Posted on 11/26/2014 7:02:36 AM PST by shortstop
Every cop in America knows one thing – it could have been him.
Or her.
It could have been him or her, instead of Darren Wilson, who pulled that trigger on Michael Brown.
Or some such similar young man.
Every cop in America knows that, in return for choosing a career in law enforcement, the rules of the road are now that, at any minute, it all could be over and you could become hated and condemned all across the country.
No one would have your back, even the president could denounce you.
Because you defended yourself.
In a twist on biting the hand that feeds you, we are instead tying the hand that defends us. We are sending them out, and waiting for the first chance to gut them.
It is an incomprehensible act of ingratitude.
All across American law enforcement, officers know that the new reality facing them when they pull their guns is: By defending myself, I could be condemning myself.
Take Darren Wilson.
A good cop on routine patrol. He’s coming back from a call and has brief contact with two individuals. Nothing comes of it until he moves a ways down the block and gets a radio description of a wanted individual matching one of the young men he’s just seen.
Rolling back up on the two individuals, the larger of them – Michael Brown – lunges into the driver’s window of the squad car and begins assaulting Darren Wilson. Michael Brown then tries to take away the officer’s gun.
The officer gets off a round, Michael Brown attempts to flee, and then charges at the officer, twice, before being shot to death.
In the mind of witnesses and Darren Wilson, Michael Brown was set to attack and was an immediate threat to the life of Officer Wilson.
So Officer Wilson did what his training taught him to do. He did what instinct, morality and the laws of men command him to do – he defended himself.
And his life is ruined.
His career is over, his family is threatened, his name is destroyed, he has been vilified across the country and by the nation’s most prominent voices.
People have rioted demanding imprisonment for him, and there have been countless threats on his life.
His life, as he knew it, is over.
Because he was a cop and he defended himself.
An entire society has forgotten that Darren Wilson is not the perpetrator of a crime, he is the victim of a crime.
Likewise, it has been forgotten that Darren Wilson was an officer of the law with a duty to act, and that he was on patrol that day in the name and service of the people.
And it is dispiriting to see how instantly the people have turned on him and his profession.
You get up in the morning and put on a uniform that carries with it the obligation to potentially die in the service of your community, to put yourself between the good people and whatever species of hell pops up, and then, when you are literally fighting for your life and the community’s protection, nobody has your back.
Everybody curses your name.
Millions hate you.
Much of the nation turns against you.
In the matter of some 20 seconds.
Damned if you do, dead if you don't.Every cop in America wakes up every day knowing that that could be his fate. By the happenstance of random probability, the unpredictability of criminality, some wild hare seizing upon who knows what thug, and that could be you.
And it wouldn’t matter who you were, or what good you had done, or how many years you had served, or what you had made of your life and to what good cause you had dedicated it.
Al Sharpton would be yelling your name, mobs would be burning your effigy, and the president would be undercutting your profession.
And who wants that?
What kind of person, having seen on the nation’s newscasts the destruction of Darren Wilson, wants to risk that?
How many law enforcement officers will think of the danger associated with their thankless job, see the risk facing themselves and their family, recognize that it is completely unfair and wrong, and quit?
How many will lay down their badge and their career and walk away?
Probably none.
Because that’s the kind of people most of them are. They press on. They do their duty. They don’t quit.
That’s who they are.
More at issue is: Who are we?
Are we the kind of society that looks on and does nothing, or are we the kind of society that values law enforcement and what it does, and has its back?
Are we the kind of society that can look at the matter in Ferguson and push back the anti-cop prejudices and honestly consider the situation of Darren Wilson? Can we recognize the injustice of his situation?
Not that he wasn’t prosecuted, but that he was ever suspected. That an officer of the law, the victim of a violent and felonious attack, can be forced into a fight for his life, and then be condemned for winning.
Would society have preferred he die?
We all know that if the cop had died, instead of the guy who attacked him, that none of us would have ever heard of this. The president wouldn’t have commented, the nation wouldn’t have noticed, nobody would have given a damn.
Dead cop, no problem.
Dead thug, raise holy hell.
And every cop knows that.
And carries that sad realization 24 hours a day.
The president said we need to train our police better. Maybe we need to train our society better.
Maybe we should train the Michael Browns of the world to respect the law, and maybe we should train the rest of us to respect the law enforcers.
And have their backs.
Or at least understand the horrible risk and reality Ferguson creates for them.
Because every cop knows today could be his day.
They may or may not believe the video. The question is whether or not they accept the video.
There was video of Brown assaulting the store clerk. It didn't matter at all. Likewise with Martin. Ample proof he was a thug too. The left nor their useful idiots care about facts.
Sorry, but this article is missing a key factor that works against Wilson. Law enforcement apathy to killing innocen people. Their complete willingness to circle the wagons around ANY cop. Even the stairwell shooter has the comissioner trying to dismiss it as an accident.
There are too many shootings that are clearly wrong. People are getting tired of it. Wilson is catching the flack from bad shoots getting ignored. When whitewashes are all we get, one innocent cop looks like another.
Always remember that the Dorner hunt shootings went unpunished.
Yes, but that was a store clerk. If there had been video of the shooting itself, almost none of this would have happened.
The left wants more White cops dead and more non-White thugs canonized as saints.
What needs to happen is when the sheriffs come to DC next month, they need to march into the White House and arrest Obama for his crimes against the USA. Never happen, of course.
