10 month old baby alone in a motel room at 2 a.m.

It was 2:00 am on Wednesday morning when Ventura PD officers were dispatched to the Mission Bell Motel on Main, in response to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance. When our officers arrived, there was no response when they knocked on the unit door, but they could hear an infant crying inside the room. When they gained entry, the officers discovered a ten-month-old infant abandoned and crawling around inside the motel room.

It wasn't until thirty minutes later that the 24 year-old mother, a Las Vegas resident, was located walking near the motel.

She was arrested for abandoning the child and booked at Ventura County Jail.

It's hard to imagine mitigating circumstances for leaving a baby alone in a motel room in the middle of the night for an extended period of time. But it is up to the justice system to sort through the tragic circumstances that surround an incident like this, not city managers or readers of blogs and newspapers.

Yet I can't help but reflect on the job of cops.

Villify them, glamorize them -- call them heroes or call them names, practically everyone has an opinion. All too many of those views either seem to come from watching television or personal opinions about how someone felt the last time they were pulled over for a traffic ticket.

But who else goes out at 2 in the morning and ends up having to deal with situations like this?

Police officers are human beings. Yes, they have a job to do. In cases like this, it means taking charge of a 10 month old, tracking down the missing parent(s), making sense of the conflicting stories that come spilling out and making often agonizing judgment calls about whether laws have been broken and how to enforce them, knowing those decisions will inevitably be second-guessed by others who are sleeping in their beds at 2 a.m.

Still, no matter how experienced or trained they are, police officers can't help but be affected by situations like this. Many are parents themselves. After finishing their shift, they go home and try to put the emotions aside and live a normal life. But no one can do a job like that for years on end and not have it take a toll.

It's a tough job -- and someone has to do it. But the next time I hear some loud mouth generalizing about cops and what a lousy job they do -- I'll be thinking about a ten month old baby alone in a hotel room at 2 a.m. And thinking about what a lousy job we give to some of the most caring and courageous people I know.