President's Column - 'Only the good die young,' the saying goes
“We have a lot of very fine people in Police whose contribution to their fellow citizens goes way beyond their job description.”
“Only the good die young,” the saying goes. Sitting at the funeral of Jacob Schriek, a long serving sole cop in Riversdale, I reflected on how that phrase could have been written for our colleagues who die in service. Jacob died of apparent heart failure late last month while participating in a biking endurance race.
Jacob’s funeral, as it appears is every police officer’s funeral, was attended by a very large number and range of local citizens as well as most of the district’s police.
What struck me sitting through Jacob’s, and indeed all funerals, is that there is nowhere to hide the true facts of that person’s life.
Sure, there are the inevitable superlatives and a focus on the positives but it’s pretty easy to fill in the gaps if there are any. The unspoken is a powerful word!
And that brings me to my point.
We have a lot of very fine people in Police whose contribution to their fellow citizens goes way beyond their job description.
The reality is that once we pull on that uniform for the first time, those fellow citizens, even our families, look at us in a slightly different way, and have different expectations. Non-constabulary employees experience something of the same as well.
Those expectations are still present at funerals such as Jake’s. Even if it is not an official Police funeral, the large uniformed presence inevitably means the rest of the mourners, and even the family, can be and often are very much subsumed into that Police dimension.
For that reason, a significant aspect of the service and eulogies will be to draw attention to Police and policing.
Invariably, we come out looking pretty good, mostly because the mourners will leave the service reassured that there are people like Jacob, like Derek Wootton, like Don Wilkinson and the numerous others who have died in service, of natural causes or otherwise, out there looking after them.
Those of us still in the job not only walk away reassured, but, truth be known, with a determination to be that much better as police officers and human beings.
That is because we have had the opportunity to sit and look at policing through the eyes of our fellow citizens.
Which brings me back to my original statement. When it comes to the standard of police officer who has their life dissected by eulogy, the old saying might have been written about New Zealand police! Jacob Schriek was a sterling example of a good man and policeman who died young.
