Sergeant Joe Friday: Hillier, your personal history card lists a whole string of commendations from those angry citizens you have to serve. But if it didn't list one, so what? You pick up your check, don't you? You get paid to be a policeman, not to be loved.
Ed Hillier: You don't buy that 100%, do you, Sergeant?
Sergeant Joe Friday: No. I'd like a kind word now and again. When they don't come, I write it off as part of the job. When you first put that uniform on, nobody ever told you you'd be running in a popularity contest, now did they?
Ed Hillier: No sir, they didn't.
Sergeant Joe Friday: Your PRR puts you in the top run percent of the department. Now to me, that means a trained, capable, disciplined police officer, not a back alley brawler. You were riding with a young partner. What kind of example do you think you set for him? And worse, you committed one of the cardinal sins in our business - you struck a man. And I'll use your words, a man you're hired to protect and to serve. Now one last thing, Hillier, and maybe this is the most pregnant issue of all. These are tenuous times we live in. The young people in this country are groping, searching for a direction, and they're having trouble finding it. The older people in our society are not much better off. They seem to have lost or misplaced one of our great American commodities, a true sense of the real values. The values that built this country into the great one that it is. I tell you, I never thought I'd live to see the day that it'd become stylish to shout down constituted law and justice, to scream police brutality at almost every opportunity. There's the key to this, Hillier. When you lost control this morning at 2:00 a.m. out there on Garland Street, you laid another bruise on every man who wears a uniform and a badge. Your newspaper story will give credence to those whose sole aim is to kick authority right in the groin. And you've shaken the confidence of those who believe in order with justice. No, a lot more went down on Garland Street this morning besides a man being struck by a policeman.
