Editor’s Note: This week’s essay comes from PoliceOne Member Keith Bettinger. In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. If you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members, simply send us an e-mail with your story.
By Keith Bettinger
Police1 Member
I guess it all goes back to the time when as a young police cadet assigned to parking enforcement I had the “privilege” of meeting a crabby old lady. As I approached her car to mark her tire in a two hour parking area, she ordered me not to give her a ticket. Just what everyone in law enforcement wants to hear, another order from the person who pays your entire salary.
When she came out from having her multiple shades of grey hair done I was sitting on my Harley Servi-Car, just waiting for the two hours to tick away. After all, according to her, she paid my entire salary and according to me, she was now entitled to my complete attention. She walked to her car, which by the way still didn’t have a parking ticket on the windshield because she had only used up one hour and fifty-eight minutes of her allotted time.
She looked at me and said in her most charming voice, “You bastard!”
Having managed to somehow pass high school English class (much to the surprise of my fellow classmates and myself) I wanted a clarification of what she said. I looked at her and politely asked, “Are you making disparaging remarks as to my ancestral background and as to the legality of the relationship my mother shares with her mate.”
The lady didn’t have much more to say.
Years later, I surprised even more of my classmates and especially myself when I started writing for publications. I wrote a story titled A GIFT FROM THE HEART. It was fiction. It was about a K-9 cop and his police Dog: Colonel Klink. To make a long story short, Klink dies and the community buys the cop a new dog and with a group decision they name the dog Schultz; another character from HOGAN’S HEROES.
A couple weeks after publication of the story, I received a phone call from the magazine editor. She told me she had received a phone call from a female K-9 officer who wanted to speak to me regarding my story.
I took the contact number and called the officer up and in an excited voice she proceeded to tell me how much she liked the story. She informed me her husband was also a police officer and her father-in-law was a police chief. Her mother-in-law was the civilian in charge of supporting two houses full of cops and maintaining a level of sanity for one and all. This nice officer went on to tell me that everyone was at her home one evening and after they read my story everyone cried. To cement the bonding more, her K-9 was named Schulz. She saw a bond between her and the officer in my story developing as if it was Karma. She told me that when she received her next K-9 she was going to name it Klink and she wanted to personally talk to the officer I wrote about. The bond between them would be Kismet and Kibble.
I told her how honored I was that she enjoyed my story and I wished I could introduce her to the K-9 officer and his dog, but there was a problem — they didn’t exist, the story was fiction, I made it up.
The next words out of her mouth were, “You bastard! You had all of us in tears and now you tell me you made it up! You bastard!”
I laughed as I apologized and realized being a bastard really isn’t so bad.
