We Weren't Soldiers

Not so long ago I worked as a security guard at a shopping center in my home town--something normal people would call a 'mall cop.'

I've had several very different jobs over the course of my life. I've worked as a valet, a dry cleaner, a landscaper, a store stocker, a waiter, for one horrible day I even worked with an extremely shady group of men and their two Mexican employees (neither of whom spoke English) planting grass in a river along the Louisiana-Texas border. I ended that job faster than any other job I've ever had.

The mall cop job was probably my least favorite job, though, even if it wasn't as objectively horrible as the grass planting one. People seem to be pre-built with a hatred of mall cops. I know I was. I grew up going to the same mall I would later work security at and more than once I had seen a mall cop in his crisp white shirt and silly hat and scoffed or laughed at his silly self importance without a second thought. When I, a few years later, found myself in that same uniform being laughed at by the teenagers I had so recently been part of, I couldn't help but reflect on the reasons for why I and so many others despised the mall cops of the world.

I realized with some surprise that I had no reason to dislike or mock mall security officers. I'd never had any sort of trouble with them what so ever (not that I was a particularly rebellious or naughty kid, especially at the mall--the worst thing I ever did there was get a blowjob in the parking lot once,) never even known anyone who'd had problems with the mall cops at my mall. I just didn't like them. I just laughed at them.

So why? I asked myself this question a lot as I strode around in my worn black shoes and thick leather belt (people saw the belt and thought I had a gun, even when I plainly didn't. I think it was the shiny black leather that did it, it evoked memories of police so strongly that the people's brains provided a weapon where there was none) and ignored the occasional scowl or giggle during the weekends.

Jesus Christ, the weekends. We'll talk about those later.

After a few months of mall coppery I realized that I had an idea of what a mall cop was in my head--formed from a few skit comedy shows and vague understanding of a security officer's powers, responsibilities  and the  laughably serious uniform they wore.

The figure I had half-heartedly constructed in my mind was a man who craved power and authority but lacked the drive, wherewithal, or possibly the courage to join either the armed forces or a police force. Here was a person who thought himself important, the king of his own little castle, but was really just a paper tiger. He had authority, but was pathetically unaware of how meager and unimportant his authority was. Doubtless this man heard the mocking japes of the teenaged customers of the mall and totally missed the sarcasm and cruelty of them--hearing only their words without understanding their meaning because he was so wrapped up in his own importance.

I feel here I should mention I never actually thought that much about mall cops before becoming one, all these complicated impressions and colorful metaphors were realized later either while walking around or--God forbid--crusing around on the mall's Segway.

I think many people have similar ideas about what mall cops are, whether or not they actually put them into words like that. I think the vast majority of people see mall cops as sad, pathetic little wannabes who are hardly worth their time.

Lately I've been having some serious employment issues and they have caused me to reflect on past jobs I've had. The one I spend the most time thinking about is my time spent as a mall cop. I'll say up front that I absolutely hated the job. Every time I had to go to work I'd be filled with very real dread and loathing. Just putting on the uniform made me angry. It was undoubtedly one of the worst jobs I've had in my life--but upon reflection I'm glad that I did it and I'd like to clear a few things up for my fellow mall coppers, on the off chance that you, Gentle Reader, even find yourself wanting to scoff and laugh at them.

The first thing to be said about our typical security officer is that he's a man, probably somewhere north of 30 years old. I was 23 when I started mall coppery and was unusually young. Only one officer in the two years I worked there was younger than me, and she was a woman which was pretty unusual itself.

In terms of race, the officers at my mall were pretty evenly split between white and black, with 2-3 Hispanic officers thrown into the mix as well.

During my entire career as a mall security officer I worked with only 4 female officers, half of them were my superiors, however.

Your average mall cop is not a man who couldn't make it in the army of the sheriff's office or whatever--in fact he's probably either an ex-cop, a veteran, or a currently serving member of the armed forces. My immediate supervisor when I started working at the mall was a sergeant in the army, had served two tours of duty in Iraq and spent the another year there while I was still working. I eventually took his place as supervisor until he returned home for the third time to see his newborn baby. Three marines, a sailor, and a national guardsman rounded out the rest of the men in the office when I started working there--about a year later we were joined by another marine and two soldiers from the Army. There were three retired policemen on our team as well, including the woman who would eventually take over as our Director once the company that we worked for sold our contract to another, competing company. When I first started I was asked many times what branch I served in and my answer, that I was not and had never been in the military or police force and was attending college to get an English degree (as opposed to Criminal Justice or something similar,) was met with confused chuckles and nods.

So what about the mall cop's sense of self importance? Do they really picture themselves as the final authority and the king of the mall?

Of course not, don't be stupid. The phrase I heard most as a mall cop besides, "Fucking kids." was "Call the cops." I personally loved calling the cops for whatever problems were besetting us in the mall, calling the cops meant that we didn't have to deal with the problem anymore, that we just had to hold it together long enough for the real cops to show up and deal with the problem. None (okay, all but one) of my fellow officers would readily admit that we were little more than ornaments with legs, patrolling the mall to save face and occasionally jump a car with a dead battery, and little else.

