Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column has two snippets I wanted to share. The first, the opening of the column, is about as good a characterization of politics in today’s United States as I’ve seen:
Public opinion on how America does its policing has devolved into two camps. The first is highly progressive, driven by ideological certitudes and made possible by a generally limited experience of life. These are the defund-the-police people, small in number and suffering in public support but effective at pushing their agenda through highly ideological district attorneys.
The other camp is all “back the blueâ€â€”police are heroes who put their lives on the line to protect us.
In neither camp do people feel free to depart to any degree from their side. A progressive can’t say, “Jeez we’re going too far against the cops, my grandmother’s afraid to leave the house.†That person would be thrown out of Democratic Socialists of America. If you are back-the-blue, you can’t look with a critical eye at the cops.
All I can add to that is that ideological bias is always wrong. Ideology always fails to match up with objective reality, with empirical facts.
She follows that with a characterization and analysis of the recently published videos of the Uvalde school shooting which leads to the next snippet:
Later the police veteran sent me a Texas state directive, training guidance published in 2020, on active-shooter response for school-based incidents. It puts the first priority in caps: STOP THE KILLING. The second, also in caps: STOP THE DYING. “First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent,†it reads. â€They must accept the role of “Protectorâ€: “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.â€
When force protection becomes the highest priority of law enforcement officers, it naturally leads on to wonder what we need them for. Wouldn’t completely avoiding dangerous situations be the surest way to ensure force protection? I can’t help but wonder if that’s not what we’re seeing in the reduced police activity about which I posted yesterday.
Being a police officer is a hard, unpleasant, dangerous, necessary job. I wouldn’t want to do it but I’m glad that somebody does. It’s not like being a firefighter. Firefighters are always heroes. A police officer is always the goat to somebody.
Actually, the very large majority of people support the police. Most police are decent people and most do a decent job. The problem is when they go bad or screw up. If the good cops would stop covering up for the bad ones then a big chunk of our problems go away.
Steve
” If the good cops would stop covering up for the bad ones then a big chunk of our problems go away.”
That’s a true statement, steve. But you do know that your profession is notorious for the same.
As is yours, but mine has taken a lot of steps to try to get rid of bad docs. We go through an incredible number of checks to try to catch bad docs and do lots of internal monitoring. We do have a weakness in having licensing controlled at the state level so it is possible to being in someone from out of state with issues and not be aware. This is very much unlike the police where the union protects them regardless of wha they do, where in individual states or cities it is illegal to pass on information about bad police behavior and where they are largely granted immunity for what they do.
Steve