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I Know, Right?
Whatever the merits of this meme, it has the advantage of speaking to the way a lot of people feel — not just about the events in Uvalde but about the entire past couple of years.
There is a visceral sense that, when it came to the highly questionable mandates imposed on the law-abiding populace, law enforcement energetically and eagerly enforced the mandates, even with some excessive enthusiasm and relish. But when it comes to doing their job against actual lawbreakers, well, not so much.
Someone might argue that the behavior of the cops in Uvalde was in some way an artifact of the demonization of the police we’ve seen the last few years. That argument has some potency and might carry the day were it not for the egregious and overzealousness that has been on display these last months where Covid was concerned.
I doubt that we really know yet all of the details regarding what happened in Uvalde. Perhaps some exculpatory things will come out. But the fact that this kind of meme immediately resonates with people would, in a sane world, give politicians pause. But we don’t live in a sane world.
H/T Instapundit for the meme.
Published in General
I literally saw this in Illinois: The lockdown protesters were chased out of Grant Park (granted there were probably less than 100 of them); but the rest of the protests in the summer were allowed to continue.
The later in the year, there was a protest of the mask mandate in my small town. They were on a public square on one side of the street and some hecklers showed up on the other side of the street yelling such niceties as “Trump sucks” and saying how stupid the mask protesters were.
I had come back from a cross-country ski trip and I was starving so I waded through the protests to get my food from my favorite restaurant, and waded through on my way back. On the way back, some of the hecklers partially blocked traffic and I almost got hit by a car who couldn’t quite see through the crowd that someone [me] was trying to cross. FWIW, I couldn’t see the car coming, it was a true accident.
You know what would have helped? A cop, keeping those hecklers on the sidewalk with the same zeal that they displayed with the anti-mask crowd.
But they were all on the other side of the street, posturing and glaring at the anti-mask protesters through their tactical gear, bump helmets, visors and balaclavas pulled over their faces. I bet every single one of them felt they were the real tough men and women of the day.
So, it’s not a meme, it’s not a feeling, it’s how it is, at least where I live.
Also, Gov Abbott should have a state recognition of the ACTUAL heroes, really not much different than when Gov. DeSantis of Florida had an even for the REAL winner of an athletic event – not “Lia Thomas.”
My goal. As a law enforcement chaplain, writer, teacher/trainer and speaker (internationally, even!) for law enforcement.
My (now late) husband’s goal was to support his family, serve his community and earn a living in an honest and honorable way. He died doing it. That seems sufficient.
And most everyone got, or stayed, healthy…..
Shouldn’t 1 of the ‘measurements’ be the number of body bags, increases in crime, the general feeling that no one has our backs? Yet, many say ‘back the police’. Shouldn’t that go both ways?
The problem is, there is no such thing as “the police.” Some departments and individuals are good enough to keep and support, some are not, at least not without reform. But from Clinton to Biden, there have been increasing efforts to turn the diversity of police forces into one federally-controlled super-police unit. When that process is complete, then we can speak of “the police.”
And many of the unarmed parents were trying to get in the building. I saw several reports of parents successfully saving lives.
I think—someone can correct me on this if they like—that the question of whether a police officer is legally obligated to respond in a certain way to a certain threat is largely one of liability and what you might call technicalities. “Officer X didn’t do the thing that would’ve prevented Bad Thing Y and therefore it is Officer X’s fault.”
I don’t know any police officers who do not consider themselves morally obligated to rescue innocent people from a desperate threat. Heck, I’m just a chaplain, and I feel morally obligated to fling myself between the threat and the innocent (especially kids). I did some debriefing for LEOs after Sandy Hook, and let me tell you, those guys felt strongly—if irrationally—that they were supposed to rescue those kids. Never mind that they couldn’t possibly have done so—by the time anyone knew what was happening, everyone was already dead. Including the shooter.
Cops feel omni-responsible. That’s really why cops still take the corner table, back to the wall, in a restaurant. It’s not just because they’re paranoid for hteir own safety (got to keep my eye on all points of egress…) it’s also because if the bad guy comes through the door, it’s their job to protect everyone in the restaurant. All. The . Time. Never mind that they can’t possibly rescue everyone. They want to.
I’ll betcha Doug Watt still feels this way.
