True Motivation

In the wake of a siege by a troubled officer at Earlwood police station, it was yesterday revealed 14 serving or former police have committed suicide in the past seven years. Mr Moroney said police were at risk because they were confronted with a daily barrage of trauma including road carnage, child sexual abuse, murder and the "worst of human behaviour". "I keep saying to my officers it is OK to cry in a stressful situation or at the funeral of a colleague. You can't bottle it up.

Mr Moroney urged his police to ask for help and to ignore the "Australian male ethos of not putting up your hand". The police have called in the Black Dog Institute to run an officer welfare program with Mr Moroney promising other measures to combat work-related mental health problems.

My take on this

The counseling programs and talking about it and getting help are all well and good, I don’t have a problem with that. However I believe we also need to approach this from an additional angle. Let me explain, most cops join the force because they want to make a difference, almost all of them are good people, however they constantly have to deal with the scum of the earth, the rapists, murderers, thieves, pedophiles etc and this would take an emotional toll on any person.

They are after all, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends to someone after they have finished dealing with the scum all day long. How much better would these cops feel at the end of the day if they know they have caught some scumbag and the justice system will put him in jail for a long time, I understand that you can’t just catch someone and throw them into jail in a day, however I believe that at least some of the emotional problems are also due to our justice system.

It has to be demoralizing to a cop to go out there everyday knowing that which ever scumbag he collars and brings before a court will be out the next day or the next week or in a few years and he’ll have to go after the fellow all over again. To expand on this further, many of us would have seen the odd news story of a pedophile being released from one of our jails. Most of the time we see the crim being led to a waiting car, but he’ll have a t-shirt or something to hide his face from the cameras, sometimes it might be a cop that’s holding it over his head and making sure he makes it to the car and before being driven off to a secret location.

Now I wouldn’t know this for sure, but I firmly believe that if that cop were to let the t-shirt or whatever that’s covering the person’s head fall off, he’d be before his superiors taking heat over it in no time. This is the reality we now have and in my opinion it’s just crazy.

I’m not saying that exposing pedophiles is going to help the emotional problems of cops, but we need a culture of justice in our society. Surely a police officer who wakes up everyday knowing that when he goes to work, his job of getting crims off the streets will actually make a difference due to support from the courts, is emotionally healthier than one who knows whatever he does will only make a small difference because the courts won’t support him.

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