[indiscernible] every policeman lives to lives, offduty dresses like everybody else and could first be thought of as one more representative of the public but once he puts on the authorities and the obligations of the police job, he becomes a marked man. In uniform or out of it, he must learn to live and work under pressures you people outside his profession know or understand. This is a film about these pressures and as they are experienced by four men. Jack morris knows how to laugh at himself, but he is also a perfectionist. Almost every monday night, he and his sons play pool together and the boys have learned a lot from their father. I believe a man ought to learn whatever he sets his hand to properly right from the start, i dont care if it is playing pool or whatever it is. Fredcks partner is mcpherson who grew up in the west. He has never gotten used to big city ways, he would much rather hunt or go fishing. My fatherinlaw is a carpenter from the old country, we built this house together. Now my wife and i both helped to pay off the mortgage. We do not have any children, but it still takes two paychecks to keep things up the way we both want them. Sweeney,ird man is jim there are plenty of children around his house, four of them hits, the rest just collect from all over the neighborhood. , it canthey make noise bother you sometimes, like when i am working nights. Youve got to let if you let things like that bug you too much, you can go off your rocker. Youve got to learn to live. Is john martin, john grew up in a poor city neighborhood so he works especially hard to get the best of everything for his children. And yet, his often troubled without about what he is doing. If kids dont learn to make it on their own, they are headed for trouble. They even got to learn to do without things sometimes. I have talked a lot about this with my boy, i wish i knew how much got through to him. These four quite different men tell our story, have one thing in common, they are all leishman at least 15 years of service out in the street toyou do get exposed physical danger, not for myself, i think i need this sort of thing. I guess i am like my favorite uncle. That car was not there last time. [indiscernible] against the door, hands up. All right, that is far enough. I do not mind the physical risks he run into, but something i actually like about police work is helping to make the jigsaw puzzle fit together. That was just a juvenile. Cpd number . 42391. 430 63. T the arrest . Ok, hold on a minute, please. We have got a good one for you, three convictions if you do not have the patience it takes to get this kind of detail, you will find you have no place in police work no matter how good you are with a gun. Im going to run and check on this. Springfield make, serial number 4912. [sirens] identification. Take it out yourself. Whose car is this . Hours mine. Are you letting the fellow drive over there . What are you doing out this late . Does your dad know you are out . No. Has mickey been with you tonight at all . Now i have not seen him all day. How about you, paul, what you know . Is your dads . Do you have the registration . I dont know where it is. A second. Atch him for what is your name, lead . Bill. Is he one of your friends . No, i never saw him around the neighborhood. Have you been doing any drinking at all . No. You smell like you have. We are going to give you a break, im going to let you go home but im going to give your body a ticket. Hey john, it is a hot one. God, get up against the twoo ows, bobby, you too. No forget you are still got two hours on the street. Getting personally involved with the people whom one must arrest cannot be avoided sometimes, but the truly put professional policeman follows procedures to keep such cases to a minimum when issuing a traffic citation for instance, he asked for license and registration, then leaves the driver to cool off as he returns to his own car to make out the ticket undisturbed by the drivers attempts to argue or talk his way out of the situation. Meanwhile, the officers partner stands guard. Patrol car place so we can give protection from oncoming traffic. This is your citation, this is your personal bill that you given on the fifth of july. Will you sign this, please . Want to see how personally involved you can get . I tried to stop but the car was right in front of me. There was no car in front of you. Dont tell me, i know what i saw, it was a white Station Wagon. There is no white Station Wagon there, there are two stoplights back there, you may have stopped for the first, you did not stop for the second. You dont have to give me a lecture, i did stop at that sign, i did not see design you are talking about. Now she is in charge and doesnt he look silly . You are not taking me anywhere. You are going now. No patrolman can possibly guess what is coming up next, this uncertainty adds to the jobs interest. It builds attention, he nowadays even the most routine call can involve patrolman and something that adds up to thousands of dollars. With so much money at stake, i guess it is only natural for people to tell us with just what is favorable to them, but after a few years of hearing this thing you get pretty cynical about everybody if you are not careful. Ill tell you Something Else youve got to watch out for, you see situations like this day after day. You get so used to them you start forgetting the people involved, it is most probably