What is a Police Officer?

With the rash of violence targeted toward police officers in the last couple of years I’ve seen many question why so much attention is given to line of duty deaths. After all, the argument goes, they are just another individual murdered. There’s no difference between the officer and another individual gunned down on the street in terms of humanity, is there? There are other dangerous occupations out there as well. However, to understand why an attack on a police officer captures the attention of the community we must understand exactly what a police officer is on the practical level and in the abstract.

What is a police officer? On its face, the answer to this question seems simple. A cop is just a guy who got a job with a police department, carries a gun and a badge, and puts bad people in jail, right? Certainly that’s a part of what a police officer is. Obviously he (or she) is just a human doing their job. But what is their job? They enforce the laws of society, obviously. But do they really do this job as another individual amongst equal individuals? No they don’t. When a regular citizen attempts to do similarly, except in exigent circumstances, that regular citizen will find himself in legal hot water. This tells us that there is something abstract which sets the police officer apart from the rest of society.

That abstract idea which sets the officer apart from John Q. Public is the fact that when he takes his oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and his home state and to enforce the laws of his state and community he becomes the personification of society at large. His authority is derived from the trust placed in him by his community. When he arrests someone, he is not arresting them, the community is arresting the individual. The officer embodies the authority of the community. The authority delegated to the officer is the authority to use force, even deadly force, to ensure that those who violate the community’s laws can be brought to justice in the court system. This is why police officers are held to a higher standard in terms of conduct. Officers can be held criminally liable if they execute the duties of their office improperly or neglect certain aspects of their duties. Effectively a police officer is two persons in one: John Q. Public and Officer Public.

Instinctively we recognize this to be true. When an off-duty police officer is assaulted or killed in a home invasion robbery with no connection to his occupation we consider it to be a shame and a tragedy, but likely very little additional attention is given to the events apart from a blurb on the 6 o’clock news and a story in the paper. Yet, when an officer is gunned down in the line of duty we instinctively recognize that something very different has happened. We may not be able to articulate this difference and we may not understand this difference, but we know something unusually heinous has occurred.

When one individual chooses to take the life of another there is really only one direct victim of the crime: the one whose life was ended. Certainly there are other “victims”; friends, family, dependants, etc, but the crime itself has one victim. This is not so when an officer is assaulted or murdered. There is a similarity of course between the two crimes, but what distinguishes between them is the second victim: society. When someone murders another he demonstrates a lack of regard for that individual. When someone murders or attacks an officer, not only do they demonstrate a lack of regard for the individual but also the rule of law and society as a whole. In effect, the assault is a treasonous act of sorts. The perpetrator is declaring that they are in opposition to society, that society’s laws have no authority over them, that they have no fear of society’s justice.

We recognize intuitively that when an officer is attacked we are also victims. An individual we have entrusted with our authority has been attacked simply because that authority has been vested in him. We feel a degree of responsibility for this attack – we have a minor case of survivor’s guilt. This individual lost their life because they chose to act on our behalf. This is what is different. This is what makes a police officer a police officer. He is a public servant; he enforces the law so we don’t have to. As a result, when an officer is killed during the course of their duties, we recognize that in a very real sense he has died in our place.

I'm not sure if I've conveyed my thinking as clearly as I would like, or if my thinking makes any sense at all. But this matter has been on my mind for about a week since the death of Kalamazoo Dept. of Public Safety Officer Eric Zapata. I really think that there is something that definitively sets a police officer apart from the average citizen. Not that his life somehow intrinsically more valuable than anyone else's, but that by virtue of his duties there is another element to his life distinct from his individual self which in the abstract represents all of us.