“Be Careful Out There”
NBC has a round up on the recent attacks on police officers: Police fear ‘war on cops’
A spate of shooting attacks on law enforcement officers has authorities concerned about a war on cops.
In just 24 hours, at least 11 officers were shot. The shootings included Sunday attacks at traffic stops in Indiana and Oregon, a Detroit police station shooting that wounded four officers, and a shootout at a Port Orchard, Wash., Wal-Mart that injured two deputies. On Monday morning, two officers were shot dead and a U.S. Marshal was wounded by a gunman in St. Petersburg, Fla.
On Thursday, two Miami-Dade, Fla., detectives were killed by a murder suspect they were trying to arrest.
“It’s not a fluke,” said Richard Roberts, spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. “There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on.”
This is dangerous for everyone. Police officers are subject to attacks of paranoia, like everyone else, but they carry guns, and may be “trigger-happy” for a while. While you know the badge is potentially a target, events like these make it seem bigger, no matter where you work, or how quiet your beat is. The Detroit station attack is, in some ways, the most unnerving, because you don’t expect it, not on your home ground.
If you have any interaction with police officers for at least the next month, don’t make any sudden moves. They are likely to be on edge, and will probably overreact.
2 comments
I assure you that I am always careful around heavily armed men, whether said heavily armed man wears a badge or not. The only person who argues with a heavily armed man or behaves in any way that might upset a heavily armed man is a moron. I value my life too much to argue with a man with a gun.
One thing that all these increasingly draconian laws imposed upon the little people (but not upon our leaders) is doing is creating an environment where disrespect for the law is rampant. The “thin blue line” can be thin because the majority of people are law-abiding people who don’t want to willingly break the law. But we’re breaking that down here, which is why we have the largest prison population both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers of any nation on the planet. As the police become “the enemy” to more and more people, the police in turn start behaving like an occupation army rather than a preservers of public order. It is a downhill spiral that ends with either a full-fledged police state with widespread repression against ordinary citizens, or with collapse of public order as police officers are killed and decide to leave their jobs rather than risk dying, a.k.a. the Afghanistan scenario. Unfortunately the desire to criminalize everything that offends someone doesn’t appear to be relenting, so I don’t see what’s going to stop this. It’s all just a matter of which extreme we’re going to end up with — North Korea Lite, or Afghanistan Lite. Neither one holds any appeal for me…
— Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
The election time vice sweeps were the pits. Taking people off of real crimes to harass people who were making a living the only way they knew so some politician could claim to be tough on crime was a total waste of resources. At budget time the pols ask about the low level of ‘crap crime’ arrests and ignore the clearance rate on crimes of violence and theft. Apparently solving and reducing crimes that had real victims wasn’t as important as ‘seeming to be moral’.
I’m just happy that I don’t have to ‘keep a lid on’ a group of jumpy, armed people any more. I had to lead them through the ‘body armor doesn’t make you Superman’ phase, and don’t want to deal with this garbage. After those two deputies were gunned down by the winger whacko, it was a very touchy time around here. Fortunately the Sheriff got caught with his hand in the till and a mistress on the payroll, so cops had other things to think about than being gunned down every shift.