the biggest thing in their lives. If you sound bored or offhand, theyre going to resent it and will hold a grudge against the whole department. People can be pretty unreasonable sometimes, almost everybody has got some form of prejudice. A nicemple, there is neighborhood that is trying to keep hillbillies from moving in, so we get a complaint every time the kids Start Playing in the park. Sometimes the kids are doing things they should not, but if they are behaving themselves, they have just as much right to be in the neighborhood as anyone else. We are not making ourselves popular with the property to win aut if i wanted popularity contest i would not have been a policeman. The ou own property in a neighborhood like this, it is unlikely to take an impartial attitude. It is a real strain trying to handle a situation and partially impartially. I dont know what happened. One of the things you see in this business can turn your stomach in no time flat if you let them. It will amaze you to see how the public turns around when anything like this is going on. Maybe some of them think we are lucky because we get a real close look. I dont know. When you are the more you are in this business, the more you begin to think the world is a mixed up place. This old man had been dead for a week before anyone noticed, now all his neighbors are acting like they care what happens to him. Maybe some of them do care, but one thing you can bet on, whenever we please do, there is a thousand eyes watching us. I have to get used to this feeling of being watched all the time, but after 19 years on the job, i have learned to ignore it. God almighty the things that you see, one of the things you are really not equipped to handle in the situation somehow. When i first joined, i thought policeman spent most of their time catching burglars, solving crimes stuff like that. Instead we spend most of our time playing nurse mate, if nobody else wants the job, then who gets it . I will give you one guess. But it makes the day pass. There is one thing you can say about police work, it is not routine, we can answer a call and hear a mans whole life story before you get through. People can break your heart if you let them. I know i shouldnt, but every time i handled a case where there has been a family breakup, i think oh my god, it could be me or mine. Quarrels isfamily not the kind of work tickets or name in the papers or much credit back at headquarters, but it is one of the most important jobs we do. Most crimes of violence begin here. Yet to learn to handle them without getting problematic. A lot of policemen have gotten themselves killed this way. I guess i made my worst mistakes when ive been working under the pressure of time. We got a call to pick out a mental patient a halfhour before we were due to go off duty. [indiscernible] the wagon men who got the call with us were there, too, and in a bout a minute all of us were in a mess. [indiscernible] i dont think that mans family or neighbors will ever forget what they saw that day. I know i wont forget it. And i days later jack handled something they could have been just as messy if we had led to get out of hand. Women can be just as difficult to handle as men. What is your name . Been exhibiting strange behavior for several days. We talked with her quietly for a long time before we made the first attempt to get her to move. By then, we had made her feel we were not siding against her, but that we met what we said. Handling people like this does take time. You have seen only a minute or so of the halfhour we took to get her. When i first joined the force, i thought you had to yell at people and frighten them to get them to do things. Now i have found that all you have to do is talk to them, show them a little respect. I am not saying you can make hard and fast rules about anything in this business, most of the time, you are working in the dark in more ways than one. Theseople for you, take two loss kids we picked up the other night, their story was that some big boys had stolen their best money so we gave them a ride home. It turns out they cooked up the whole story to get out of a beating they thought might be waiting for them at home for being out so late. A policeman gets a close view of the other side of life are at, some of the characters you meet in this business can track you into all sorts of trouble both at home and on the job if you do not watch your step. So you do a good conscientious job all night long, maybe make a good pinch and what happens . You end up in court the next morning when you could have been home sacked out. Where mom, cooking . Yeah. What, again . Yes, again, now get to bed. Are we going to go fishing tomorrow . No, we are not. Why . Because that is a cop. Dad is a cop. What happened this time . We got a drunken driver. Every time we make plans, you have to go to court. What you want me to do, look the other way . I am the ghost, you can see their reaction, they think i dont want to go anywhere. Any effort, call uncle bill and local frank and they will forget everything. All right, i hate to disappoint the children. Not be so baduld if i do not have two jobs, who am i to work 20 hours a week on the outside . I need a little money to afford all the extras the kids of all the neighbors do. There have been times when i went on a leaf late shift after a date so tired my partner had to do the looking out for both of us. Sometimes i think, what the