Brothahs and Sistahs Listen Up!

It's officially in the 40's outside. I've officially used my heater for the first time.

For those that may come across this blog and actually read it... I live in Texas. We have a saying here that most Texans are familiar with. "If you don't like the weather in Texas, just wait a few minutes and it will change." There was a perfect example of this the night before last.

Sunday night: I get into work and it's sweltering. It was 90 degrees on Sunday and it was still about 80 when I got into work. Mostly clear skies throughout the day. I did job stuff for a couple of hours and decided to take a break and walked outside and it was lightly raining and the wind was blowing about 50 mph and the temperature had dropped down to 53. Of course, I was dressed for sweltering with no jacket. Brrrrr... I think it's suppose to be in the mid 70's by the weekend. Silly Texas weather.

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Wurk stoof:

Last night was a sloooooow night at work. Not one single phone call. And on top of that, our internet was down. And tonight, which is usually my Friday, won't be special because I swapped a day with a fellow employee and I will be working Wednesday for him and will only get one day off this week. But next week will be nice because I'll have 3 days off. As slow as last night was, this week has gone by pretty fast and that will help with that extra day in there.

You probably won't read me writing about my job very often. I am exceptional about not bringing my work home with me. When I walk out of work, I don't think about it any more. Plus there's that whole I'm not suppose to talk about what goes on because of people's civil rights and all and I totally respect that. But the last couple of weeks my work place has been on the news and last night before leaving for work, I watched a news story that is still irking me quite a bit. Let me explain...

I work for a fairly small city. Our ethnicity is comprised of predominately African Americans, then Hispanics (most of which don't speak English), elderly Caucasians and a few younger white folks thrown in and I believe we have some from the Asian and Indian continents as well. The majority are of a lower class. I'm talking monetarily, not personality here. For the most part, we have some very supportive citizens, very nice citizens and even though I'm in the line of work that I'm in, I am still able to see that this little city is not such a bad place at all. Our police officers have an advantage that bigger cities don't have. Our officers are able to stop and talk to people and make every effort to get to know the citizens that we are working for and most of them actually take the time to do that. And like all other incorporated cities, we have our undesirables that live there as well. The dopers, the thieves, the general thugs. And also like all other cities we have those people that we have to deal with screaming "racial discrimination". Now... because we are a predominately African American city, statistically those that are doing most of the screaming are of African American decent. Not all of them, mind you. We have our African American officers getting it from the Caucasians as well. Our Hispanic officers getting it from both of those and our male officers getting it from females and our female officers getting it from males and so on and so on. So here's the deal. We don't CARE what color you are. If you are breaking the law or acting like a fool and get caught doing it, you are going to have to deal with the police. If you are fighting with the police and get a taser to your ass, be thankful you didn't get shot. No matter what color you are, if you are doing something you are not suppose to be doing, get caught, and start yelling racial discrimination because you can't own up to the fact you were being stupid, you are demeaning your race. Again, this goes for ALL cultures. Without going into detail, I'm sure you are getting the gist of what one of the news stories was about.

Now about the second one...

About a year ago, our department had the misfortune to hire a couple of individuals that we shouldn't have. It happens. And of course it wasn't until after the fact we learned why these individuals were looking for jobs in the first place. Being a small department, we have the advantage of getting to know our co-workers very well. They become family. They ARE family. And on occasion a bad apple or two finds it's way into the mix, but usually don't stick around very long for one reason or another. I will mainly be talking about one of the two because I believe the second one was highly influenced by the first one. This is because they had worked together previously and came in pretty close to the same time. But anyway... this one employee, let's call him JS for short, had a not very good reputation that was not discovered until after he was hired. (Word of mouth gets around in area departments)

The general public has no understanding of the mentality of this job. They may have an idea, but to work in this environment on a daily basis, we sometimes joke about the reason we are given psychological tests is because you have to be at least a little crazy to want to do this job in the first place. I, personally, think the only worse job for a person's sanity would be a telemarketer. Add to the fact we are a very small department so the "shit", so to speak, doesn't get diluted between a whole lot of officers... just a few. There are officers who would never be able to work for a small department and most who have started at the smaller departments have a hard time adjusting to the bigger departments. I've worked for both and I MUCH prefer the smaller. I think JS had a hard time with the small department thing. That and the fact he's just not a nice person.

I had the opportunity to speak with JS on several occasions and tried to explain to him the differences between the smaller and the larger departments and how it takes some getting use to when he voiced his concerns about different things. And unfortunately he couldn't get past the "well where I use to work we would NEVER do things THIS way" phase. Me, who just wants everyone to get along in the world, told him to just give it time and he would understand why we do things the way we do. What he saw as civil rights violations and discrimination and inmate mistreatment and so on and so on were not even close to what he was making them out to be. I tried to explain this to him on several occasions. Let me add here, he had not been a police officer for very long. A year or two at the most. Let me also add here, he was in an interracial marriage... and extremely over sensitive about the fact. Let me add even more here before any judgment is made on me, that I was ALSO at one time in an interracial marriage. So... after listening to his complaints and him not listening to my reason, he often spent time inside the police department instead of outside patrolling the city sitting back in the patrol room gathering documents because "this department just shouldn't be run this way". We found out later on that ours was not the first department he did this with. Our Chief, who lives in his city that he works for and who has been the Chief for almost 20 years now is VERY involved in his department and VERY well respected by the peons that work for him. His door is always open and those of us that work for him, LIKE working for him. If he feels something is amiss in the department, you will often times find him patrolling the city in his personal vehicle at all hours fo the night "just because". The word had gotten around that officer JS had been spending most of his nights NOT out doing his job and in the end, was ultimately terminated because of that fact. In the amount of time JS was working for us, he was able to stir up quite a big pile of b.s. between members of our department and for our Chief, this is intolerable. He takes stuff like that personally because you are not just messing with other employees, you are messing with his family.

Unfortunately, there are people out there who's only satisfaction in life is stirring up trouble. JS is one of those people. After the Chief called out JS for not doing his job and for stirring up so much trouble, the only thing out of JS's mouth was lawsuit this, and lawsuit that and how he was going to call up all the news stations and so on and so on. And unfortunately for the other guy, he got all caught up in it as well and was on JS's bandwagon and ended up being terminated for the same reasons as JS.

About 9 months have passed since the JS BS took place. When the first news story aired that I mentioned above, JS took that opportunity to not leave well enough alone and jumped right in and ended up on the news as well, spouting off about things he just doesn't understand and when I saw that, I was just infuriated. Did the journalist do any background work into this guys history with ALL of the other departments he has been terminated from? No. Did the journalist make mention that this guy can't find a job as a police officer because of his history with other departments? No. Will the general public see both of these news stories and think all of us are a bunch of discriminating, taser happy employees? Unfortunately, yes. Because good news rarely gets aired and people take what they are given to see and read as the whole story and don't understand that even in the news, you can't always rely on the one side to understand the whole story.

There are bad seeds in every culture, in every job market and in all religions and those bad seeds are what society bases their opinions on. Discrimination is born from not opening our minds to both sides of the story. If you read this, I beg of you to remember this next time you want to judge the person next to you, or next time you watch the news.