Humidity. I think it is very good. [indiscernible chatter] 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 Authority 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 few people outside of his profession know or understand. This is a film about these pressures 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. Jacks partner is Fred 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 both work to help 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. Our third man is jim sweeney, there are plenty of children around his house, four of them his. The rest just collect from all over the neighborhood. Sure they make noise, it can bother you sometimes, like when i am working nights. If you let things like that bug you too much, you can go off your rocker. Youve got to learn to live. Live and let live. Jims partner 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 with doubt about what he is doing for them. 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 policemen at least 15 years of service out in the street. In police work you do get exposed to physical danger, not i think i myself, need this sort of thing. I guess i am like my favorite uncle. That car was not there last time. We should get it. Horns] stop. Come on out. , on. Against the door, hands up. All right, that is far enough. Come on, really. I do not mind the physical risks he run into, but something you run into, but something i actually like about police work is helping to make the jigsaw puzzle fit together. That was just a juvenile. How about recently . Ccw. Get his cpd number for me. Cpd number . 42391. How about last arrest . 42063. 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 5384912. Pretty soon after i finish that up. Wait. Scretching [sirens] get out of the car. Identification. Take it out yourself. Whose car is this . Mine. Are you letting the fellow drive over there . What is his name . Robert. Bob 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 . Whose car is it . It is my dads. Do you have the registration . I dont know where it is. John, watch him for a second. What is your name, lad . Bill. Where do you know bob from . I go to school with him. Is he one of your friends . No, i never saw him around the neighborhood. He went to florida central. Can you give us a listing in a check and a check . 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 buddy a ticket. Hey john, it is a hot one. Oh my god, get up against the car fellows, bobby, you, too. Turnaround around, put your hands up on the car. Bobby, you two. Good arrest, i want to congratulate you, do not forget that you still got two hours on the street. Getting personally involved with the people whom one must arrest cannot be avoided sometimes, but the truly 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. The patrol car placed so it can get protection from oncoming traffic. This is your citation, this is your personal bill that you theyll that you will be on part on the fifth of july, 8 45 a. M. 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. There was. Do not tell me what i saw. There was no white station wagon. 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 i did not see the sign 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, some find this uncertainty adds to the jobs interest. All find that 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 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. For example, there is a nice 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 owners, but if i wanted to win a popularity contest i would not have been a policeman. If you own property in a neighborhood like this, it is unlikely to take an impartial it is a lot harder to fake an impartial attitude. It is a real strain trying to handle a situation impartially. When you feel one side or the other is 100 wrong. 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. 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 police do, there are a thousand eyes watching us. Id card . 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 but the public expects you to take charge, but the public and so you do, somehow. Ringing] 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 instead we spend most of our time instead we spend most of our time playing nursemaid. 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. That yellow one. 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. Handling family quarrels is not the kind of work tickets or name of the papers or credit. Most crimes of violence begin with spats like this. You have to learn to handle them without crossing the middle. A lot of policeman have gotten themselves killed like this. I guess, i make my worst mistakes when i have been working under the pressure of time. We got the call to pick up this mental patient an hour before we were do to get off duty. [crying] kicked a window and he was started to scream. Maybe you can do something about it. Jenny t like that, jimmy. The wagon got the call with us were in a hurry. All of us were in a mess up to our armpits. Please do not hurt him, that is my husband. Jimmy, do not do this, jimmy, do not. Please, do not hurt him. Jimmy, do not hurt him, please. Do not hurt him, please do not hurt him. I do not think that mans family or neighbors will ever forget what they saw that day, i know i will not forget it. Jack and iter, handled a call that could have been just as messy. Difficultbe just as to handle as men. I am not bothering nobody. What is your name . This one had been asked exhibiting strange behavior. We talked with her quietly for a long time before we made the attempt to get her to move. By then we had made her feel that we were not siding against her and that we met what we said. Handling people like this meant like this takes time. Here is only a minute or so of the half hour it took to get her to the car. The firstfirst joined the force i had to yell i thought you had to yell at people and frighten them to get them to do things, now i found all you had to do was talk to them and show them a little respect. Now, i am not saying that 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. These two lost kids that we picked up the other night. Their story was that big boys had stolen their money so we gave them a ride home. It turns out that they cooked up the whole story to get out of a beating that they