Sorry, Cheesesteak, but I agree with Monty that there was a patronizing tone to Long Road’s comment. Right after saying these people would be rejected for any police job, Long Road said they could jobs as security guards. Sort of like telling somebody who flunked out of medical school that they could go to dental school.
And yet it happens on a regular basis.
I’ve known people, both in Australia and here in the US, who took security jobs after being turned down on their police force applications.
I’m not making judgements about them as people, but at the same time i contend that being a police officer—or a good one, anyway—does (or should) require a higher level of skill and qualifications than many security jobs.
Are you seriously telling me that the guy who sits at the entrance to my college’s library checking student IDs, and whose most taxing task is asking students who inappropriately use their cellphones to leave the library, is as qualified to cope with the pressures of law enforcement as a Baltimore City police officer who spends his working life among the city’s drug dealers and addicts?
Leaving aside the issue of these particular New Orleans cops, this is not about trying to make the point that people who work as security guards aren’t as good as people who work as police. It’s simply about saying that different people are suited to different jobs. I worked as a waiter in a variety of establishments, and i knew waiters who did very good work at neighborhood cafes, but who would have had trouble coping with the more refined levels of service required at a five-star hotel. They weren’t lesser people for this; they just had different abilities. And i do believe that some people who woulodn’t (for any one of a number of reasons) make good cops would make perfectly acceptable security guards, especially in the more low-risk and low-stress security jobs.
There’s a huge difference between “not hired in the first place” and “failed in the job after being hired.”
Perhaps, but can you not envision a circumstance in which someone proves unable to properly execute the duties of a police officer, and opts for a security job instead?
And how about the addressing the very real question of whether all security jobs do, in fact, require the same level of training and commitment and willingness to deal with imminent danger as a job in the police force?
mhendo: Despite your jackassery in posing that query, that is clearly not what I was addressing in this thread.
Fine. Go on defending the honor of security guards against imagined slights. No skin off my nose.
There is and always shall be, a difference between the noble public servant and the individual who is hitting the clock. I am sorry gentlement and ladies, you may stand behind your desks and throw stones, but you, in the private sector, will never measure up to a man/woman who will give his life for 8 dollars an hour. Against your common beliefs he/she does not do it for money, but for love of their community. I realize, in the world of cynical natures and angry partisans, we question our public servants. But, believe you me, many of them are not there because it is easy money. In fact they could deal with urine throws, shit kites and blows to the head if they only had the respect of their community.
Ask yourself, would I stand that line… honestly; then ask how much you would want for it. Then, realize, in many cases, those who protect you at night make less than a waitress at a tex-mex restauraunt. No disrespect to the waiter/waitress, but I believe being bludgeoned to death, having someone rape you or dealing with a ratio of 250 inmates to 1 officer exceeds the nasty ‘insert persona here’ that sends their steak back.
Went back and reread this thread, and I still don’t get Dio’s position.
My Dad wasn’t a police officer, a fireman, or holder of any other position that one would think to be vital. He was an engineer for a power company, and I remember my Mom bitching that every time storms would come, he’d leave. We weren’t left in the throes of disaster-plenty of wood to burn, an electric generator that my older brother had been shown how to start (we’re talking early 1960’s-I was still single digit). There was a snowstorm in the northeast where the suburban Philly area was all but impassible for days. PECo sent out an ex-military tracked vehicle they called a weasel to get Dad. He packed a suitcase, shoveled enough to get out the door, climbed inside the thing and we didn’t see him for a week.
Locking up the bad guys and putting out fires is high profile stuff-Pop labored to get the lights back on. Dad wasn’t a State Trooper like my Uncle, and he never dragged a firehose as I have done, but he still understood the importance of doing his job for the good of many, even if it meant personal sacrifice, and I thank him for demonstrating that ethic, one to which Dio is obtuse.