Blue lives matter.
BZ
The sound of silence
Tag Archives: law enforcement
Dear officer, I see you
No more to be said than that.
BZ
Humanity
Good luck reading the article and then watching the video.
From PoliceOne.com:
Colo. officer sings to young girl after fatal accident
Photo shows officer singing to little girl after accident kills father, injures mother and siblings
by PoliceOne Staff
BRIGHTON, Colo. — A photo of an officer holding a small girl in front of a fatal car wreck is going viral, USA Today reports.
Officer Nick Struck arrived third on the scene to a one-vehicle fatal crash that ejected all six passengers. The two-year-old girl was handed to Struck as her family received medical attention.
The girl’s father was killed in the crash, while her mother and other three siblings were injured.
“When you hear that there’s children involved, I’ll tell you what, everyone that responds to that scene, you get that pit in your stomach,”” Struck told USA Today.
Struck tried to distract the girl in order to make her feel better. He did what he would want another dad to do if it was his two-year-old daughter, he said.
So he began to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
“I remember when I was holding her, she was grabbing the back of my arm, which is something my daughter does. Just stroking to the music, ‘Twinkle, twinkle’,” Struck said to USA Today.
The moment was captured by witness Jessica Matrious, who said she saw the vehicle blow a tire and lose control.
Any time you believe you’re having a bad day, remember this.
And remember those evil American law enforcement officers.
BZ
P.S.
That’s it for me. I am now officially a retired law enforcement officer as of today. My last day at work was yesterday. That makes 35 years with my current department and 41 years serving, overall.
I shall miss the job terribly.
Thomas Sowell: paying the price
Seldom do I quote the bulk of articles I consult for reference here in my blog, with rare exceptions.
This is one exception, and I gladly, gladly proffer credit to economist Thomas Sowell.
Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters.
Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.
Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”
None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, “Are Cops Racist?” Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.
If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?
Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible words and actions, are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices.
Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists.
So let’s not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians’ personal interests, and often in terms of the media’s personal interests or ideological leanings, even if what they say bears little or no resemblance to the facts.
Of course, all these benefits have costs. There is no free lunch. But the costs are paid by others, including men, women and children who are paying with their lives in ghettos around the country, as politicians think of ever more ways they can restrict or scapegoat the police.
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice has been leading the charge, when it comes to presuming the police to be guilty — not only until proven innocent, but even after grand juries have gone over all the facts and acquitted the police.
Not only Attorney General Holder, but President Obama himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words.
The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done.
The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands — not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work.
By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.
It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies — which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.
Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.
And innocent men, women and children — most of them black — will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.
Thomas Sowell has said and written it.
And I believe it.
BZ
Non-US citizens are being hired as cops
If you wish to hasten the true and irretrievable death of our sovereign nation, you continue to do this to our local communities. If you don’t care and merely want to turn the United States into Mexico North — with its drug cartels and public shootings and beheadings (not unlike a death cult I can think of), keep to this path.
From USAToday.com:
Police departments hiring immigrants as officers
by Alan Gomez
Law enforcement agencies struggling to fill their ranks or connect with their increasingly diverse populations are turning to immigrants to fill the gap.
Most agencies in the country require officers or deputies to be U.S. citizens, but some are allowing immigrants who are legally in the country to wear the badge. From Hawaii to Vermont, agencies are allowing green-card holders and legal immigrants with work permits to join their ranks.
In other words: illegal immigrants. Not even full US citizens. Green card holders. Work permitters.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said he has no problems with green-card holders becoming police officers because they’ve made a long-term commitment to the country and have undergone extensive background checks. But he worries about the security risks associated with allowing any immigrant with a work permit to become an officer, especially considering that the Obama administration has given hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants work permits.
“We’re handing over a gun and a badge to somebody whose background we don’t really know a lot about,” Krikorian said.
As a cop, there isn’t much new under the sun that I haven’t already seen and, as we all know, life tends to be cyclical because we fail to learn from our past. I call that Historical Alzheimers.
We went through this problem in the early 90s, in terms of trying to find a sufficient number of qualified candidates to fill the cop ranks. And that became the operative phrase: “qualified candidates.” As a cop in the Sacramento Valley, working for a 2,000 + member department, I know that LAPD and LASO recruiters would drive north and attempt to poach recruits from our northern gene pool — strictly because they knew their southern gene pool was tainted with gangbangers and unqualified — ahem — scum, shall we say.
This kind of thinking roped LAPD into hiring, essentially, gangbangers. Hence: Rampanrt. Rampart was a failure of the LEO Liability Triumvirate:
1. Negligence in hiring;
2. Negligence in training, and
3. Negligence in retention
The same thing is beginning to occur all over again as LE agencies are in a bind for suitable candidates.
When I was hired, I took a test in our local huge community center which held over 300 seats. The written test was administered in three shifts, meaning that over 900 persons took the written test that day.
From that compilation, for my department, I came out in Rank One, as Number One. When I passed the academy that became my career ranking and seniority. I am extremely proud to have come out in Rank One and Number One as an academy recruit.
When I was hired, the question was “have you done any drugs, do you have any large debts and what are they?”
Today, the question is: “you haven’t done any illegal drugs within the past month, have you?”
With marijuana laws breaking down, the question is soon to be “you haven’t just smoked a splib prior to walking into this room just now, have you?”
Because, as a law enforcement agency: you are what you hire. You want stoners to enforce laws, hire stoners. You want illegals for enforce laws, hire illegals. But the Logical Extension becomes this: the community gets what it tolerates for LEO hiring.
Let me state the obvious: if you think that hiring “more blacks” or “more Mexicans” or “more crazed Albanian dwarves” will “solve” law enforcement problems in every community, you and others are sorely mistaken. It won’t.
Again, let me state the obvious: in my department, the best recruits and hirees are military veterans. They are young, squared-away, used to regimentation and sacrifice, and have a sense of duty few others possess. They will be the future of my department, at least this decade. And I have done and am doing my best to groom and shape them appropriately.
But let’s be clear. Demography is prophecy. If Mexicans and Muslims out-procreate the rest of the US population, that’s your US future: Mexicans and Muslims.
My, what an interesting culture clash that is going to be.
BZ
REQUIRED READING:
1. Illegal Immigration – The View From A Police Officer’s Car