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An Officer’s Lament
One of my good friends serves as a police officer here in the Pacific Northwest. Over time, he’s been frustrated. About a month ago, he expressed his frustrations thusly:
Dear Conservative Ideology — There is no easy way to say this, so I am just going to say it. I’m breaking up with you. I know what you are thinking. No I am not seeing anyone else. I am not going to remove my conservative sign and replace it with a liberal one. Right now, I’m just going to stand on my own. Ironically, the thing that has pushed you away from me is the one thing that has always kept me far away from liberal ideology … anti-police rhetoric.
He goes on:
I love being a police officer. I know that there isn’t a lot of glory in being one. I know that it’s a pretty thankless job. I’m okay with that. But every day, I love going out and getting a chance to really help. I know that sometimes all I can do is place a dirty band-aid on a gushing wound, delaying society from tearing itself apart. I know that sometimes I may use a tone of voice that is a little tough when dealing with citizens. But it is because it is a tough world, and this is a tough job. And yes, there is a lot of despair in my job, but every once in awhile, I get a chance to help people. I don’t enjoy arresting people. I don’t enjoy writing tickets. I don’t enjoy using force on people. I enjoy doing my duty and knowing that, maybe even just a little at a time, I am making the world a better place. I took an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution, all of it. Not your amended interpretation of it.
Which brings me to you, conservative ideology. It is true that, as a whole movement, there is not a widespread call for violence against police officers. However, there is a subtle ideology in your thinking. There is a hostile demeanor in your articles, essays, and online posts. And there is ominous silence when your masses respond to such media calling for open violence against “pigs, Fascists, Nazis, and oppressors.” There is no call for violence in your words. But there are words like “revolution, demand action, excessive force, trampled rights,” and “police state.” Often these words are used out of context, or applied to half-truths and partial facts. Your words are stirring followers to use words that advocate, encourage, and call for the deaths of police officers. I have turned a blind eye to it for far too long. But your silence towards the recent shooting of two Las Vegas Officers while they were eating lunch, and the death of a concealed carry American citizen who tried to stop the shooters, is just as hypocritical of the liberal silence over the loss of four lives in Benghazi. The shooters draped a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on one of the officers, and a handful of swastikas on the other officer, (which, contrary to what the media told you, was meant to imply the officer was a Nazi. The swastikas were not placed on the dead officer due to white supremacist ideology.) Where do you suppose that symbolic gesture comes from? Both of these officers had families … wives and children. You always bitch about the “militarization” of American police, because we now wear body armor outside of our shirts and have armored cars? We carry rifles now because criminals carry them and wear body armor. We have armored vehicles because criminals have rifles that can shoot through cars now. You know what? We’re okay with that. We’re okay with law-abiding citizens having the option of bearing arms. But a law-abiding gun owner can go south pretty quick when he loses his job, his wife leaves him, or some other life event takes a turn for the worst. That’s fine. We’ll respond. It’s what we do. But don’t bitch at us because we want vests, armor, and rifles to deal with the problem. Especially when we, the police, as an institution, are overwhelmingly supportive of citizens’ rights to bear arms.
I’ve also heard you complain about police wearing BDUs now. You know why we’re wearing BDU’s? Because $40 slacks that you the taxpayer pay for are not comfortable for the work we do. They tear and need to be replaced due to us working in the increasingly violent world that you and your liberal ideological brother are making for us. Oh, and here’s a news flash: Bullet-resistant vests are not comfortable. Wearing them over our shirts is more comfortable and allows us to carry gear on our vest rather than our waists. Gear on the vest spreads out weight that is normally concentrated on your waist and lower back. This helps prevent back problems, which, for your information, is very common among police officers.
So we are done, conservative ideology. I thought you were different. Turns out you’re just as full of crap as your liberal opposite. I’ll stand on my own with my God, my family, my brothers and sisters in blue, and all of my countrymen.
