A realistic police movie might be pretty damn boring. I'm trying to find the stats but I've read that most officers never fire their weapon during their entire career.
If someone else can find stats that prove or disprove this, please post them.
I have this feeling that police work is like combat. Long periods of boredom punctuated with short periods of sheer terror.
What I learned from years of covering crime and emergency beats for newspapers is that firemen are more likely to be killed or injured while on duty than policemen. That's because firemen are more likely to go into unstable locations where a floor may drop out from under them or a roof or wall fall on them. They also are prone to serious back injuries as a result of falls and heavy lifting. On the other hand, police have one of the highest suicide rates of any occupation. There are general stats out there that support this general observation--probably under different organizations and publications for police and firemen, maybe even under the US Labor Department. If one wants to find them, one probably can.
Your supposition that like military combat or general aviation, policing is subject to long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of shear terror is essentially correct. The average policeman has to write up many more boring incident reports than the average firemen since that duty in the fire department usually falls to the team supervisor.
And yes, I have known policemen who retired after 20-30-year careers and never even had to unholster a gun in an on-duty confrontation, much less fire it other than at the firing range.
But sometimes the damnest things happen. Like an off-duty homicide detective I knew and liked who walked upon a purse-snatching one day outside the office where he had gone to pick up his wife. The detective grabbed the suspect and while they were wrestling around, the suspect managed to get the officer's automatic pistol from the belt holster under his coat. The office grabbed the barrel of the pistol and the two struggled until the suspect managed to pull the trigger and shoot the detective through his side. The most remarkable thing, however, was that the detective was gripping the barrel of that automatic so tightly that the blowback of gas from the fired shell was prevented from pushing the top of the barrel back to eject the spent shell and put a fresh bullet into the chamber. Unable to fire again or to get the pistol from the detective, the culprit broke and ran. He was captured in a day or two. The detective was hospitalized for a few days but returned to duty. But his wife had seen him shot down before her eyes.
Divorce rates are high among both police and firefighters. But I also knew a uniformed police captain who cracked down on the "model" prostitutes working in his district by putting a marked patrol car with two uniformed cops outside those "modeling" offices and taking photos of guys who drove up and got out of their cars. This same captain with such high moral outrage against prostitutes later went to prison for murdering his own wife so he could run off with some other woman. (The "photos" of Johns were just a fake. Pimp running one of the places called the newsroom and happened to get me and complained about the cops ruining his "honest" business. I went out to check it out, and when I got out of the car, these two young cops pulled up behind me and flashed this small cheap camera in my direction. I walked over to them and leaned in the car and asked them what the hell they were doing. Told me the captain told them to come out and take pictures of guys getting out of the cars. Asked if most of the guys left after they snapped them and they said, "Sure." While we're talking I look down at the floorboard on the passenger side where the cop with the camera was sitting as he ejected the flashbulb he'd used on me and put another in the camera. There on the floorboard were dozens of used flashbulbs--but not a single discarded box or wrapper like film comes in. I asked if they even had film in the camera, but all I got were sheepish grins. Don't know if I even wrote a story about that event or not at the time, but I resurrected it as a nice little sidebar about the captain after he was arrested for murder.)
Anyway, getting back to police and their pistols, one of the damnest things I ever covered was the story of this one cop in foot pursuit of some culprit; he could see the runner had a gun in his hand, and so the cop had fired at him several times--even had to reload as I recall--without slowing this jackrabbit at all. So they're chasing along there and the runner is approaching a tall chain-link fence midway across this alley. He hits the fence on the jump and manages to scramble up and over with the policeman in pursuit and just as he's going over the top of the fence, he snaps off his first shot of the evening at the policeman. Now it was during the holiday season and one of the presents the officer got from his wife at Christmas was a lightweight bulletproof vest--the kind that you put over your head like a sandwich board hanging down in front and back and then it ties or clips at a couple of places on each side to enclose the upper body--except, that is, a thin opening on each side from armpit to waist in the area where the vest is fastened.
Well, here's this runner flipping over a tall fence, firing one shot on the fly, and hitting the pavement below and continuing running as fast as he can. And his one hail-Mary shot under impossible circumstances hits this poor cop who has fired several times at the culprit without even nicking him. What's more, instead of hitting the policeman straight on in the front of his body as one would expect with him running directly at the culprit, somehow the officer must have twisted some way because the bullet catches him smack against the side through this thin little opening between the front and back of the vest. Fortunately the kid lived, but I don't recall if they ever caught the shooter.
A deputy sheriff at a crime scene I once ran was not so lucky. He was a big ol' corn-fed boy carrying a few extra pounds and he was shot with a small caliber bullet like maybe a .22 that caught him from the side right in the fleshy part of his upper chest, traveling though that meaty area between his ribs and his nipple, Because of his body fat and the slower speed of the small caliber bullet, the shell traced a kind of wobbling path through his flesh, turning in at one point to bounce off his breast bone, which then caused the bullet to ricochet out toward the front of the chest in such a way that it could have exited his body, leaving just a painful flesh wound. As I recall, the bullet actually exited his chest, but then the damn thing hit the back of the badge pinned on that side and the impact turned it back into his body, hitting him in the heart and killing him.
That's the problem with being a policeman--you never know what may take you out. Like the one uniform officer driving down the freeway late at night with a young woman sitting in the frontseat of his patrol car when it slams into the back of an disabled 18-wheeler sitting by the side of the road with all of the warning signals and flares out. Killed them both. The officer was married, and the department said the young woman was sick and he was giving her a ride home, and they buried him with all honors. Story around the station however was that the woman was his girlfriend, a stripper in one of the more notorious Houston clubs, and she was performing oral sex on him when he plowed into the rear of that parked truck.
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seriously
