It might be hard to determine why many men and women decide to become police officers. For some it is because they have a real sense of civic duty and want to do all that they can to keep our streets safe and crime free. For others it has been discovered that they might choose line of work because they like the power that it might give them over others. Just as the old saying goes, there are good cops and bad cops.



While there are so many good cops that love their jobs for the reasons they should, it is the bad ones that can give being a police officer a bad wrap sometimes. While the crooks and criminals are supposed to be afraid of police officers, the average law abiding citizens are not, but in this day and time that is not always the way it is.

The one thing that all police officers do is place their lives in jeopardy on a daily basis. They never know when they respond to a call whether it will be alright or if it will be the last response they make. They can find themselves in the line of fire at almost any time. Of course, they have guns too and sometimes a police officer will shoot when he should not. Many people think that a police officer should not have reacted by shooting someone first only to find out later that the person was actually unarmed. It would be a bad position to be in.

While it is always a tragic event when someone is killed, either a supposed criminal or a police officer, it is the result sometimes of having law enforcement. People are human and they make mistakes or bad judgment calls on both sides of the law. We are lucky in the sense that we do for the most part have good law enforcement in our country, but there are more and more corrupt sheriffs being found out all the time lately.

Maybe to avoid having the bad cops on our forces at all there should be more rigorous moral and psychological testing involved before someone is allowed to become a cop. This would be for their protection as well as ours. We do not want policemen on the force that are so macho and gung ho that they would take advantage of the power given them. We need police officers who want the job for the right reasons and those are the only ones who should have the jobs.