Superiority Complex

Well this should be fun. Today I’m going to try to describe a phenomena that I think naturally occurs in cops due to factors of the job. The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who is not a cop. He did 3 tours in Afghanistan, and in scales of badass elitesness, he’s towards the top. He asked me “why the fuck do a lot of cops think they’re better than other people?”. This dude is not some cop hater, but has a few cop friends and was frustrated with some recent interactions. I replied “I’ve thought a lot about this; I think the job can make cops get a superiority complex due to two primary environmental factors if they’re not careful. I know I did before I realized it.” I then went on to describe the factors.

I fell into this when I was a rookie, so don’t think I’m trying to sound all above it (do I have a superiority complex about superiority complexes? So meta). I only stumbled upon my own issues with this after some unique career incidents and lots of time to self-reflect. Once I saw this in myself, I realized it was a false belief. This helped make it crumble away, made me a little less cynical, and a little happier while I was on the job. As I roved around my workplace, I started seeing this superiority complex everywhere. Yeah, there were some content crusty old cops who didn’t seem to fall victim to this, and surprisingly few guys on the SWAT team had it (getting shot at occasionally can be humbling), but man this superiority thing seemed to be everywhere else.

Who this post is for:

1. Cops. Dude, when I realized that I was unconsciously operating this way, and figured out how to poke holes in my bullshit, my life got better. I became a better cop, and I was less pissed off all of the time. I’m hoping maybe you can use this to make your life and work better too.
2. People who aren’t on the job, and never were. Look, I get it. Interacting with cops can be frustrating, especially if they seem like dicks. I’m hoping to give you some background here, so you realize cops are just imperfect humans like everyone else, and trying to do a fucked up job in a fucked up world. Maybe cut them a little slack. You being less pissed at them will make you less pissed in general, and that leads to being a more happy person. Compassion leads to empathy. Empathy leads to being chilled out. And being chilled out leads to being Yoda or some shit. I totally realize I’m probably pissing in the wind here. Story of my life.

Lets get back into it. Why the fuck do cops get a superiority complex? Well, you gotta understand the majority of people cops interact with at work fall within two categories (yes, yes. I know, totally false dichotomy, it’s more like a spectrum, blah blah blah. c’mon man, our brains like binary and such imperfect distinctions make this messy world a little easier for us to interpret. Go with this for a minute, will you?)

1. Normal People on the worst day of their life. This is probably you. You’re reading this blog which means you know how to use the internet and enjoy reading. This means you can color between the lines, and therefore the few times in life you’ve ever encountered a cop is probably when they’ve pulled you over for a minor traffic violation. Counter intuitively, the primary function of most cops is not traffic enforcement, it’s responding to 911 calls. We’ve talked about this before. You don’t call 911 to tell the dispatcher you’re having a nice day, and ask if any firefighters, cops, or paramedics would like to come over for some tea to bask in the beautiful simplicity of your everyday life. Fuck no. You call 911 when shit has gone wrong. If you just got robbed, physically assaulted, were t-boned in an intersection, or someone just died, the cops get sent.

This is a bad day for anyone. You spend the majority of your life not being hit by a driver posting on Insta, getting your TV stolen, or brained by a 2×4. So when this happens, you’ll tend to lose your shit a little bit. Totally understandable. Because you are way fucking outside your comfort zone. Sure, you abstractly knew that there was a small likelihood that bad shit could possibly visit your relatively tranquil life. But now it actually happened to you! This is the worst day of your life.

Your brain gets stuck in survival mode, which means you can run or fight better than normal, but your body pays for these temporary improved abilities by giving up stuff like being able to carry on a normal conversation and rationally figure stuff out. To reiterate, unless you’ve been trained to deal with this shit and/or have lots of experience of bad stuff happening, you’re going to seem like an idiot to anyone you talk to for next 20-60 minutes after something super horrible happens to you.

2. People at the low end of the intelligence distribution– Actual Idiots If anyone actually read this blog, I’m assuming this part would trigger some interesting comments. Guess I don’t have to worry about that!

There’s this old story where President Eisenhower was alarmed to hear that half of all Americans are of below average intelligence. If this is true, he probably didn’t fully grasp what average meant, nor did he understand that intelligence generally falls within a normal distribution. You know, that whole bell curve thing:

Image credit

Guess where many of the people cops interact with fall within that curve? Look, I know, intelligence is not a single marker that predicts success, and like all measures IQ is flawed. But lets accept that it’s an OK stand in for showing the range of which people are able to interact and function within a complicated society.

