Never argue with someone lacking common sense

A person posting under "cmncents1" on the Northwest Herald website wrote the following comment to an article about the candidates' interview held on Monday by the newspaper's editorial board. He (she? it?) was responding to my comment that I am a citizen first, cop second.

"Phillpot (sic), you ARE a citizen first AND second... Because you are not and never were a cop."

You never want to argue with a person who refused to believe facts or is drunk or is having a mental breakdown or who is holding a gun on you.

He is right that I am not a cop. Today I am not a cop. No argument about that. It's a fact. Of course, I have never said that I am a cop today.

Where he is wrong is in his assertion that I never was a cop. As I have stated elsewhere and said in Monday's interview, I was a police officer ("cop") when I was in college.

During my senior year at in college in Iowa, I lived off-campus in an apartment on 1st Street West, at a corner where there was a school walk-light. As I ate breakfast in the mornings, I would watch the kids try to cross after activating the walk signal. Drivers heading for Cedar Rapids would drop off the hill from the downtown area, and the red light seemed to be their signal to accelerate (and not stop).

After pestering the town council for enforcement there (we had a night cop and a day cop, and the violations occurred when no officer was on duty), one night at a town meeting the Mayor (who was also the police chief, judge and head of the education department at the college) opened a drawer, pulled out a badge and tossed it at me. "If you think you can do something about it, go and do it!"

And so I did. Looking back, that poor little town got a whole lot more law enforcement than it deserved. I drove over to Gil Hebard Guns (Knoxville, Ill. (although I remember it as being in Galesburg) and bought a .38 Smith & Wesson, holster, belt, cuffs. Today I don't remember where I came up with a uniform. Later an Iowa State Patrolman and I bought M-1 rifles (I think they were) at the Rock Island Arsenal.

One winter night the county dispatcher called me at home and told me the night officer was in the town's one patrol car and stopped on the road in front of the college. Students were pelting his car with snowballs and had petrified him. I went to the hill overlooking the road, walked through the back door of the dorm and out the front door, where I found about 15 students who were packing snowballs.

Many recognized me and stopped what they were doing. I walked up to one kid who was icing up one snowball and tapped him on the shoulder. "I don't think I'd throw that one, if I were you." He said something impolite and tossed it, striking the windshield of the police car. The next thing he knew, he was face down in the snow and I had the cuffs on him. It turned out he wasn't even a student at the college; he was visiting from the state university 20 miles south.

So, to explain to "cmncents1", yes, I was a cop. I enjoyed it. When I left at the end of my senior year, I suspect that little town was glad to see me go. Some of the students still call me "007".