Context: when I go running, I run through the parking lot of a closed-down drugstore as my turn around point; over the last year or so, I have noticed that a police vehicle parks their car under the awning of the drive-thru. This was not an isolated incident, and given the fact that I’m fairly schedule oriented, I have seen this cop parked out here at roughly the same time ranges, and I would go so far as to say that it’s north of a 50% chance that I’ll see the car whenever I go for a run. And like I said “year,” this has been the case for the better part of the span of the last year.
One time, I saw the office sitting with his door open trimming a cigar, so it’s clear that the cop isn’t just hiding out to kill time or take a breather, but to be giving himself a little daily vacation on company time, fairly regularly. The fact that I’ve run past numerous butts and remnants of cigars in the lot indicates that this probably happens more than he wants people to be aware of.
Now before I continue, I don’t know definitively that it is the same officer that’s doing this on the regular, but I do definitively know that it’s the same vehicle I’m seeing every single time. I’m not in law enforcement so I don’t know if every officer has their own vehicle, or if they have to share with others, but if it is the former, then it leads to believe that it’s the same cop who’s loafing on company time on the regular.
Anyway, on this particular morning where I’ve decided to finally pose this question, I had the opportunity to get out and run early, and I decided to capitalize, because fewer things bring me joy like getting to knock out certain self-imposed daily tasks like Duolingo and exercise, so I was out of the house and running by like 9 am, before I would log into work on my weekly remote day.
Typically, whenever I see the lazy cop car, it’s at around 12-1 pm, when I’m either taking a lunch break when I’m working remotely, or the kids are in their rooms for quiet time, and I have the opportunity to get out and run. And like I mentioned earlier, the rate in which I see the cop car when I run is pretty high, and frankly I’m at the point where I’m more surprised when I don’t see them.
However on this morning when I’m approaching my turning point at around 9:15-ish, the thought crossed my mind on whether or not I’d see the lazy cop car, seeing as how it’s nearly three hours earlier than I normally run. But sure as the sun rises, there was the cop car, same five-digit vehicle number on the rear hatch as I’ve grown to recognize. Door was ajar, legs sticking out of the driver’s seat, human being very much present and alive.
And this is where I began to ponder, if this guy is here at 9:15 am and often seen at 12-1 pm, is this cop just parking here and hanging out for his entire shift? Is he coming and going at intermittent intervals? Did I just happen to catch him completely coincidentally at an odd time? Is this cop really that much of a lazy pig, completely complacent by the sheer lack of job accountability?
Which brings us back to the original query of this entire post – would you narc on a cop?
Full disclosure, I don’t hate the police. I know I identify more as leaning liberally, but I don’t hate the police. A few bad cops don’t paint the whole picture of the entire occupation of law enforcement, and sure I think that there are some places in the country where the police have too much funding and it could be scale back some, but by and large, I support law enforcement, and want to give benefit of the doubt that most cops are good cops.
But like I said, I’m writing all this after nearly a year’s worth of observations of what appears to be a singular cop taking way too many liberties with his job, and I’m curious to know on whether you, my non-existent reader, would narc on them or not.
And by narc, I’m thinking of taking pictures and putting up on social media and tagging the agency in which the officer works for, and pointing the finger, because most everyone probably knows that cops do have a culture or protecting each other, and I don’t imagine a phone call to a precinct would result in anything more than a good laugh from those on the inside, as well as a marking on the source, as, an enemy to law enforcement, for daring to take action against a cop.
Not like putting them on blast on social media wouldn’t result in the same risk of retaliation, but at least the intel would be made immediately public, and put the officer in question as well as the agency they work for in self-defense mode first, and muddy up the waters on how they’d be able to retaliate without there being any scrutiny.
And it sucks that this is where we the people are with law enforcement, where it definitively feels like engaging in a manner that is accusing the police would result in some form of retaliation, because I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that law enforcement has the resources necessary to trace an image, a post or a be able to scrape metadata better than most armchair sleuths and pretty efficiently be able to identify those who act against them regardless of how warranted it might be.
But anyway, no matter how much it irks me to see a sworn officer of the law behaving in a manner that’s anything but a respectable police officer, I’m not doing anything. I try to operate my general life as low-key and devoid of any legal scrutiny as possible, and I’d rather there not be a note next to my identification that I’m some opponent to the police that deserves the book at the slightest infraction should there ever be a time, and I don’t want to increase the risk of that ever happening.
That’s just me though; would you?