Except we have plenty of examples that they don’t feel responsible. I’ve heard more than one officer say that their number 1 mission is to go home at night. If your number one mission is to go home that doesn’t really mean you’re going to run into the fire.
I find it amazing how quickly any and every example of police negligence or overreach is so quickly countered by, well they (or we) aren’t all bad.
That’s NOT the argument.
Just because there are brave and good police officers in most jurisdictions does not mean we don’t have a serious problem.
Cops don’t feel any one way. There are a lot who don’t feel in the least ‘responsible’. I’ve met some of those. Others actually think they are the only ‘good guys’, or at least that just about every citizen is some kind of criminal.
The argument is also about the culture and the system. I.E. police want fairness and other priorities, but their hands are tied. Okay, let’s untie their hands then.
Until (edit from ‘when’) people like you and Doug Watt start looking into these problems instead of blanket knee-jerk defenses of ‘police’ in general based on anecdotal information and the mere existence of ‘good cops’, this problem will continue.
Pretty sure you mean “Until people”
I actually changed from “until” LOL ! But then I neglected to change the back end of the sentence. Thanks!
Yes, that was the other main option. But you should change (back) one or the other.
Franco—of course there are crappy cops, crappy departments and bad attitudes that behave like viruses in a department. Remember my story about my husband looking for a squeaky clean department? There were a bunch of places that got rejected out of hand—New Orleans, at the time, had drug gangs composed of police officers dealing out of precinct houses. They killed people who narc’d on them, or just sliced off their lower lips.
When I say that I’ve spent my adult life—over 25 years—-working with many, many others on making American policing better, that’s what I’m talking about.
Well, guess what? And things have been getting much, much, much better.
I’ll give you an easy example: Google the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 1965 (Barack Obama and I were both three years old).
Now try to imagine a civil rights march, circa 2022, in which fifty American law enforcement officers go completely berserk, attack unarmed, genuinely peaceful (not just “mostly peaceful”) protesters of all ages, breaking heads, breaking limbs, riding their police horses literally into the homes of fleeing people…
That happened then.
It is unimaginable now.
Police corruption—serious graft, serious abuse—has been declining for years. Police use of force, and especially use of deadly force has been declining for years. Fewer and fewer people (including unarmed black men) are shot and killed by the police as the years pass and the work gets done: Better training, better equipment, better body armor and a different sense of what the mission is…all these things have made a huge difference, visible and palpable over the course of just my career, let alone over the course of my life.
And now?
My daughter—a police officer—has been promoted to acting sergeant in her little city not because she has the experience, but because the department is so short-staffed, they don’t have anyone older and wiser to fling into the position. (Luckily, she’s smart…but still…) THis is true all over the country, because “Defund the Police” and “All Cops Are Bastards” didn’t refer only to the cops in Minneapolis or Charlston or Kenosha, but everywhere.
Recruitment and retention for a difficult, complicated, physically and morally hazardous job has never been exactly easy…but guess what? Black Lives Matter didn’t help. Barack Obama didn’t help. Defund the police? Didn’t help. A bunch of seriously dumbass people and policies have made things much worse.
And now, my idiot leftist friends say things like: “They should really require all police officers to have bachelor’s degrees” as if A.) That’s a novel idea (hello? MAny jurisdictions have required this, or the equialent, for years) and B.) as if Americans with bachelor’s degrees are itching to take jobs that —according to their teachers, peers, Facebook friends, Diversity Equity and Inclusion deans—-are racist, white supremacist, probably cisheteronormatively oppressive and, oh by the way, about to be defunded, deconstructed and dismantled out of existence.
“I think I’ll go work for Starbucks. They fly the rainbow flag, and I can keep my lip rings.”
There is a problem Franco, and you know what? The problem is going to get worse. Much worse.
Not because America’s remaining police officers are horrible people or craven cowards, but because America lost its ever-loving mind somewhere around 2012 or so, and has been laying waste to much that took years and whole lifetimes to build.
I have never walked into an accountant’s office, looked over their books and said you’re doing this the wrong way. Get out of your chair and let me balance the books.
I’ve seen things as a police officer that most people never see. I’m well aware of the fact that some people test well. They get through academy but when things go to hell they panic.
Some of them spend two or three years on the streets and then become supervisors. Some are cowards but that doesn’t stop them from second guessing a cop that had to make a decision in a matter of seconds.