I’ve been delaying sharing here for a while, but George Savage’s recent article about our militarized interior compelled me to cease my delays. I can see a problem. While I believe there is genuine concern about the increased militarization of federal bureaucracies (I’m not sure why the EPA requires SWAT teams, for example), it’s becoming more necessary for the police officers who serve to gear up and protect themselves. It seems that, as of late, more officers have been victims of shootings not in the line of duty, but doing nothing more than enjoying a bit of down time. If it’s not more common, we’re at least becoming more aware of it.
Here’s the thing: many of these officers are our allies. They love freedom and liberty as much as we do, but they understand that everyone’s liberty comes at a cost. Those of us who enjoy what liberties we have do so because there are officers like my friend defending them. That takes them to dangerous places. And yes, those places can be inside the borders of this country. One needs only look at Chicago’s murder statistics to realize just how dangerous life can be right here at home. That we don’t experience it every day is thanks to the work of men and women like my friend who go there for us.
The last thing we should be doing is treating them with suspicion or contempt. The questions are: How do we support them? How do we reconcile with them? How do I behave towards my fellow man?
Published in General
Are all drug raids done as night time raids? What proportion are done that way? Do all raids end by shooting anything that gives the slightest inkling of being a threat? What proportion end that way? Who determines whether no-knock and/or night warrants are justified? Are they making incorrect decisions or using incorrect criteria?
His beef isn’t with conservative ideology. His complaint is about one or a few specific issues limited to his particular profession. Was he ever interested in conservatism? Or was he simply asking, “How will Republicans improve my work environment and benefits?”
I can understand if he’s simply too frustrated with conservatives on these few issues to frequent conversation sites like Ricochet. But he’s not voting on principles if this alone is enough to make him vote Democrat.
Thing is, I didn’t feel I was being uniquely abused. It felt like standard treatment from a large bureaucracy.
After so much rigmarole just to report a burglary, I don’t wanna know what it takes to file a complaint about the way the police reacted. We’ll either move soon, or simply not bother to report any future minor burglaries. (The burglary was a fairly small one, and we reported it mainly to help the police.)
Nearly all SWAT raids are done between Dawn or Dusk.
I can’t help but notice that you are avoiding defining when YOU think SWAT raids are appropriate. Do you believe that serving warrants for misdemeanors and minor felonies justifies a SWAT raid? If not, the numbers suggest that you oppose greater than 10,000 of the SWAT raids that happen every year.
continued…
There is no group more likely to respect the role of police in an ordered society than middle class conservatives. The fact that so many of us now view the police as something other than protectors is a reflection on their failure to ensure high standards for themselves and their brethren and their role as enforcers of corrupt and abusive laws, rather than protectors of Constitutional rights. There are plenty of good police and many of them have shown themselves willing to stand up for what’s right. They need to continue to do so and encourage the other good cops to put some daylight between themselves and those who sully the uniform. This open letter was not such an attempt and I dismiss it for the special pleading that it is.
Experience may vary. My local PD is very very responsive – even calling in a minor B&E on my car and I had an officer there in 5 minutes. Same with the county sheriffs (response time is a bit longer just because of the size of the ground they cover). But I live in a small town.
Just south in Columbus it is a different matter.
I hadn’t heard of this incident until now. Could it be that our “silence” has more to do with media concentrating on a very narrow spectrum of events each week, rather than willful disregard by conservatives in general?
Again, if this is a common problem, it doesn’t make the news. That I’m aware, very few criminals are armored up or employ advanced weaponry. SWAT was created for these extraordinary circumstances, and no conservative ever objects to extraordinary measures when facing extraordinary threats.
Forgive us if we exhibit concern about a President who during his first campaign advocated the creation of a domestic military force; concern about intelligence agencies which have been caught preemptively recording communications under the “oversight” of a lawless and corrupt Attorney General; concern about government agencies like the IRS and EPA being used as legal weapons against anyone who dares to upset the current Administration… and police officers being employed, under orders, to enforce these whims masquerading as laws.
Besides which, Midge is absolutely right about the pressure upon otherwise fine officers to focus on regulatory enforcement and petty tax-like penalties. The sad reality is that, with or without police officers consent, this is the primary way in which the average citizen encounters police. It’s a gotcha game with law-abiding citizens as the prey.