hell , i make more money pushing crates than i do as a policeman. Of mywould hate to think life i just dont care how much i make. I would not do that job for a million bucks. I will be frank with you, i enjoyed my job, maybe i need to change. It sure played hell with my home life. And i see my now boys one night a week. This is a poor arrangement at best for all of us and financially, i am in as much of a hole right now as i ever was. It is too late to think about it i guess, but what i was trying to do was find happiness for my family on the installment plan instead of learning to live content on what we had. Sometimes i think the greatest hazard of a police job can get that your almost unlimited credit. They know they can complain to the apartment if you get too far behind and man how they manage. Yout is a trap all right, get into debt over your head and then you know some but he wants to do your favor do you a favor. There are always people around you want to do a policeman a favor. Maybe i am too cynical, but at learnedfter 15 years, i to be suspicious of everybody when it comes to this sort of thing. Most patrolmen these days spend the greater part of their working hours driving or sitting in a car. This has introduced a new occupational hazard, physical and mental lethargy. I will go along with that. It was a lot different back when i was walking a beat. You just naturally got to know people, you met all kinds not just the croaks for the ones making complaints, the way we are liable to now. It gave you a different feeling about people and about your job. There is no reason why you cannot meet people the same way now, jim and i do that all the time. You have to make more of an effort, we need you are in a car you have a tendency to think the whole world is against you. But when you get to know the folks in your path, they seem a lot different. There is good and there is bad in every neighborhood, take a look at our patch for example. We are right in the heart of the bloody fifth district, we call it the combat zone. it has the highest crime rate in the city and yet 8090 percent of the people in the district are lawabiding citizens who need our production. Theirpeople who are doing best to keep up their houses and raise their children to some kind of standard in spite of what goes on around them. Part of my job is knowing the croaks and keeping an eye on them. But if i forget there are good people here and treat them accordingly, i am not doing my job as a policeman. If you start treating all of them at the because they live in a neighborhood where lincoln sea is high, you are encouraging the thing you are fighting. I try to remember these kids present not just their block, but the whole city government, the way they feel about me now is beginning to determine how they will feel about law and order in general a few years from now. My partner and i are pretty fortunate, we live in a live and work in a good part of town but you cant assume everybody is going to respect you because you have on a uniform. You do not stay friendly with the people, then you do not have much of a chance to find out about the trouble ahead of time. And yet you have got to learn to keep your distance. People are always suspicious, even your neighbors and friends. Say you are getting a free drink, i am quick to check out places like that. They see us getting a coffee and right away they say you are preloading on the kitties time cities time. People are funny, one policeman gets accused of making a mistake and we all get blames no matter how far away it happened. Do about friend could it, i try to laugh with them, but it hurts. Even mickey starts asking all sorts of questions. Every Police Officer must expect this kind of group blamed for individual deeds and there is another kind of publicity every policeman and his family must learn to accept. This is a job they can get to you if you do not watch yourself. You are under pressure alter the shift and then you have got to relax. Stoppingof us relax by by the nearest tavern. After a couple of while you are fine fighting a habit that is hard to control. I would not be surprised if booze has killed a lot more policeman then bullets. As a policeman, you see what is rotten in this world but you have got to get away from that once in a while, you start getting a different view of a job. It is not all bad, once in a while you get an assignment that makes your family feel proud of you. [applause] i wish i had more education, i had a couple years of college, 14 weeks of basic training in our Police Academy and we get refresher courses from time to time. I am a lot better able to handle things then my uncle who is a marshal out west, but police work is getting more professionalized all the time. We work right along with the nurses and doctors and lawyers, social workers, the public is beginning to expect us to measure up to professional standards. Im glad to see this. We talk a lot about the public not appreciating all the hard work we do, but today are not going to change much until we change. Until we start thinking of ourselves as professional men and acting like it. When you are tired, you start asking yourself what is in it for me anyway . There is not much glory, thanks, or praise and i can tell you, there is something is about something about this job that is right for me. I dont think i want to do anything else
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