Then there are the David French’s and the Radley Balko’s that have never ridden with a police officer. I ignore them because they are ignorant.
I have counted cigarette burns on children’s arms in one incident. I’ve responded to a welfare check involving a woman who blew her brains out by using her toe to pull the trigger on a rifle. Skull fragments and brain matter embedded in a basement ceiling. I made the call to have a police chaplain to notify caller of the welfare check, but not notify them of what I saw.
I’ve wrestled with people and driven some to the pavement in knock down drag out fights. I came close to having to shoot some individuals. My partner and I were shot at on a traffic stop.
I find it difficult to tell people or give them the full experience of policing. I do resent the generalizations of police officers. There were times when I questioned why I was doing this job, but there were times when I could right the universe.
I don’t want anyone to call me a hero. I’m not going to ask for anyone’s respect. I know what I’ve seen and done and I could care less what those who couldn’t do the job think.
Fine, but basically every job is something other people need done but don’t want or aren’t qualified to do themselves. In that regard, police are nothing special. But if the pizza guy doesn’t deliver the pizza on time – or at all – probably nobody is going to get robbed, or beat up, or perhaps killed. Which makes it even more critical that if someone employed by the police department can’t do the job like they’re supposed to – and “supposed to” as defined by the public that hires them, not just by other police – they need to get out of it. For their own sake, as well as the public’s. Argue the “rightness” of it all you want, but if the people of Uvalde hired a police department to – among other things – go into a school and take out a shooter if that were to happen, and the police department didn’t do it, THEY FAILED.
Yes, I’m well aware of what I would call epic fails.
Okay, but you seem to be missing the other side of “I know what I’ve seen and done and I could care less what those who couldn’t do the job thinks.” Another term for those people might be “your employers.” Whether they “couldn’t” do the job themselves or just don’t want to, doesn’t matter. It’s THEIR expectations that you and other police are hired to do. Where do you get off not caring what your employers think? As I wrote before, in that respect, police are no different from any other job. Damn near every job on the planet is someone being hired to do a job SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE the person hiring them can’t – or doesn’t want to – do it themselves, for one reason or another. Maybe just because of limited time. But ultimately those reasons don’t matter. If one of the companies that I did programming work for, had someone working for them that couldn’t “code their way out of a wet paper bag,” but didn’t care what the employer thought of their inability to do the job they were hired for, maybe because the employer themselves couldn’t code at all… What nonsense.
The thing that disturbs me most is the lack of accountability by government in today’s America. It is not new, and it is not limited to the police. Challenger in 1986 was an example of this kind of epic fail. (That’s my field people.) Despite the failures in that, no one was ultimately held accountable. The ones most responsible got promoted, while those who tried to do the right thing got sacked.
Well, it has been that way ever since. No matter how badly the government screws up, those causing the screw ups skate and the only ones that get punished are those who tried to warn that failure was coming.
If people screw up badly enough, they should not have to be fired. They should quit. Not because of the fail, but because they have demonstrated through their failure that they are not up to the job. They should be fired only if they do not quit, because by staying on they are demonstrating they do not understand how dangerous they are.
It is not happening. As a result the incompetent remain in positions where they will hurt others, and eventually there will be a catastrophic failure of the entire system – coast to coast and border to border.
Given events of recent years I can easily imagine it happening now. It’s harder for me to imagine it happening back then.
I was a junior in high school then. Yes, this statement reveals some problems.
Back on a Sunday in spring 2006 I did a bicycle ride from Selma to Montgomery. It was mostly about War of 1812 history but I also wondered, as I rode across the Alabama River, if this was the famous bridge (I didn’t remember its name) so took a photo. (It wasn’t.) My wife visited a civil rights museum while I was on my ride.
They only people who get screwed now are those who try to stand against the powerful.
COlumbia was as epic a fail as well. Some of the same people?
I was 12 in 1965. You cite one aspect of policing and riot response that’s gotten much better. But there are a thousand things I can cite as evidence it’s gotten generally worse. Police abuse and corruption is rampant across America.
Police Departments routinely protect their officers from civilian oversight. Police have almost zero discretion anymore. They are brain-dead functionaries.
Police can lie, and they lie routinely and casually. Police can and do STEAL. If you travel with a large amount of cash they can just take it and they will no matter what you tell them it’s for, and good luck getting it back.
