Joseph Wambaugh’s books on the camaraderie and tomfoolery of policing weighed large on my teenage mind so my first career aspiration was to be a cop.

As I made my way through high school in the late 1970s, my friends’ parents would sometimes tell me, “You’re going to be a good lawyer.”

But while arguing against the philosophical tenets of the American judiciary, my very first law professor drew a smile and said, “you shouldn’t be a lawyer, you should be a journalist.” What he saw in me, I think, was a bull(expletive) detector and a natural ability to ask followup questions based on the answer to my last question.

In my experience, the similarities between these three professions far outweigh their differences.

Good lawyers, good cops and good journalists all want the same thing, to make the world, or their part of it, a little better because of their actions.

The way we do that in journalism is to search for the truth and then let everyone know it.

Like the police and the attorneys, our actions are based on investigation, but that’s where some separation begins to occur.

If you tell a reporter something and that reporter believes the information is of any significance, you’re likely to see it in the paper.

That’s not the case with the police, who in order to successfully manage an investigation, must hold close much of the information they’ve gathered until they go to trial.

As for attorneys, they can be pretty selective in the cases they choose to prosecute — the ones they believe they can win.

As for defense attorneys, regardless of their belief of a client’s innocence, they often do the good work of arguing on their behalf, as is constitutionally mandated.

These finer points are generally where reporters and law enforcers come into conflict.

Such is the tale of the Marion County Record in Kansas, where much speculation and few facts haven’t kept their struggles from international headlines.

Earlier this month, the entire police force of Marion along with some sheriff’s deputies for good measure, raided the offices of their local paper and then the home of the paper’s 98-year-old publisher, Joan Meyer.

The police seized every computer and phone in both buildings and the very next day, Ms. Meyer died.

Since then, the county attorney withdrew the search warrant and promised that the paper’s property would be returned.

How did it happen?

My great mentor in this business, Les Mann, told me, “a small town publisher doesn’t have any friends. Sooner or later, if you’re doing your job, you’re going to anger everyone in the county.”

That was a depressing revelation and for a long while, it seemed to be true.

Anyone who’s spent more than a few years in this business will tell you that when a reader is angry, it’s most likely for a failure of omission. Which is to say, not for what we’ve done but for what we failed to do, for instance, someone’s granddaughter placed well at a competition and we failed to report it.

For a police chief in Kansas to ask a judge to issue a search warrant, there needs to be more than a failure to report — the Marion County Record’s sin was a failure of discretion.

The newspaper had angered too many of the most powerful people in that county by investigating the drunken driving records of its citizens.

How could the situation have been avoided? Confrontation begins when dialogue ends.

In my years as a newsman, I’ve had many friends in law enforcement and a few enemies and although I tend to trust someone until they give me reason not to trust them, I find that friendship takes time to build but can be lost in a flash (please excuse the pun).

Tom Mullen, owner