When you think of becoming a policeman, you mostly think about maintaining law and order. Basically, kicking bad guys’ asses.
People get motivation from all sorts of sources. Me, I got the itch from my father’s old cowboy movies. I couldn’t get enough of the Western sheriffs facing off with bad guys at high noon. Probably why I still love movies so much.
The other day I was called to our local school to give a speech on Career Day. I thought exactly what you’re thinking. Why would they choose me of all people to encourage young minds? My oration skills are next to none, and I’m a cop in Jiji Ndogo, for God’s sake. It doesn’t get any lower in police postings than Jiji Ndogo.
I won’t bore you with the bulk of how the talk went. Let’s just say it wasn’t what the teachers had expected, which is a polite way of saying it was disastrous.
I remember exactly when it all went sideways. I decided to ask the pupils why they wanted to be cops. First of all, none of them wanted to be a cop. So I asked if they were to be cops, why would they want to do it. There were some of the expected answers — to arrest bad guys, to carry a gun, to wear the sharp uniform and so on.
One of the boys shot his hand up. I picked him.
“To shoot the bloody protesters,” he said. “That’s what my father said he’d do if he was a freaking cop.”
“Language, Mathew,” his teacher admonished him, then turned to me. “He has a very active imagination.”
“More like a sharp memory,” I said. “He’s only reporting what he heard.”
The teacher decided that we should hastily move on from Mathew and his active vocabulary.
One of his classmates was a bright-eyed girl who suddenly seemed very eager to participate.
“What’s your name, little girl?” I said.
“My name is Naomi and I am not a little girl,” she said. “I am seven years old.”
“Okay, Naomi, why would you want to be a policewoman?”
Confidently as can be she shouted, “For the money.”
“You mean the salary?” I smiled the same smile I give anyone who asks how much cops get paid. “For that, you might want to go into politics. We don’t get paid a lot. We do it for the—”
She cut me short. “That’s not true. You get paid a lot of money by drivers on the roads. I saw it in shorts. They said the police get lots of tufinje.”
I turned to the teacher. “Shorts?”
“Short form videos,” she said. “We try to encourage them away from them but we’re losing the battle. I’m sorry about that.”
What then followed was a flurry of mostly unrelated questions and requests from just about every single child to hold my gun. Apart from one particular kid who sat in back totally uninterested.
I approached him and said, “Don’t you want to touch my gun?”
In a very calm voice, he said, “I touched my brother’s gun and he went to prison.”
Then I recognised the boy. His brother had been arrested after their father reported he had a weapon in the house. Only then did I realise that we have a new breed of crime in this country, and it was social media and the way it has infiltrated our lives.
We no longer filter what we say and neither do we pay attention to what our kids see online. Maybe I cannot inspire a bunch of kids to be cops, but I sure know what to do once I am a parent.
