Old Cops Know "Stuff"

Old cops know "stuff" - by Roy Huntington

If you want to make it home alive at the end of your shift, heed the advice of veteran cops.

After 24 years in the field on two different agencies, the most important thing I learned was to listen to old cops. “Old” is relative. It might mean 28 years old, having been on three more years than I was at the time, but these officers still knew more “stuff” than I did.

The big secret is to listen to these veteran cops, believe most of it, and put it into action in your own life. What I learned from older cops covered the gamut from on-duty techniques to off-duty survival (both in family life and real life), and it saved my life on several occasions I know of and probably many more times I never even realized.
What follows is a compendium of “stuff” I learned from my own experiences and from cops who were smarter than me. We all have this list buried somewhere inside, but we rarely make it a formal one, something we can point to, hand a trainee, or simply look at once in a while and say, “Yup, that’s all true.”

I was recently asked by a young man who was about to be hired by a police agency to give him “some advice,” as he said, “so I don’t get killed or anything.” I wasn’t sure about the “or anything” part, but the “get killed” part I could help with. So I made up this list. I take little credit for most of it and gladly give due to those hundreds of street- and battle-weary cohorts who I’ve worked around. Their collective experience amounts to thousands of “street years.”

Combat Vs. Police Work
I used to bump into lots of military types in police training who would say, “I was an infantryman” or “I was a military policeman,” etc., who thought they knew what being a cop entailed. They never did. Combat is very different from police work.

If you’re a former military policeman or one of our returning vets who saw action in Iraq or Afghanistan in another capacity, my hat’s off to you. And you can use what you learned, but it has virtually no bearing on 99.8 percent of what you’ll be doing as a street cop back here in the good old US of A. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s not a good thing. It just is.

"Don’t Believe Them!" Probably the single most important thing I recall from all my years is that people lie. Grandmas, that “nice kid down the block,” wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, neighbors, store owners, delivery men, waitresses, garbage men, doctors, lawyers (of course), witnesses, and even suspects, they all lie. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but just about the time you want to believe somebody, you’ll find out they’re lying and be very disappointed.

And the worst thing about it is often the lie isn’t intentional. People often feel a need to give you answers and will simply make them up or “fill in the blanks” in their memory in order to be helpful. If only we could make them understand it’s so much easier and so much better for us and for them to simply say, “I don’t know” or “I can’t recall” and let us fill in the blanks.

Crooks always lie. Always. And they’ll look you right in the eye when they do it, and smile, and be all serious and such, and you’ll be tempted to believe them. Don’t believe them. Ever.