Suit of Blue

The old man hobbled over to the park bench and sat, leaning his cane against the metal arm rest.   He closed his eyes, sighed, and breathed in.   Children were riding their bikes, skateboards and scooters and even more children were on the swings and the monkey bars in the playground.  He smiled at the sounds of life around the bench where he rested.  Trees full of leaves offered shade from the strength of the early June sun.  Parents sat or stood watching their children and some scolding the little ones for being a little too active.   Music played from the snack bar a hundred feet away from him and folks and their little ones were coming away with a plate of fries, a hot dog or just a big old, double scoop ice cream cone.  He felt the sun on his face, and he leaned his head back, awash in the idyllic day.

His eyes still closed, he daydreamed of the past, his past.   He had been a cop, a police officer but he liked cop better.  It was less formal, more down to earth, but then, who but anyone who had worn the suit of blue, would ever analyze this.  He had retired during the summer of 2020 with twenty-seven years.  Thirty-one years ago.  He would have worked longer but the events of that year were just too much.   The bush fires in Australia, the corona virus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the second wave of the virus, two weeks after the protests, erupting into three million cases in the United States alone and the death toll rose over 300,000.  To call it tumultuous would be an understatement.  

Tensions rose in early January when an American drone strike killed Iranian security and intelligence officer, Major General Qasem Soleimani, followed a couple of days later by Iran pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal.  A Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 was shot down by Iran a few days later and all 176 passengers and crew, 57 of whom were Canadians, died.   The possibility of war was on the minds of many North Americans as this played out.   It fizzled out by the end of 2020 with a change of leadership in the land of the free.  Joe Biden won the US presidential election in November of 2020, but it was March of 2021 before he was inaugurated because the former president, Donald Trump, refused to leave the oval office and relinquish command.  It finally took a Supreme Court order served directly by the Attorney General and the presence of armed troops for Trump to realize the time for his rule had passed.   Trump supporters rose up in angry protests resulting in the killing of hundreds of people, most of them police officers as they were targeted by the protestors.  Targeted because police became the focal point of public hate.

During an arrest in May 2020, a police officer, had knelt on the neck of a black man for almost nine minutes, snuffing out his life while the officer watched with his hands in his pockets.  Horrible.  The old man shook his head.   It was not George Floyd who had changed the world, you could not put that on him.  It was this piece of shit, in uniform that was responsible for the change.   Not entirely, it had been coming for a while, he was the straw that broke the camel’s back.   The job, that everyone knew how to do right except the ones doing it, was becoming obsolete.  No one liked to be arrested or to be detained, so often, you had to struggle, to fight, just to earn your pay cheque.   Arresting a non-compliant person cannot be made to look pretty by any stretch of the Imagination.   Even when justified, it never looked swift and smooth like in the movies, and perception made you the bad guy.  People wanted pretty.

The George Floyd incident brought all the recent deaths of black people at the hands of the police to a head.   People could not take it anymore and they started protests, protests which were supposed to be peaceful, but erupted into violence, with people and police being killed and injured in the name of peace.  There were many who blamed the violence on white supremacists and that might have been true, but it was not all the truth.  The truth was never laid out as very few were charged or found responsible for those crimes.   Hate smoldered in the eyes of protestors as police were tarred as racists, bullies, liars, and all things negative.  Several police officers tried to quell the hatred by kneeling with the protestors in a sign of solidarity and that did sway some in their thinking, but not enough, as ‘defund the police’ surged across the US and other countries.  The media reported police brutality was rampant and reported incidents daily to prove this.  To stamp it out, to get rid of it, defunding racist law enforcement organizations became the only answer and the only logical next step was to disband the police.   ‘We can do it better’, was the slogan on some of the placards the old man had seen while holding the line in front of businesses.

It was shortly after that duty that he put in his retirement papers.   It was July 2020.   Officers who had retired previously told him the day would come when he would know it was time.   It did; but it was not an instantaneous thing that flashed into his head.   He had known it for a long time, yet he hung on until, like the protestors, he could not take it anymore.   He could not take the hatred, the disdain for a profession which was built on mottos like Serve and Protect.   His official date had been October sixth, but he had taken the remainder of the leave he was owed so he finished up on August the eighth.   The protests were still happening in many cities but with less looting and violence.  That may have been due to the protestors anger being quelled, or it might have been due to many of them getting sick with the virus due to lack of social distancing practises.   Either way, he left his gun and badge on his supervisor’s desk, signed his termination papers, and walked out the door.   He was done. 

Shortly after his retirement it started.  Force after force was disbanded in the United States and in Canada until 2030.  By then only a few policing agencies remained yet with vastly reduced operating budgets and limited duties.  Those in power formed Community Response Teams (CRT) and resourced them with people with education in mental health and social, poverty and gender specialists.  Civilianized police organizations, CPO’s, complemented the CRT’s and they were comprised of unarmed, non-uniformed personnel with skills in de-escalation techniques.  Police officers were refused applications unless they underwent a six-month decontamination process which supposedly eliminated all previous police thinking.  Not many opted to go through this and out of the few that did, most failed miserably and either left or were fired.

The new system was welcomed with open arms by all the civil liberties groups and they were included in the civilian oversight of these new agencies.  It was all congenial at first and it seemed even the criminal element was co-operating, or at least holding back to see how things played out.   The leaders, despite their strong dislike of Donald Trump, were unrelenting in their Trump-like support of the CRT’s and the CPO’s and how they were an overwhelming success over the old way of policing.   Many police officers were out of work and moved on to other things, but some did speak out against the new order only to find themselves and their families targeted with hate mail, vandalism, and violence.  Soon they stopped speaking and faded into society.   Now, twenty years later, few even spoke of their former careers, while the leaders of the new world of public order, continued to profess how much better things are.

The old man stirred as a gust of wind brushed past his face.   An aluminum can clunked its way down the concrete sidewalk.   He opened his eyes.  Gone were the images of happy children.  Surrounded by reality he realized he had been dreaming.   The youthful laughter was replaced with silence and the far off swearing of someone, intent of no good.  The charred remains of the once bustling snack bar loomed in front of him, the standing walls choked with graffiti.  The park, once a haven for citizens, now an overgrown, garbage strewn abandoned lot.  He looked for the statue of a police officer and a child that had proudly stood in the center of this wonderful escape and saw only headless figures covered in a mess of paint and garbage.   A large spike had been driven through the heart of what was left of the policeman and below it was written ‘Fuck the cops’ in red paint.   He stared at this former icon of policing for a long time, remembering.   A tear swelled to the edge of his eyelid, then trickled down his cheek.