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HeyBub[_3_]

wrote:

Boy scouts with guns? Are you joshing? If they ever were boy scouts,
it was when they were young enough to be forced by their parents to
join. Boy scouts? I'm laughing so hard I can hardly type...and I've
heard all of the stories about copper bars, including the one where
some poor sucker tried an armed robbery )

I've been both. Almost all the calls we take are "after the fact" (residence
burglaries, stolen cars, malicious mischief, naked woman in a tree). In
these cases the victim is upset and feels violated. In many situations they
are afraid. Sometimes they are angry.

They need help in securing their remaining property, advice on how to
prevent a reoccurrence, referral to appropriate agencies, a call to a
relative or neighbor, or, most often, a sympathetic ear. I've spliced
telephone wires back together, hammered boards over broken windows, and all
manner of little things to assuage the victim's panic.

One of my most effective lines was: "I'm on your side. If it were up to me,
I'd loan you my gun."

The events you "hear about" are the exceptions. Police work is really
"months of boredom punctuated by a few brief seconds of terror." You don't
"hear about" the beat cop starting off his shift by making 16 residence
burglary reports, just like you don't have TV specials about the
firefighters spending five days in a row waxing their equipment because
nothing caught fire.

Fortunately, humans are funny. If you stress 'em a bit - such that their
facade of respectability vanishes - they get even funnier. Ask any cop,
firefighter, paramedic, or emergency room worker to tell you stories ("Uh, I
didn't know you was the fuzz. I thought youz was just a couple of ordinary
turds" [Whap! Whap!] ).