Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

This is a line from a song in a movie made when I was a very small person, and the movie was based on a Broadway play that had nothing to do with police work (it was about baseball). But it’s also true for anyone that needs to survive when their life seems to be circling the drain. Some cops’ lives are like that, but it’s not a new condition.

On the advice of a friend, I have been reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by the late Viktor Frankl. This is a kind of self-help book, but not one of the current genre. Frankl was a psychiatrist, but also a survivor of Dachau. The book mostly describes his personal experiences and observations during the Holocaust as a way of illustrating what happens when one’s life loses hope and meaning.

Dr. Frankl saw in his fellow prisoners that those who found meaning in their concentration camp experience, horrible as it was, and could still foresee a time when the nightmare would be over and they would return to normalcy, lived. Those that didn’t died of despair. Certainly, they didn’t just curl up and die, but they quit making the smallest effort to take care of themselves. The Nazi troops that were their guards would usually handle it from there. For reasons that he did not explain, Frankl and his fellow prisoners called the men that had given up “muslims” (there doesn’t appear to be any association with Islam in the label, and I do not infer any here). The muslims were easy for everyone to spot. A man would take on a certain affect and behavior, and his mates would know he would be the next to go.

Finding hope and meaning in what seems to be a hopeless, meaningless situation requires focus on a purpose or ideal. Dr. Frankl was a student of the psyche, the mechanisms that people use to create feelings, emotions, motivation, and all of the other factors that keep us going—or don’t. He found meaning by regarding the concentration camp as a laboratory where he could analyze the reasons that people gave up or endured. Some held out because they believed that their wives or children needed them, and that they had to find a way to rejoin them. Others saw the camp as a trial that God was using to test their faith. For each of the survivors, their reasons for holding out until liberation were unique and personal.

It would be an insult to the memory of those that lived or perished in the Holocaust to compare that event with a law enforcement career. But each situation offers a unique perspective for each of us, and that which one person finds interesting and even enjoyable might be utter torture to another. In a cohort of 100 police recruits, some will drop out of their academy, a few more will quit or be terminated during a probationary period, and a significant number will decide that police work is not for them, and leave on their own. Most of those will make that decision before they get their first hashmark or service star. The ones that remain have a good shot at making retirement. But, along the way, many will lose the sense of purpose that led them to the job, and a few will take their own lives.

There are any number of methods for staying motivated and focused, but whichever you choose or devise for yourself, never lose hope. Policing can be a near-hopeless job. You can’t ever catch all of the bad guys, and the system seems to be oriented more toward catch-and-release than clean-em-and-cook-em. The system of advancement is stacked against the individual, as there are always more people that want to be promoted than there are promotional slots. If the physical risks of the job weren’t bad enough, contemporary cops are always aware that they can be sued for anything they do, don’t do, or are only suspected of doing, whether they did it or not.

So you gotta have hope. You have to remember that the work you’re doing contributes to a greater good, even when you can’t see it at your level. There are still a lot of people that are glad to see you coming down the street or highway. You gotta hope and believe the day will come when you will look back on your career and remember the good, honorable work you did with a sense of accomplishment. Whether you get that hope from within, from your God, from your family, from your peers, or elsewhere, doesn’t matter. It’s like evidence or probable cause—it’s where you find it. Keep that hope, keep the faith, and believe that 2007 will be a better year for all of us.