Wit & Attitude Quote by Kent McCord

There’s a working-class candor to this line that feels less like a policy claim than a mood: the sense that police are expected to absorb humiliation that would be intolerable in “normal” life. McCord, an actor best known for playing a cop on Dragnet, speaks from the cultural afterimage of the badge as a job like any other - only with extra disrespect stapled to it. The quote’s power is its casual, almost locker-room logic: if you wouldn’t tolerate being screamed at in an office or a garage, why should a cop?

That framing quietly smuggles in a moral exemption. By comparing policing to “any other line of work,” the quote flattens the most important difference: police carry state authority and legal permission to use force. The subtext isn’t just empathy for a difficult job; it’s a justification for why restraint should have limits, why retaliation might feel “human,” even deserved. “I know I would” functions as an invitation to identification - he’s not speaking as a distant commentator but as an everyman who’d react the same way.

The context matters: mid-to-late 20th-century cop storytelling trained audiences to see verbal abuse as the opening act before violence or heroism. McCord’s line echoes that narrative grammar, positioning the public as antagonists and the officer as the besieged protagonist. It’s persuasive because it’s emotionally legible, not because it’s logically complete.