thought might be waiting for them at home for being out so late. Policeman gets the close view of life. Rid side some of the guys you can meet can trap you in trouble at home and on the job if you do not watch your step. So, you do a conscientious job all night long, maybe make a good pension, and what happens . You end up in court the next morning when you could have been home sacked out. Going off to bed. Where his mom, in the kitchen . Going to Court Tomorrow . Dad . Yes. Again . Yes, now, get to bed. Are we going fishing tomorrow . Arent we . We are not. Why . Because dad is a cop. What happened this time . We had a drunken driver. Every time we make plans you have to go to court. What do you want me to do, look the other way . No. I tell you one million times, do not settle with the kids ause i hate to disappoint the children. Maybe it would not be too bad if i did not have two jobs. A lot of us work 20 hours a week on the outside and i need that extra money to buy stuff for my kids and the neighbor children. I will admit that there were times where he went on a late shift after a day on the docks so tired that my partner had to look around for the both of us. Sometimes i think, what the hell . I bake more money pushing freight than as a policeman, but i hate to spend the rest of my life working there. I just do not care how much it pays. I do not want that. I would not do that job for 1 million. I am frank i will be frank, i enjoy my extra job, but it sure played hell with my home life. Now, and i see my boys one night a week. Is a poor arrangement at best for all of us, and financially, i am in as much of a hole as i ever was. It is too late to think about it. What i was trying to do was buy happiness for my family on an installment plan instead of learning to live content on what we had. Sometimes, i think the greatest hazard of a police job is the fact that your wife can get unlimited credit, and they all know if you can come that you can come to the department if you fall too far behind. Man, they can push your the limits know that there is somebody who wants to do them a favor, believe me, there are always people who want to do a policeman a favor. Maybe i am too cynical, but after 15 years on the street i learned to be suspicious of everybody when it comes to this sort of thing. 107, called the first district. Most spend the greater part of their working hours driving or sitting in a call car, introducing a new occupational hazard, physical and mentor mental lethargy. It was a lot different when i was walking the beat. Then, you naturally got to know people, you met all kinds, not just a croaks or the ones making complaints now we are that we are liable to now. It gave you a different feeling about people and the job. There is no reason why you cannot meet people in the same way now, jim and i do it all the time. I admit that you have to make more of an effort. When you are stuck in a car, you think that the whole world is against you, but when you really get to know the folks in your patch, they seem a lot different. There is good and bad in every neighborhood. Take a look at our patch. We are right in the heart of the bloody faith district, we call it the combat zone. It has the highest crime rates in the city, and yet 80 to 90 of the people are lawabiding citizens who need our protection. Are people who are doing their best to keep up their houses and raise their children to some kind of standard in spite of what goes on around them. Of course, part of my job is knowing the crooks and keeping an eye on them. What if i forget that there are good people and treat them accordingly, i am not doing my job as a policeman. If you start treating all kids as a delinquents as if they happen to live in a neighborhood when delinquency is high, you are creating the thing that you are supposed to be fighting. Thatays try to remember for these kids i represent not only the law, but the city government. The way they feel about me now is beginning to determine how they will feel about law order in general a few years from now. [kids talking] my partner and i are fortunate, we live and work in a great part of town. You still cannot assume that everybody is going to respect you because you have on a uniform. If you do not stay friendly with the people and you do not have much of a chance to find out trouble ahead of time and you have to learn to keep your distance a little. Suspicious,e always even your neighbors and friends, they see you in a bar and right away they say you are getting a free drink. We need to check out places like that. Coffee, you stop for a and right away they say you are freeloading on the citys time. Why dont they take a coffee life. A cop fun out of people are funny. Once a week we get accused of making a mistake and we all get blamed, no matter how far away it happens. Your breast friends kid you about it your best friends kid you about it, you laugh about it, but it hurts. Mickey asks all sorts of questions. Every Police Officer must respect expect this group blame for individual misdeeds as there is another kind of policeman publicity every policeman and his family must learn to accept. This is a job that can get to you if you do not watch yourself. You are under pressure through the shift, and then you have got to relax. Relax byus locks stopping by the nearest tavern. After a while you find that you are fighting a habit that is hard to control. I would not be surprised if booze has not killed more policemen than bullets. As a policeman, you see it so much that is rotten in this world you have to get away for a while. Then you get a different view of your job. Once in a while you get an assignment that makes your family feel proud of you. [groaning] i wish i had more education. I had a couple of 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 than my uncle, who is still town marshal out west, but police work is getting more professional. Doctorswith the nurses, lawyers, social workers, and the public is expecting us to measure up to professional standards. I am glad to see this. We talk a lot about the public not appreciating the hard work that we policemen do. But, they are not going to change much until we change and start thinking of ourselves as professional men and acting like it. There is something about this job [bells tolling]
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