There are plenty of people, myself included, who had the exact opposite of your experience. I should have followed my grandfather’s advice and pitched a stink with IG and Congress, but I was a young enlisted guy terrified of ruining a career (which happened anyway) and was drilled with Khaki-is-God and believed it. In fact, I would say the military is a whole lot better at eating its young than it is in caring for them. This could vary between branches obviously, I was Navy.
For most locally employed LEO’s the worst that can happen is they would be fired from their jobs for not reporting to work over a extended period of time.
Now weigh that against the LEO going to work during a total nation wide SHTF event and having his entire family injured or murdered because of his absence.
Which penally do you think the LEO can live with for the rest of his life after selecting one of the two options?
Mine already know that I’ll report in so long as my own property is secure: riots down in Long Beach and I live in Pasadena? I’m showing up, riots in my town or the next town over (or even between me and the armory) I’m sitting put at home, armed, until my unit rolls up and picks me up.
Part of my reasoning was, I have guns and ammo, I don’t want to leave it unattended for bad guys to come in and steal and then use on innocent bystanders or myself and other responders.
I do, well, a decent one anyways, but at the same time, I’m not going to risk myself by fighting through hostile area to link up with my unit, who probably wouldn’t have any ammo, risk my personal stuff, everything I own, to be pillaged when I can sit tight and extremely well armed, keep a small area secure and wait until the Cav (quite literally) comes by and secures the area as a whole.
All in all though, can’t really say one way or another as each possible scenario is different, to many factors come in to play to say for certain what path will be taken.
Once again, someone should stop and define what this nebulous, fantastical term “SHTF” is. By itself, it is fairly useless. So much, that it should probably be stricken. Use of “SHTF”, “TEOTWAWKI”, and the like take what could be useful, interesting discussions and flush them before they start.
To consider the issue at hand, there really isn’t a lot to wonder about here. Simply look at the cases of natural disasters (regional or localized) that produced evacuations, displacements, diversions of service, or other calamities that caused public safety to consider potential conflicts of family and duty. The trend is that the overwhelming majority of public safety professionals act professionally.
However, that isn’t as much fun as putting on the tinfoil hat and railing about who will carry the most water, and adding noise to boost post counts.
If this is about post-apocalyptic, zombie, Mad Max type scenarios, lock the thread and spare us all.
former combat engineer and hopeful future local PD opinion.
if its a serious crisis, say a bad epidemic or fallout from a dirty suitcase nuke.
i bet about 50% of the local pd will be going home to be with the family. probably all the detectives, patrolman and operators. higher ups will lead by example and stay on for days straight
but its highly unlikely the MIL will have a size-able number of deserters.
2 reasons.
one is the simple fact that if its that bad (SHTF and is raining down) kind of bad, they will be to far away to make it home.
and two is if its that bad, the first deserters will be made examples of so that the whole unit dosent go awol.
Soldiers are conditioned to function under adverse conditions with their units and continue indefinitely. It is a major goal of military training, depending of course on MOS. Cops don’t have that sort of discipline (as a group) though individuals may. Also Soldiers families are all over the country and many won’t have family in the affected area to worry about.
The real question is, why do some of you have families that can’t handle a crisis in your absence? There should be a contingency in case you are killed or otherwise unavailable.
Would you seriously leave a wife and child in a hot zone to fend for themselves? Perhaps you didn’t think that through all the way. If the effected area doesn’t include where my family is, I’ll report ASAP. If it does, I’ll report when my family is secure. If you expect me to expose my family to unnecessary risk because you were unprepared to secure your own, that’s your problem, not mine.
This is why I seconded the chain of command sentiment earlier. Some have a chain of command that is very understanding and would be loathe to enforce any sort of penalty on someone watching their family’s 6. Others, not so much.
Since I am no longer bound by a formal chain of command, I will default to my family’s safety and well-being every single time. I have little doubt that everyone else around me in my current AO would do exactly the same thing - including LEO’s.
Me and mine are secure. More importantly there is no single person who is indispensable.
The question is what can you do, or what haven’t you done, to make your family able to overcome the situation if you are injured, killed or otherwise unable to attend to them.
