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MissDominae -> RE: Oklahoma Cops Attack Paramedics (6/13/2009 7:36:00 PM)
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Slaveboy for you,
as I believe you will reject this post's content or, as least, pick a thousand holes in it for various reasons, I find myself wondering why I am bothering to post it. Perhaps it is just that, in my view, it needs to be said.
I was a serving member of my State Police between 1978 - 1996. I am not American and have not served in an American police system but, given the generalitisations you make towards Police members I doubt that disqualifies my comments, so here goes.
Police are all too human. In my 18 years of service I never met one who joined for power or corrupnness. Au contraire, all that I met joined through a sense of idealism; a serious desire to do something positive for their community, to make the world a better place for all who live in it. That idealism is beaten down and broken down over years of assaults, abuse, stress, danger, disrespect, physical and emotional pain and a system geared towards the rights of the criminal above all else; by that I mean that it takes every and all steps to ensure that NO guilty person is ever convicted. Like every system it fails but please accept this as a truth - that system sees a large number of guilty people released for every not guilty person it convicts nd most police, as much as they grumble when someone they "know" is guilty gets off, would NOT have it any other way. The though of the innocent being convicted is anathema to them.
The breakdown of that idealism takes many faces. Some become insensitive and yes, brutal, but only a VERY few. More by far become less effective; less inclined to work as hard or go that extra yard or put in that extra hour. They go through the motions, do what they have to and go home. Others become very dysfunctional through alcohol, stress or the like. Some become crooks themselves, and EVERY serving Police member hates and despises a crooked cop, and a brutal cop, because it makes the job that much harder for every one of us. We may not like our local equivalent of Internal Affairs very much - it is not human nature to "like" those whose only job appears on the surface to be hounding us and second guessing through hindsight every split second snap decision we make, but we all recognise the necessity for such a group and cooperate with it. As I said earlier; cops hate crooked or brutal cops even more than you do; you can choose to believe that, or not - I don't care.
Take a group of ordinary, everyday members of your community. Train them and guide them, arm them and educate them. Prepare them as best as you can ......... and then watch what the job does to them over the ensuing years. Watch what scraping teenagers off the side of a lamppole after a car accident does to them. Watch them get the crap beaten out of them during a brawl because both sides of the brawl turn on them the moment they arrive, and yet then watch them be patched up, healed and go out to do it all over again. Watch them cry over the 12 year old crack addict that just died in their arms, or the still-bleeding corpse of the wife just murdered by her drunken husband (or vice versa; it does happen). Be with them as they pay their final respects to one of their own who ran out of luck one day, or ran out of courage and couldn't face another day ....... and look inside them as they realise all too clearly that their day might come as soon as their next shift. See the faces of their families as they leave for their shift, never knowing if their loved one will come home, EVERY SINGLE DAY of their working life.
Administraive leave after an incident such as you describe is standard. It allows the prosecutors to investigate fully, allows the medical and mental health of the Officer to be ascertained and monitored and allows the facts to be established independantly. OF COURSE it is paid leave - until such time as charges are laid the person is INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. Remember that one? Ever heard of 'Due Process"?
I am not going to abuse or criticise you for your posts. What I am going to say is this - you have no justification in making sweeping generalisations about all Police based on the acts of a statistical few, and all the comments you make come from the perspective of someone who CANNOT understand the consiant difficulties inherent in policing because you have never been in the situation to find out. You should never sit on a Jury against a Police member because you are not their peer, yet it is biased folk like you who form the juries that all charged Police Officers must fact. Even given that circumstance, the conviction rate for Police Officers charged for violence-related crimes is (I am told) under 20%. What does that say to you?
Police officers are not perfect. They are human. They make mistakes and do the wrong thing and even break laws sometimes and they deserve to face the consequences of those acts, but they ALSO deserve to be given the decency to have the entire picture of their lives and work circumstances looked at, not just the narrow little slice you choose to view..
I won't be reading any replies to this nor responding to any comments, because I know it won't change any minds. It was said because I owed that to the men and women I served with, bled with and, in too many cases, watched burn out, break down and even die. Someone who had been there had to answer the vitriol of people like you who had not been there. I might have been retired for 15 years but the call came for someone to Uphold the Right, and I answered the call ........ just as they do, time after time. You can hand your Uniform back but you never really take it off.
Slaveboyforyou, you just run along and go hang out with your friends and bitch about cops to your heart's content. Those same cops will be out there keeping you safe whilst you do, and whilst you sleep, and whilst you're celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hannukah or whatever. No matter how much you hate them, despise them, sneer at them, spit at them, they will still do all they can to save you in a time of need, to protect your rights and to allow you to live safely and free. Yes, there are bad ones but there are a hell of a lot more good ones that your sneering disrespects for no reason. People like you choose to overlook that.
I pity you your bias. To never see the good that exists in the world; how sad that must be.
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