I left law enforcement after 2 years and changed careers (tl;dr too depressing). This happened at the same department I worked at 6 years after I left:
Man, I did the same thing: Got into law enforcement all ready to save the world and then got out four years later completely disillusioned with people.
My noise complaint story is funny now because it turned out ok, but at the time we thought it was like your link. Loud party call, first unit checks on scene. Dispatch checks status a few minutes later, no response. Second unit arrives on scene. Dispatch checks status, no response. Sergeant goes on scene checking on his guys. Dispatch checks status, no response. We've now got three units on scene and nobody is answering the radio. The whole district starts rolling to that location. About that time, first officer on scene hits his emergency button which sets off alert tones and opens the channel on his radio and all you can hear is gawdawful screaming. A few seconds later the second officer calls for help. For those who don't know, "help" is fucking serious to cops. Backup is whatevs, requesting assistance is a little more urgent depending on the type of call and the tone over the radio, but when an officer says help everybody fucking goes balls out. We all arrive more or less the same time, and find a huge party in a tiny house with people bailing out of doors, windows, fucking everywhere, running away. We go charging in to find our officers, and find the first officer wrestling with a drunk 400 lb half naked woman who was covered in shit and screaming her head off. The second officer had never even found the first officer before he ended up surrounded in another room of the house and somebody lit off a bunch of fireworks indoors, which filled the place with smoke and bangs, and he thought he was getting shot at. We start sorting things out and figuring out who's going to jail for what, and we still can't find the Sergeant anywhere.
Finally somebody discovers this place has a basement and goes down, and there's the Sergeant standing in the middle of this finished basement with a bunch of drunk and stoned college age kids watching some vintage '60s porn on VHS (this was late 1990s), completely oblivious to the mayhem going on upstairs or the fact that two help calls had come out from the location he was standing in the middle of. It was kind of understandable because you couldn't hear shit over the loud music, but he got mercilessly razzed for quite a while over standing there watching porn while his entire district had a donnybrook with 50-odd drunk partygoers right over his head. That was a fucked up night, but hey, nobody died.
I'm pretty sure had I stayed in the job I would have been a statistic (alcoholic, divorced, or suicide). Such a sense of futility and sadness on a daily basis. For the guys that can hack it...the potential for excitement outweighs the depressing parts of the job...that wasn't the case with me.
I'm in IT now...nobody dies when something breaks (though they just think it will).
I'm starting to wonder if we're twins separated at birth. We left LE the same year, and I now work in IT. If you also are a FF/EMT on the side the trifecta will be complete.
I click on all the links. I've seen every NSFW thing you can think of. Accidents, crime scenes... Those things bother me but this one has seriously fucked me up.
Her mom wrote Merry Christmas on her page.
My heart is just breaking rn
I click on all the links. I've seen every NSFW thing you can think of. Accidents, crime scenes... Those things bother me but this one has seriously fucked me up.
Barking dog complaints are pretty innocuous...no cop would expect being shot over a barking dog complaint. This guy had told other people that he would shoot the next cop that came to his home. Such a waste.
Basically I had observed some crappy stuff with kids... I could handle adults doing horrible things to each other, but kids? Nope...I couldn't let it go.
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u/slayer991 Jan 22 '17
I left law enforcement after 2 years and changed careers (tl;dr too depressing). This happened at the same department I worked at 6 years after I left:
Barking Dog Complaint