Question the Constable! is a segment the Sunshine Coast RCMP and Coast Reporter features weekly.
Residents can email or Tweet their questions related to the RCMP on the Coast, via email: [email protected] or via Twitter: @COAST_RCMP.
Question: The question this week was submitted by a six-year-old who we’ll call Mathew to keep his identity confidential. Mathew asked: “I would like to know if you ever get scared, and if you do, what you get scared of?”
Answer: Mathew, when we come to your school and talk to your class, and kids think “Hey, I want to be a police officer when I grow up!” it might seem like there couldn’t possibly be anything we could be scared of, because we’re police officers and we’re trained to take on anything however, I assure you that police officers absolutely do get scared.
RCMP officers are some of the best-trained police officers in the world. We spend six months at the RCMP’s training academy learning to be a police officer, and then we spend an entire career learning to be a better police officer. We are taught to handle violent situations, drive with lights and sirens, make split-second decisions, and know a vast array of laws. Yet underneath all of that training we are caring human beings who have real thoughts and emotions — emotions that make us feel truly scared sometimes.
In recent years, numerous sad events have reminded police officers of so many of the reasons we have to be scared.
We might be scared while driving to a 9-1-1 call where an argument was heard before the line went dead, or running into a house where someone is yelling for help.
We might be scared while chasing someone through a dark forest at night, or pulling over a car in an isolated area, not knowing whether someone inside might have a gun. We often have only a limited amount of information, and even less time, to make a serious decision.
Police officers have many reasons to be scared, but perhaps one of the things that scares us most is the possibility that one day we won’t be around to come to your school and visit your class, that we won’t be there to wave to you while you are riding your bike, and that we won’t be there to make sure you have a safe community to grow up in. Hopefully that day never comes, and so we need to trust in our training, trust in our fellow officers, and believe in the people we’re doing it for, people like you Mathew. Thank you for believing in us.