The views of many conservatives might not be properly balanced with the dangers facing police and the admirable services they provide. But our concerns are not unreasonable.
At the risk of banging on, allow me:
Dear Conservative Ideology,
Addressed to “Ideology”, but complains about incidents and individuals. This is the great conflation attempted in this “letter”.
There is no easy way to say this… I’m just going to stand on my own.
Disarming empowerment rhetoric sets up…
ironically, the thing that has pushed you away from me is the one thing that has always kept me far away from liberal ideology … anti-police rhetoric.
This is what conservative ideology is to be identified with. THIS is the destructive payload.
First off, this only makes sense from a particular point of view, the left. Since it claims to dislike the left and now find the right similar, it is an attack only on the right. Obviously Progressivism is not worth addressing, and therefore *gets a free pass*, because it is not attacked, but is the antithesis of Conservatism.
Second, it impugns not the ideology of conservatism, which is not anti-police rhetoric, but apparently some whackobirds (sorry!) who spew anti-police rhetoric. Why the conflation? Because this is a profoundly anti-conservative letter.
Shall I continue?
I’m not avoiding it – I don’t know the answer and I’m not in a position to develop the criteria for when SWAT raids are justified. But you’re the one making the assertion, among others, that nighttime SWAT raids for drug violations are unjustified, and I’m trying to understand how you arrive at that assertion and how big of a problem we’re talking about.
Okay. Seems I started something. Ouch. I would have replied earlier, but was pulled away for an all-important lunch meeting at the office. It was important because the lunch was free. I just proved it exists. My friend exists as well, have no fear there. I have reprinted this with his permission, but by his request he remains anonymous.
He is for the most part conservative, even per this note if he’s “breaking up” with them. Sure, he’s not 100% — we can argue ’til the cows come on SSM for example — but then who is?
Some background in the Portland area: being a police officer is a pretty thankless job in Portland. The locals lean radical left, and the city council is ready to throw the department under the bus if anything looks just a bit bad. Vancouver, just to the north, is better than Portland for police officers. Actually I suspect that applies in general. Vancouver, just to the north, is better than Portland.
Otherwise I think my other questions are still relevant: Do all raids end by shooting anything that gives the slightest inkling of being a threat? What proportion end that way? Who determines whether no-knock and/or night warrants are justified? Are they making incorrect decisions or using incorrect criteria?
This is an infuriating lie. To equate those two *as phrased* is obscene. I’m not exercised about “liberal silence” regarding benghazi, but a breach of faith between the government and those whom it sends into harm’s way. If this letter were written by a cop who had been a conservative, he would know that through one if not both of those conditions. This is a whitewash of the administration’s conduct. Smuggled predicates like this are the real payload of “letters” like this.
I tried to post a more or less neutral stance, but I admit I tend to be sympathetic towards him. I do have some issues with his analysis of the situation, but I didn’t want to poison the well (unlike my brother’s Vox.com links in which I’m more than happy to poison the well). Some of what is said here in refutation of his points has been constructive. This is why I post here at Ricochet.
Anyways, I have to catch up on the reading while working here, so I’ll comment as I can.
I always find the common charge that cops show up more quickly in affluent areas than poorer ones annoying. The obvious answer being not bias, but the fact that affluent areas have much less crime, and therefore the police who serve in that area are less busy.
As for the minor parking violations v. burglary issue, as frustrating as it may be, the parking violations are much easier to enforce, since the car is sitting there and has a license plate etc., whereas nobody knows who the burglar is. And the detectives handling burglaries are different from the street cops handling parking violations.
Ed,
Do you work from the assumption that civilians asleep in their homes should absorb nearly all of the risk in their interaction with police officers? If so, the error rate is irrelevant to our disagreement.
My aunt was subject to such a raid in a case of mistaken identity. She was handcuffed and dragged out of the house in her sleepwear, injuring her recently operated on back. Is there any universe where she should be the one assuming the risks of this interaction, as opposed to police?
This answer can be arrived out without the abuse rates of SWAT procedures, because it questions the procedures at a fundamental level.
The facts just do not support the case the author is making. Overall crime rates continue to trend down. Officer deaths/injuries are down. Police departments with MRAPS is…….up? Hmm.
