Another Good Cop in Boston

A commentor on a post below left some obnoxious remarks about police officers.  I wasn't going to bump anything up until I read a paragraph in this morning's Boston Globe story about the Transit officer who risked his life to pull a man from the path of a train.  After recounting the event, the reporter includes this:

[Officer] Vieira, 27, [was] born and raised in Somerville [and has] two years in the job, a 5 1/2-month-old boy at home, and a wife who waits up for him to finish his late-night shift. He spent much of yesterday thinking about how bad things could have been and apologizing to his wife.

Does that sound like an evil high-school drop-out, Steve?  Not to me.  To me, it sounds like a regular cop, doing an exceptional job.

Comments

[Steve]

Considering there were people there to witness this, and had he done nothing would have told the news, complained to his employer, etc, I'm not surprised he did something. I'd also venture to guess that he has on more than one occasion harassed an undeserving person, probably a teenager or a minority, and he may well have said some inappropriate words to a female or two.

Now, I'm not saying cops are always *-holes, in fact I recently encountered a cop who pulled me over for an end of month quota ticket ("you were driving too fast through the intersection, but you weren't speeding... you should take this to court and fight it"), whom after frisking me and seeing I had no weapons or drugs on me was rather polite. Of course, his partner was none too pleasant...

Of course, take all the advantages away from a cop that leads to this behavior, and I'm sure we'd see a lot more incidents like this one and a lot less like the Beverly officer incident. I also think we'd see a lot less cop killings.
Until then, I will never trust a police officer and I will always think of them as the people we entrust with the ability to indiscriminately kill anyone and when they do it wrongly get punished with a mandatory paid vacation.

[Luke]

Wow, it is rare to find someone who hates cops and is unwilling to allow that there are even a few good cops out there. Given how much Steve has managed to piss me off with just a few dumb posts on the internet, I am not surprised that every actual face-to-face encounter he has ever had with a police officer has been negative. I imagine he has a problem with authority, wears it on his sleeve, and has managed to alienate nearly all of the people he has met in life, especially the cops, his engineering supervisors, and his professors in school. I am being mean here, perhaps indulging in that inner bully that cops just can't keep under wraps, but Steve, try to look at this with an unfamiliar objective eye, imagine a third party with a fly-on-the-wall view of your life, and consider: no one really likes you, do they?