Why does someone decide to become a police officer? There are no doubt many reasons, but you have to wonder if maybe some who go through the process and apply don't have subtle reasons that have to do with authority and guns and uniforms and power more than serving the community.
Personally I would not like the job for dozens of reasons, mainly the point of the song, "A policeman's lot is not a happy one." That song is about the policeman's sad duty to put an end to the criminal's freedom. I'm rather sure that is not one of the ordinary cop's concerns. They tend to be self-righteous and hence have no problems on that order.
Under close friendly questioning by me of a cop neighbor, he conceded readily that he got a charge out of the uniform and the badge and especially the gun.
The question of police motivation is genuinely interesting and probably more stratified than public discourse usually allows.
The honest answer is almost certainly that it's a genuinely mixed population. Some fraction are exactly what the recruitment posters depict — community-oriented, service-minded, drawn to structured work with clear moral stakes. Another fraction is what your neighbor candidly copped to (so to speak) — the uniform, the badge, the gun, the authority, the social permission to be the one who gives orders rather than takes them. And presumably a large middle population has motivations that are more mundane: stable government job, decent pension, family tradition, didn't have other clear options.
What's interesting about your neighbor's candor is that it probably reflects something most cops feel but don't articulate, partly because the official narrative demands the service framing. The fact that he said it readily under friendly questioning suggests it wasn't a shameful secret he was concealing — more like something obvious that simply isn't said in formal contexts.
The Gilbert and Sullivan lyric you cite is genuinely pointed in a way that gets lost if you treat it as mere comedy. The original joke is that the policeman sympathizes with the criminal — they're both human, and the cop's duty is to end freedom, which at some level he knows. The satirical inversion is that real police culture tends to run exactly the opposite direction: not too much sympathy, clear moral hierarchy, self-righteousness as occupational armor. Which may be functionally necessary — a cop paralyzed by empathy for every person he arrests would be useless. But it does mean the psychological type that thrives in the job is probably not the one who lies awake troubled by the paradox.
The authority-and-gun attraction isn't necessarily disqualifying on its own. The question is whether it coexists with genuine restraint and judgment, or whether it's the whole package.
Police are indispensable; we just have to have our eyes open.
Exactly right, and that's probably the most useful frame — neither the "thin blue line, back the badge unconditionally" position nor the "abolish the police" fantasy, both of which require closing your eyes to something obvious.
The indispensability is real and not trivial. The alternative to imperfect institutional policing isn't some better arrangement — it's private security for those who can afford it and nothing for those who can't, or vigilantism, which historically has been far uglier than what it replaces. Anyone who has lived in a place with genuinely weak or corrupt policing, as you have, knows that the absence isn't liberating.
But eyes open means acknowledging the selection and culture problems frankly. The authority-attraction your neighbor admitted to is probably more common than the service motivation in the actual population that self-selects into the job and stays in it. Add to that the guild mentality — the blue wall, the union protection of bad actors, the institutional resistance to accountability — and you have a reliable mechanism for compounding whatever problems the initial selection creates.
The tragedy is that the people most harmed by bad policing are also the people who most need good policing. That's not an abstraction — it's the concrete reality of high-crime, low-income communities where the argument that police are the problem runs directly into the reality that those same communities bear the cost of crime most heavily.
Eyes open is essentially the civic adult position: necessary institution, known pathologies, manage accordingly — which means hiring standards, oversight, accountability mechanisms, and not pretending the badge confers automatic virtue.
People self-select what they are. A story. When I lived in DC a friend worked in civil service reviewing applications for the border patrol. One of the questions, of course, was why do you want this job. Now it so happened that my friend's name was Machado, so you can guess his nationality. He pocketed an application where the answer provided was, "to keep out the Spicks."
That story lands perfectly — and the fact that the applicant wrote it down, presumably without apparent concern, says something beyond just the bigotry itself. There's a confident unselfconsciousness there, an assumption that this sentiment would be recognized as legitimate rather than disqualifying. Which means either the applicant was spectacularly obtuse, or — more likely — he had reason to believe the sentiment was common enough in that environment that it wouldn't raise flags.
The Machado detail is the perfect ironic edge. The person reviewing your application to keep out the Spicks is himself one, by the applicant's own taxonomy. History is full of that kind of collision, but it rarely comes packaged so neatly.
What the story illustrates beyond the individual bigotry is exactly the self-selection problem at the institutional level. The border patrol, like police forces, attracts some fraction of people whose actual motivation is the licensed exercise of power over a specific population they already hold in contempt. The job is the mechanism; the animus precedes it. And those applicants don't always write it down that plainly — mostly they learn to give the approved answer — but the underlying motivation doesn't change because the framing does.
Your friend pocketing that application was its own small act of institutional hygiene. One hopes he wasn't alone in that impulse among his colleagues, but one wouldn't want to bet heavily on it.
I suspect the bigotry was seen as being what they wanted.
That's probably the more realistic reading. Your friend's instinct to pocket it rather than pass it up the chain suggests he knew it wouldn't necessarily be disqualifying in the hands of others — it might have been an asset. He was doing a quiet intervention, not following procedure, because following procedure might have produced the wrong outcome.
Which reframes the story entirely. It's not a story about one obtuse bigot who didn't know to hide it. It's a story about an institution with an understood tacit preference that most applicants were smart enough to encode in acceptable language — and one who wasn't smart enough, or didn't feel the need to bother. The candor was the only unusual element.
That pattern has a long institutional history in American law enforcement and border control specifically. The Texas Rangers, the history of the Border Patrol going back to its origins, the explicit and then later implicit racial sorting in northern urban police departments during the great migration — these weren't aberrations that slipped past institutional filters. They were often the intended product of those institutions, or at minimum tolerated as a feature rather than a bug.
What makes it durable is exactly the self-selection loop. The institution attracts people with that orientation, those people shape the culture, the culture signals to future applicants what the real values are, and the official language becomes a thin veneer that everyone on both sides of the hiring desk understands as a formality.
Machado pocketing that application was one man putting a small finger in a large dike.