111 officers died in 2013.
33 were due to firearms.
32 Other (heart attacks, etc.)
46 traffic-related deaths.
There are 780,000 LEOs in the USA. Simple math: If you were a law enforcement officer last year, you had a .004% percent chance of being shot and killed in the line of duty.
Conclusion: Police do not need MRAPS.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/30/law-enforcement-deaths/4247393/
Yes, that was my point.
Frank- I think the SWAT “raid” numbers you cited are a little misleading. I know a number of South Bend PD SWAT officers. Most of what they do is serve high risk warrants. These usually are not raids in the Elian Gonzales sense, but normal arrests conducted by SWAT officers. The risk isn’t assessed by reference to the offense, but based on whether the suspect is likely to be dangerous. In South Bend (and I would assume elsewhere) there are a lot of very violent and heavily armed suspects who are arrested for relatively minor offenses. I’m receptive to concerns about the miliarization of the police, but I just don’t think this particular metric is all that useful.
That makes about as much sense as me severing my allegiance to conservatives because I got a bunch of parking tickets From ” conservative” cops. Good riddance to this guy. He hasn’t the mental ability to make distinctions between ideology and individuals or between good cops and bad cops. good laws and policies and bad laws and policies.
36% of Drug SWAT raids (representing 62% of all raids) end up finding no contra-band.
In 50% of forced entries, no weapons are found.
Only 7% of SWAT raids are for “hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios”.
Sal, see my numbers above. One of the problems is that the numbers do vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but it doesn’t change the fact that 50% of raids find no weapons, let alone have any real risk of a weapon being used against officers.
Wait, I thought you were arguing back in comment #7 that no-knock and nighttime warrants are sometimes if rarely justified, but now you seem to be arguing that they are never justified. Which is it? If they are sometimes justified then you too can imagine a universe where such raids are justified despite an error rate. In that universe the error rate (or worse, the abuse rate) is entirely relevant.
I think the problem is characterizing all warrants executed by SWAT officers as raids. Most are not functionally different than those by regular police.
(Letter quoted by, but certainly not written by) C. U. Douglas: But your silence towards the recent shooting of two Las Vegas Officers while they were eating lunch, and the death of a concealed carry American citizen who tried to stop the shooters is just as hypocritical of the liberal silence over the loss of 4 lives in Benghazi.
I didn’t understand this either, and I am really tired of the misuse of the “h” word. The Vegas tragedy made national news but was a local story. I don’t know what he means by supposed “conservative silence”. What in the world is the “hypocrisy” on the part of conservatives about the “liberal silence” about Benghazi? That was a national event involving high federal administration officials, and the “silence” about it is from those officials, their supporters and the liberal media. The Vegas killers would have faced justice had they lived.
Ed,
This isn’t all that complicated. I think there are times where a no knock warrant could be justified, but the risks that civilians assume in these interactions is so much greater than the police would with traditional warrants, that I’d be willing to do away with no-knocks entirely as I think the result is a net positive.
As for SWAT raids in general (which don’t have to be about warrants, but are 80% of the time), I think they should be limited to hostage and active shooter scenarios.
My position is clearly stated. Yours is not.
Under what criteria do you deem a SWAT raid appropriate?
Is justification based on the results, or do we base it on circumstances known and suspected at the time warrant is issued? Otherwise, 50% forced entries where weapons were found means that 50% of the time weapons are found. Sounds like pretty good justification to me. Can that proportion be improved with better criteria without sacrificing either officer safety or public safety? I’m certainly open to that case, but I don’t see why officers should take on more risk when there is reasonable basis for issuing these extraordinary warrants in the first place.
SWATting is new concept and a direct result of the ease in which a police department will activate their SWAT team.
I have no problem describing them as raids, as 2/3 of them involve forced entry. Are you saying that when non SWAT officers serve warrants they also force entry two-thirds of the time? Do they throw flashbangs as standard procedure when a door is partially obstructed?
If that’s by the book, then the book sucks.
I already answered that. I don’t know. But I’m not making any assertions here.