“Thats why I gave up on Fox. Their idea of “fair and balanced” is forcing me to listen to some screamer.”
That’s what the mute button is for! Like you, I refuse to watch the likes of Colmes (except when his SiL Monica Crowley is whippinghis a$$), Whorealdo, Gemooooo Greene, the Smarmy Mexican Lawyers who push amnesty (there are at least two). The jury is still out on Kirsten Powers now that she “found religion” by getting laid by a “christian.”
“In a twist on biting the hand that feeds you, we are instead tying the hand that defends us. We are sending them out, and waiting for the first chance to gut them.”..
The bastards have also tied the hands of our military when they ordered to NOT FIRE unless you are fired upon. If you are in a war, you should fight to win. Same goes for the police, when someone is trying to kill you, SHOOT TO KILL. Thank You Officer Wilson!
America’s cops should realize that their chief executive, zero, jumped on this incident in August to try to use it to affect the November midterms.
Just as zero used the media to cover up Benghazi to protect himself before the ‘12 election, he used the media to ignite passion about Ferguson- even against substantial evidence that Brown was a thug who attacked a cop- before the midterms to try to save his sorry party.
zero sacrificed the truth for political ideology, and threw the officer and his brothers in blue under the bus to further his transformation of America.
America’s police officers... wake up!! Stand with the people of America! The administration is NOT on your side, but the Constitution (rule of law) is!
Was Michael Brown guilty?
Hands down!
When libs accuse me of watching Fox (they mean it as an insult), I just tell them that it’s too liberal of a news source for me LOL
They are always shocked. :)
” What worries me, is that a cop will
hesitate to react, given what has
happened in Ferguson, and we’ll be
attending the funeral of a fallen law
enforcement officer.”
The NY stairwell shooting was a cop who DIDN’T hesitate, and killed a man for no reason. Some of these cops need to start hesitating a little. People are getting sick and tired of these mistakes, and the cops walking from them.
Defend themselves, yes. But they need to get reasonable back into the standards and stop letting SWAT create confusing situations that get people killed.
In the end, cops are paid to risk their lives to protect the innocent, not kill the innocent to avoid risk.
Pure crap. How will this help enforcement? Will it be able to fully place what is happening in context or what is happening off camera? How will it affect those being recorded? Will it lead to more lawsuits, frivolous and otherwise?
Assuming that option is not politically acceptable, the alternative may be to have all patrols consist of no less than two officers. Setting one cop loose in the hood to be at a numerical disadvantage doesn’t seem wise to me. This would also provide two police witnesses to each encounter.
The objective of these protests is to de-legitimize local
police forces by characterizing them as racist, incompetent and murderous.
The next step is a “national” police/security force.
IMHO
Precisely. Obama and Sharpton calling for calm while they are actually inciting violence by justifying it. These are the skills honed by the Community Organizer-in-Chief during his days in Chicago.
It was no coincidence that Obama had a meeting in the WH the day after the midterms with Sharpton and some of the Ferguson activists. It was a strategy meeting to direct the efforts of the agitators. Ferguson is a distraction from the executive amnesty, the Iranian surrender deal, and a host of other Obama efforts to transform America.
And forgotten in all of this is that this nice young man somehow was excused a few years earlier of some other criminal charge which I recall was related to a homicide. He was just to young to have the punishment and was going to school. The whole fabric of claims against officer Wilson was to get work free compensation. I am not especially endeared with todays ‘police’ at all levels and kinds but I am even less endeared with good vibes about people who use black skin or Afro heritage to harass other people. Many years ago before WWII I was raised as a playmate with children of African heritage and I worked for one of the finest persons I have ever known who was of black heritage as her dining helper at a well known university boarding house. Because of my natural dark skin I was often called ‘nigger’. I know in my heart there are many of the finest people in this world who have African heritage. I also know there are evil people of any culture so an evil black person like young Brown surprises me no more than an evil Jeffry Dalmar (whatever that guy’s name was).
What the Obama administration wants is to make our police forces as Black as the NBA. They want to centralize control of all police around the country, under a single federal union, similar to what they did with the hospitals, but with more central control of hiring and promotions.
This has been a goal for years, but the left lost their biggest proponent of the police union when Anthony Weiner was defeated. If you recal, Weiner had a big fight, right on the House floor, with King, the Republican from New York. It was a real screaming match.
You are setting a high bar indeed. Hesitation can cost you your life. You literally have seconds or fractions of seconds to react. Have you ever been in a life or death situation?
Police are human beings who have the same survival instincts you have. They are placed in dangerous situations against adversaries who can be well-armed and unpredictable. You can be shot dead during a routine traffic stop.
The overwhelming majority of police never fire their weapon in the line of duty. Yes, there are bad cops and cops that don't exercise the proper judgment. But just as there is death in combat and collateral damage due to friendly fire, you cannot expect cops to be mistake free in life threatening situations. The mistakes of a rare few should not be extrapolated to the many good cops who are risking their lives daily.
We should prosecute bad cops and hold them accountable. But we shouldn't fall into the meme that there is widespread lawless on the part of the police. There has been a rise of SWAT teams and the militarization of the police, but is this the result of the perceived threat or an initiative on their part unrelated to reality? We do know that violent crime has been decreasing nationally.
I find it ironic that Obama is citing the rule of law when he just legalized 5 million lawbreakers.
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