested over the years. Their vision of human beings is not ideological. They see how the lines they enforce are often crossed by people who screwed up and only occasionally by individuals with real malevolence in their make-up. None of the men, not one, showed any trace of machismo or bravado. They spoke of their own miscalculations easily. They spoke in tones of humility about themselves and with pride in their colleagues. None of their stories they told us, both on and off the record, revealed any cruelty.

What also strikes me is that this collection of officers has retained their honor and decency under very difficult circumstances. They have not sacrificed their humanity for power. Right now, they are good examples for all of us.