I’m passing this on because I think it’s important either as a warning or a social commentary; I’m not sharing the original post because it was by a friend of a friend that I only became aware of because my FB friend commented on it, and I don’t feel free to disclose identities. A young woman of impeccable personal credentials warned her friends to remove police decals or shields from their cars; she carries one because she’s a close family member of an officer killed in the line of duty. On Christmas Eve her cousin’s car, also with a shield, had all its windows smashed, and its interior shredded, and then got a phone call saying that cars with police insignia were being targeted. We’ve all read stories of individual police officers who, for whatever reason, used excessive force on an occasion or exercised seemingly inexcusable bad judgment. We’ve read less often of the daily heroics of many others, the majority of them, or of simply the job they do to protect us. On Christmas eve, for example, finishing last minute shopping, I encountered a County officer who would be working all night Christmas eve serving warrants on scofflaws who had failed to show up in court for various offences. Most of us were with our families that night. He was protecting our ability to do that. The ongoing attacks on the police – seemingly founded on a misunderstanding or refusal to believe the actual facts, or to try to appreciate the job that police have to do – threaten all of our lives. We live in a country of laws, and give the police the power to enforce those. We don’t, and don’t have the right, to ask that they constantly value their own lives, or those of their families, less than the lawbreakers they encounter. There was a time in the sixties when police, as agents of the State, came under attack as they enforced policy set by “civilian” authority. We then, and many now, aimed only at the visible targets. IF there’s a divide between how police treat law-breakers and how we want them to, attacking police doing their jobs and protecting themselves and their families is a horrible and disgusting mis-direction of anger and rage. Take this warning about police insignia as you will. I suspect many will be proud and defiant to display their affiliation, while others may not be able to take that risk. Either way, we have to support our local police, even as one New York officer is laid to rest today, killed for simply being a police officer.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 20:44:09 +0000
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