When I was a senior in high school, one of my bullshit “CWP” classes1 had a visit from a member of our local law enforcement to talk to us about the evils of underage drinking. All the usual “scare tactics” were employed to convince us not to drink (until we reached that magical age when it’s suddenly OK, anyway), essentially wasting an entire class period.
The ending of the officer’s speech caught my attention, however. He actually told us to call him if we did decide to enjoy some underage consumption of hooch. He told us that he’d come act as taxi—with no questions asked, even—so that we wouldn’t kill ourselves and others in the process of driving home, yet not be restricted from having a good time.
I raised my hand and cleared my throat, indicating that I had an important question, while he was in the middle of his next sentence. Because none of the other bored-to-death students had shown even an ounce of interest in the hour preceding my interruption, our handsome police officer seemed to take pleasure in stopping to hear what I had to say. He shouldn’t have done that.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Would you say that ‘upholding the law’ would be a fair description of what it is—as a police officer, I mean—that you do? It seems to me that you’ve just spent an hour of our time—of ‘protect and serve’ time, as a matter of fact —telling us how important it is that we not drink because the law says not to, yet you’ve just told us that you’ll go ahead and not enforce said law if ever we are in a situation that would require you to. Since it doesn’t seem as if that law is very important to you, why would you expect it to be to us??”
“You’re missing the point here—”
“No, you’re missing the point. The point being that you have the power—no, the duty—to ‘protect and serve’ us, yet you’re standing here telling us that you’ll just go ahead and not do your job because you don’t feel like it.”
“Actually, as a Law Enforcement Officer,” he said, the capital letters audible, “I’m to use my discretion to determine what laws I need to enforce. That’s my job, and I assure you, I am doing it.”
“I see,” I said. “You know, I never really understood why people hold such negative opinions of cops until this very moment. It really is just one big power trip, isn’t it? You desperately want to seem cool, so you’re either offering to ‘look the other way’, or you’re simply lying to us outright to gain our trust. Either way, it’s just great. This whole hour has been a huge freakin’ waste of time. I’ve never had a drop of alcohol in my life, but I darn well want to go get drunk so I can say ‘Officer Joe’ said it was OK. Thanks for the enlightenment.”
“Officer Joe” was speechless, the rest of my classmates had rejoined the land of the living, and I was elated at having proven my point so effectively, besting a cop in the process. I was what you would call “a quiet kid,” one who rarely spoke, let alone would confront a cop, so it was quite a surprise.
I’m pretty sure that none of my classmates ever called “Officer Joe” for a ride, and I would be surprised if he ever offered the service again.
1:
CWP, or Current World Problems, classes seemed to only serve as an excuse to consider football coaches “full-time teachers.”
I don’t know, Jer. I get where you were coming from here, BUT now that I’m a parent, no way would I give that cop a hard time. Because now I have to deal with the idiots who want to teach our children abstinence from sex as the ONLY method of birth control and protection from STDs. And yes, while abstinence may be the only fool-proof method of protection, how realistic is it? I fully support sex-ed classes teaching about condoms, etc. And the same argument could be made about illegality, because of the age of consent (which varies from state to state).
So I guess I don’t have a problem with the "You should really NOT do this, BUT if you do, here’s a way to keep yourself a little safer." I’d be pretty darn grateful to that cop that drove my kid home to keep said kid from driving drunk—the whole "no questions asked" bit just serves to increase the liklihood of someone taking him up on the service. Now, if that kid drives home and wipes out a pedestrian on the way home…there ain’t gonna be any "discretion" on the part of the responding officer as to what happens.
This is me playing devil’s advocate.