Literary

  Here are some of our favorite gems from COPS…

ON THE ORIGIN OF MUSTACHES, page 133

“Every now and then in the decoy section, you want a woman victim, so we have to dress up one of the guys. He is drafted to be the woman. The guys outsmarted me at first. They started growing mustaches. Before long, they all had one, so I had to draw the line. Somebody has to cut their mustache off.”

ON PUSSIES, page 19

“That’s what makes me crazy about the peace demonstrations that I see with ‘Ban This and Ban That Because We’re All Brothers,’ and all that stuff. Jesus, go down ten blocks from here and you won’t find your brother down there.”

ON PUSSY, page 20

“I don’t think I locked up a guy the first year on the force without fucking his wife, girlfriend, or mother.”

ON BODYBAGS, page 37

“… It’s either going to be me or you or somebody else who has to do this thing. So I go up and I do it and I bring them down and I put them in the van.”

ON LAUGHS, page 61

“We spun around and got behind them in a high-speed chase down a big old twisty, winding country road. No street lights, no nothing. We finally ran them to the ground. They pulled over and stopped. It was a 14-year-old and a 13-year-old-kid… they were armed with a .22 pistol that they’d shot at the guy they stole the car from.

We jerked them out of the car and frisked them down… I flipped open the back door and was getting ready to throw them in and this kid—a 13-year-old—turned around, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘What about my rights?’

… Anyway you look at it, there was a lot of adrenaline flowing. John and I sat there and looked at each other. Then we just busted out laughing. ‘What about my rights?’”

ON LATE CONFESSIONS, page 118

“You can’t even confess to me now. Unless a lawyer comes and agrees. And then if the lawyer agrees, some judge is going to say that the lawyer wasn’t competent and throw out the case.”

ON LOVING THE BAD GUYS, page 151

“The woman from across the street who called us in the first place was quoted in the newspapers talking about what a good guy this fellow was. One of our investigators asked her, ‘Ma’am, did you look at your car out there? There’s a bullet hole in the fender. Do you recall where your little girl was, on her tricycle, when this whole thing started?’”

ON BEING JADED, page 297

“Whatever it is that drives people to religion is what you experience. And yet you’re in a position where you can’t accept religion, because you can’t function that way. The job runs against every good impulse you ever had.”

COPS: Their Lives in Their Own Words

Mark Baker

We’re probably giving the game away a bit (or totally) here, but without this book, this issue of Vice wouldn’t have been done. I mean, Jesus, look at the cover there. Now look at our cover. Snapperdoodle!

This gold mine of amazing stories was published in 1985. That was just a little before our editor’s step-grandfather, who was a cop in the blighted shithole of Camden, New Jersey, gave him this book to read, muttering as he handed it over, “This is what it’s really like.”

And holy shit, is it ever. COPS is a compilation of policemen and women telling their stories in their own words. Completely unmitigated. It is like having cop after cop after cop sit you down at their favorite neighborhood bar and tell you their funniest, saddest, and craziest story. COPS is an essential document of 20th-century Americana, and that’s why we decided to rip it off.

(You can usually find used copies of COPS on Amazon for like two bucks. Seriously, buy it. Buy a few and give them out as gifts to your friends who like things that are amazing, smart, and funny. Also, go ahead and buy Mark Baker’s equally essential NAM, in which he gives the COPS treatment to a real oopsie of a war.)

VICE STAFF