Paramedics, firefighters, and cops will often talk about their “frequent fliers”. These are the people in the left tail of that curve. They may not be bad people. They actually may be nice, wholesome humans. But this world we live in is increasingly complex, and these people have a hard time just remembering to tie their shoes. Again, because you surfed your way to this blog, this means you can read good and figured out how to use them there Internets. So you probably don’t encounter people at the left tail end very often. If you do, it’s brief. But cops have long confounding discussions with these people everyday. This morning I was discussing with my 5 year old the difference between stealing something and getting it as a gift. He grasped the concept quick. I’ve literally had the same discussion with unintentional shoplifters on the job countless times, and they never quite got it.

There you have it, the two general types of people that cops run into whilst working. To sum up; normal people like you, who are super stressed because it’s the worst day of their life and are therefore temporarily functioning well below their norm, and people that are always functioning well below the norm. Sure, cops do occasionally run into intelligent criminals, but I propose that the more intelligent ones don’t get caught as often, and are vastly outweighed by the criminals who’s getaway car ran out of gas right after they robbed the gas station (true story. multiple times).

Unlike much of the population, cops are trained to deal with high stress situations. So when they show up at your doorstep and the guy who just stabbed you takes a swing at them, it’s just another Tuesday, but with more paperwork. Plus they are professionally detached from your worst day, because it’s not their worst day. It’s yours. If it were their worst day, they may not be doing so hot.

What does all this mean, and what does it have to do with some cops having a superiority complex? Lets break it down even further. Most people that cops deal with at work are idiots. You know the people who aren’t behaving like idiots when that cop is at work? Other cops. And the occasional paramedic or firefighter.

Now lets go another level deep. Cops work weird schedules, because it’s a 24/7/365 job that never ends. This means cops are working weird hours, and they’re more likely to have a Wednesday off than a Saturday. Most departments give the worst schedules to the new officers; gotta pay your dues rookie. Not only does this mean many cops are sleep deprived from crazy hours, but when they’re off most normal people aren’t. Probably why a lot of cops end up hitched to healthcare workers and the like. This schedule isn’t healthy, as we’ve discussed before. But it leads to this- the people that cops deal with at work are idiots, and because of their work schedule, they barely ever interact with normal people except when those normal people are acting like idiots too.

So ask yourself this: If most people you interacted with were idiots, and the few people who didn’t act like idiots were your coworkers, what would you think about yourself?

Like I said, I fell into this trap my first few years at work. And then I got into a detective unit where I did two things I hadn’t done before on the job: conduct lengthy follow up interviews with witnesses and victims, and spend hours doing surveillance.

As I talked to these people days after they went through their worst day ever, I noticed they seemed different than when I encountered them right after shit went down. They seemed calmer, rational, and were quite pleasant to talk to. They had time to digest what had happened, and process the whole thing. I remember one specific interview, where the victims of a shooting invited me inside their house. I did the interview, and we had some sweet tea. After the interview I had a relatively low workload, so I stayed for another 20 minutes just talking about life. As I got into my car to leave I thought “huh, those people were actually pretty cool”. A few days later I spent hours in my car doing surveillance, and thought back on the whole thing.

That’s when I realized I had been wrong.

Maybe everyone wasn’t an idiot, and I didn’t have a monopoly on having shit figured out. Maybe I was dealing with a couple different types of tail ends. And maybe, just maybe that meant I didn’t have everything figured out either…

The more I thought about this, the more I realized the benefit of me getting rid of this belief. Like many cops, I was quite cynical. If I’m honest, I still am sometimes. But not as much. You see, a big part of my cynicism was rooted in my lack of faith in the world. After all, if everyone else is an idiot, what hope can there be?

As much of the cynicism evaporated, I started realizing that maybe the world was going to be alright. Everything wasn’t completely fucked. Most people were doing alright, and trying to do their best. It was my job to deal with the few who weren’t. And that was a much better worldview which allowed me to be happier despite all the crazy going on around me.

Believing I had shit figured out was a symptom of my superiority complex. With a more honest assessment, I realized that yeah, I was doing some stuff well. But there were other things not so great. Thus led me down the path to self-improvement, which as I think of it, eventually led me me to financial independence, retiring early, and this whole blog thing.

Finally, this realization made me a better cop. When I thought everyone was an idiot, I tended to be a dick to them. When I started to accept that maybe these people I was interacting with weren’t idiots, and even if they were it didn’t justify me being an asshole to them. Their life was hard enough. Turns out when you treat people right, they can be a lot easier to deal with and maybe help you out. This worked wonders for eliciting better information from victims, witnesses, and even suspects. And made my interactions with all of them a lot less frustrating.

Hopefully all of the above made some sense. Maybe it will help some cops, and maybe it will help those of you that aren’t cops understand their world a little bit.

Or maybe I’m just an idiot.

What do you think? Am I way off base? Am I an idiot, or do I just play one on the internet?