Are Police Unhappy?

Mark Brown asks the question:

• Despite what you might have heard from all those mayoral candidates during the past several months, not to mention from most any police officer with whom you might have spoken in the last year, Mayor Daley insisted Wednesday that morale is good in the Chicago Police Department.

  That’s a straight line if I ever heard one, and while I find it both amusing and interesting, my punch line might be different than what a police officer would offer.

  My first thought: Is morale ever good in the Chicago Police Department? Or put another way, are police officers as a group ever happy?

You'd hardly know it from reading a lot of our comment sections, but we suppose police officers aren't overly unhappy. Is there bitterness? Sure. Is there grumbling? No more so than in years past. But is it warranted? A lot of times, yes.

Police work is a thankless job. Everyone is happy when the fire department shows up. No one is happy when the police do though. It's the nature of the job. We see society at its worst, day in and day out. And when we do our job, stopping cars, writing tickets, making people obey the law and listen to rules (laws and rules passed by a duly elected legislative body by the way), we're the assholes. And don't even get us started on the political shenanigans we've seen posted for the past six years or the biased reporting that contributes to the public perception that we're a group of out-of-control drunken frat boys committing murder and such with impunity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It isn't all sunshine and roses out here. The economy continues to sputter, the Daley machine still runs shit, political animals get richer of the taxpayers backs while we have to wait three years for a contract, the chances for advancement are rapidly approaching zero, and we're getting painted as greedy when we expect the city and state to live up to their pension promises.

We still like what we do and the few "thank yous" we do get are stories we tell the family about at the dinner table. Happiness is relative we suppose. Brown concludes:

• It’s not like there’s a tracking poll to monitor the relative happiness or unhappiness of Chicago police at any given moment, although Rahm Emanuel might want to get right on that.

  Perhaps we could convince the folks at Second City Cop to start a Morale-O-Meter to let us know when morale is up and when it is down, because from the outside, it’s only degrees of down.

  Still, I wouldn’t argue the point it might be a little better today than it was two days ago. I just don’t expect it to last.

We'll just have to wait and see how Rahm treats the Department and whether or not the media follows his lead.