And this brings us to those hats I was mentioning earlier, and the Segway. The uniforms are not something that we chose to wear. Indeed, many times we begged to be allowed to wear less idiotic clothing. Some officers, myself included, would fight over riding our singular patrol bicycle around the parking lot on the weekends even thought it was a horrifically grueling way to spend eight hours simply because it meant we could wear a polo shirt and cargo pants with a baseball cap. The uniforms were there so that people would see us and notice us. Even if it meant they were laughing at us, it meant they weren't stealing things, starting fights, or trying to fuck in the bathrooms. Our silly clothes did half the job for us.

The average mall cop was a decently nice guy, most of them probably voted republican and liked to watch football, but they were all nice guys. And I'll be honest, a few of them were legitimately brave.

I'm not trying to exaggerate the dangers of being a mall security officer--90% of the time our job involved walking around the mall and scanning cleverly hidden bar codes with a PDA was had to carry around to prove that we were actually completing patrols and not just sitting in the office all day. And some of the officers were not something you'd call brave at all--I knew one who was to afraid to tell teenagers to pull their pants up if they were black--or smart.

Some were, though, and sometimes the job was more than scanning bar codes.

Once a young man stole a woman's purse from the food court and ran outside of the mall. Two officers chased him all the way across the parking lot and tackled him on the sidewalk to retrieve her purse. The young man had a knife on him. He didn't use it, but he could have.

I feel I should mention that the mall I worked at was not in the safest neighborhood. Lake Charles is hardly a large or dangerous city, but it's also not Plano and violence does occur.

The second week I was working at the mall--before I even had a uniform and was going to work wearing a button up shirt and slacks--a man came into the parking lot of the mall and robbed two other men at gunpoint. He then walked into the mall and started strolling around. The two victims of the robbery reported it to us and two mall cops followed the suspect and his two friends through the mall--knowing he was armed and at least somewhat violent--until police officers came and arrested him.

Every weekend at the mall, specifically Saturday nights, was a war, a battlefield with us--about 10 mall cops--against a hundred or more local teenagers. This wasn't a war of pranks, they kids weren't spraying silly string on each other. I was involved in over ten violent fights during my time at the mall--and countless scuffles. I categorize the "violent" fights as ones where people wound up with bodily fluids somewhere other than their bodies. I had to hand cuff two girls who were throwing chairs from a nail salon at one another--I responded to a call of "10-10" (a physical confrontation in progress) outside of a mall entrance only to find the broken and gasping body of a 27 year old man who had been savagely beaten by five over young men for reasons I'll never know. I helped this guy up and sat with him--at his request--until the ambulance and police arrived. He asked me to stay with him because he was afraid the people who had done this to him would return. I'm still glad that they didn't.

Two people were stabbed when I worked at the mall, thankfully I was not working for either. One of the stabbings resulted in an officer being fired, since he didn't stop the girls who did the stabbed from returning to the property once we'd removed her.

And one little girl was shot dead.

She was fourteen years old and visiting the mall on a Saturday night, a battleground night. She shouldn't have been there, of course, it was well past eleven when it happened. She should have been at home--either her's or a friends. The unfortunate reality of my old mall, though, was that many of the children we struggled against were there because they had nowhere else to go. They were the poor and ignorant, they expressed their feelings through violence because it was all they knew. We tried to stop the symptoms their wretched home lives, but we were just mall cops.

Anyway, the girl. She was with a large group of teenagers who had been causing trouble in the mall for several hours. Eventually we told them to leave and had to physically corral them out of the parking lot and off property with lots of screaming and shouting and people throwing things at us.

Once they'd been moved off of the property it was my turn to switch positions and work dispatch, sitting in a nice comfy office chair and controlling the cameras around the mall, safe from the chaos of the movie theater parking lot at midnight.

I had just sat down when the mall manager claimed she had hear gunshots past the fence that surrounded the mall. I trained cameras back there and saw the little girl sprawled in the grass with her friends surrounding her. Three of our officers ran back there to help her--something I'm not sure I could do--until the police arrived.

It was too late, of course. The little girl had been shot in the head. She was brought to a local hospital and died before one o'clock that night. Men in a car had driven past the group she was with and fired at one of the other men. They had missed and hit her instead.

She was fourteen.

They told me her name--but I have forgotten it.

The police later caught the men who killed her, although I don't know whether or not they were punished for it.

Often times I wonder what would have happened if we hadn't chased the group the girl had been part of off the property. Would she still be alive? Would the assailants have seen their target surrounded not just by little girls but by us in our insane hats and crisp white shirts and decided they didn't want to attempt to murder anyone? Or would they have laughed at the idea of mall cops protecting anyone and fired anyway, would they have hit me or one of my fellow officers instead?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions but they bother me. They bother me a lot.

A good ending to the story of my time as a mall cop would be to say that after the little girl died I couldn't take it any more and quit, but that wouldn't be true. I kept working at the mall for at least another eight months before I quit--and that was because I'd gotten a nice big grant to go to school and felt I could finally focus my efforts on college without working a full time job.

When I left the mall I felt happy, incredibly happy to be free of that place and it's endless Saturday nights. But sometimes I miss the people, the other officers, the men and few women I'd go to work with every day--some of them whom I fought and bled next to. I was as unlike those people as could be, a young, liberal college student who'd never imagined joining the military. If I'd met them on the street I'd have called them hicks or stupid conservatives or assholes.

But they were none of those things to me. They were, like me, mall security officers.

We were mall cops.

And we did what we had to do.