The Problem with Hating Cops
SHOT Show 2014, Las Vegas, NV / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
If you haven't read "Why We're So Mad at de Blasio," by Steve Osborne, a retired New York City police officer, you should. It served as a much-needed respite from the near non-stop anti-police tweets that have peppered my Twitter feed for the last several months.
More often than not, those tweets have spewed forth from the mouths of the various liberal journalists I follow. Seemingly completely lacking in self-awareness and without the vaguest qualification, they lynch police officers with unrelenting vigor and venom. Cops, they spout, are bad. Cops, they announce, are evil. Cops, they declare, are the real bad guys here.
Sometimes, as another tirade trickles down my feed, I wonder if any of these mostly male, mostly white liberal journalists know any police officers. It seems they don't. For them, it appears, police officers are some foreign invading army that has come to town and must be pilloried. The way they talk about police officers, you get the sense they believe all police officers are inhuman, or subhuman, or not human at all.
That's why Osborne's piece is so poignant: because he dares to do what seemingly no one else is doing, which is to paint a portrait of the real lives of police officers. "I sometimes regret having dragged her into the life with me," Osborne laments of his wife, who must bear the shared stress of his dangerous job. He shows us the human side of the badge.
Between here and there, I dated a few police officers. I was never a cop's wife, and I was no badge bunny, but I got a slice of what it's like to be involved with someone whose day job involves the reality that they might leave for work and get killed on any given day. The police officers I dated were the types of guys who ran towards fires, ventured into buildings from which gunfire had emanated, understood they might die doing a job that, at the end of the day, didn't even pay all that well.
I guess the liberal journalists I follow don't know those police officers. They have an idea of what all police officers are like, and that stereotype is what they tweet about daily. They do so while hiding behind their glowing screens, tucked in their offices, doing jobs in which they almost never risk their anything for anybody on any day.
Of course, eventually, something bad will happen to some of these liberal journalists. Their car will get broken into, and they'll call the police. They'll get mugged, and they'll call the police. They'll get into a car accident, and they'll call the police. Or maybe something worse will happen to them or to someone they love, and they'll call the police.
The officers will show up to do their jobs, and those same liberal journalists who screeched their anti-police rhetoric online will thank the officers very much for doing their jobs, and then those liberal journalists will go back to doing whatever it is they do for a living in their safe little lives.