The leftist attack of Defund the Police resonated because of the growing general deterioration of relations between citizens and police forces. Nearly every claim they made was bogus and police ‘did the right thing’ , but somehow the general population were quite primed to believe these tropes because of the general zeitgeist of how police interact with people.
I am personally against all of those movements BLM etc. However, these things wouldn’t get traction if there weren’t an underlying schism, which I contend police officers and their bosses fostered for years. Even I, as a relatively law abiding citizen (zero felonies in 68 years and barely a traffic ticket in the last 20 years despite many miles driven) I have had some bad experiences with police. I can only imagine what it’s like to be a black teenager in a city who is similarly law abiding. In fact I think the police have been contributing to gang recruitment and forcing young city residents to choose a side.
Maybe it’s just now that we are seeing the extent of the corruption because of cell phone, CCTV footage and body cams (which are released years later when police look bad) that we can see absolute EVIL coming from police officers and departments across the country. Maybe it’s always been that way, although I doubt it based on my own experiences as a juvenile with police. Ironically in those days when I was breaking the law, cops were pretty cool. Now not-so-much.
When the eager enforcement of lockdowns and mask mandates manifested I was livid. Because I knew how reluctant many police officers and departments in general are to do the real police work citizens expect, and we see it here in a perfect meme.
Right. “So what?” when this is exactly the issue.
The converse, Of course people break laws. So what?
I could make the argument that the Drug War damaged police forces and our civil liberties to the breaking point and shattered trust between civilians and police.
Yes. They can lie to you, but if you lie to them, it is a crime.
Civil Assets Forfeiture is stealing. They just take it. No trial, no nothing, and put ways in place to stop you getting it.
Qualified Immunity, dreamed up by the courts, means a policeman can violate your rights, and even when it is clearly a violation to a normal person, it can only be held against him if there is a precedent in the courts in his jurisdiction. Of course, there cannot be a precedent made because there has to be a precedent to based the ruling on. Catch 22.
Traffic stop quotas do that too. They can claim they don’t have quotas all they want, but departments keep being found out. I hear over and over and over and over “The most dangerous thing we do is a traffic stop.” Uh, huh. Why on earth do the police keep making them? Speed Traps are about revenue, not safety. We all know it. Red Light Cameras are about revenue, not safety. That is why they are installed and the big safety factor, a long yellow light, is reduced, so more people will get tickets. Traffic stops are a way to harass people for procedural crimes and shake them down for money. It is just the same as going after “soft” targets on things like masks.
This isn’t about YOU. This is about the system.
By the way, we were all treated to stories similar to your personal anecdotes on TV for years. I can’t tell you how many cop shows or shows involving police work I’ve watched in my life. Almost all told from the perspective of police as the good guys. Would it affect me more if I were there? Yes, but that would not make my job any nobler.
We know there are good policemen and women. That’s not the point. The point is to solve this problem, and it goes nowhere if the fundamentals aren’t acknowledged. Essentially the argument is “Most cops are good” as a diversion or a defense against the argument that there are way too many bad cops.
It reminds me of the immigration debate. Most people coming here illegally are ‘good’ people. Some of them are bad, others are very, very bad gang members, terrorists etc and can cause untold carnage and damage. Wanting to secure the border because of this is met with the argument “they come here out of love”.
You only need a minority of bad (or very bad) actors to wreak havoc, and this is absolutely true with cops.
A small collection of police corruption, criminality and other despicable acts I wrote about recently.
There’s more to this than simple stealing. Police essentially lie on their paperwork, saying that they had “suspicion” of illegal activity. And the word of policemen is taken as true or reliable by judges and the legal establishment while the word of normal citizens’ is not — they say, Why would police lie?
But civil asset forfeiture often goes to police budgets and to police salaries, so there is a reason for this stealing that has nothing to do with enforcing the law.
Nonetheless, I am forced to presume that many or most cops are the good guys.
I couldn’t find it, but Ricochet member Jack Dunphy was kind enough to send me the link to one of his articles, quoted in part below. While it doesn’t explicitly deal with the abuse of police power, it is I think the best, shortest description that I can comprehend of the state of policing in America.
Any cop who participates in CAF is not a “good guy”. Any force that uses it to enrich themselves are not “good guys”.
And this came from the Drug War zealots to seize “drug money” then, it became any arbitrary amount of cash over a few thousand dollars.