A few bad apples

I am not going to beat around the bush this time, and you will not find my usual dry humor in this blog.  But I have remained silent on this issue long enough, and its tearing me up inside thinking about it all day long.  Every day I am reading or hearing about another law enforcement professional in this country being killed or attacked in a cowardly manner by thugs.  The outcries on the internet are vast and sad.  There are too many officers out there now who fear for their safety.  And there has been a whole lot of finger pointing about why this is happening.  I am going to take some time today to point out the obvious for the many masses who cant seem to see it or say it.  I am also going to tell you how to fix it, but no one is going to listen.

I want to start by saying that I IN NO WAY SUPPORT OR AGREE WITH ANYONE ATTACKING A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER EVER!  I really don’t feel the need to explain my mentality on that, but what I have to say may come out sounding at times like I agree with these attacks- I do not. But at times, I honestly feel like I am the only one who understands why it's happening.

I recently watched a video of a female police officer on Facebook questioning these attacks and stating her concerns for herself and her fellow officers.  In 4 minutes, she repeated the phrase “a few bad apples” no less than 4 times.  “Every profession has a few bad apples”  The implication being that people should not be attacking law enforcement because of the actions of a few bad officers.   I agree with this, however lets deconstruct the bad apple scenario.  If you have a bad apple in a pile of apples, the approach to fixing this problem is you remove the bad apple from the pile and toss it.  If you remove the bad apple, set it on the shelf for a few days, then proceed to place it back in the pile, it not only does not solve your problem, but it makes the problem worse by corrupting the apples around it.

Law enforcement is the only profession in this country that we trust to police themselves in the matter of removing bad apples.  Over the last 30 years, just about every agency in this country has shown a nearly complete inability to handle this task with any reliability.  We have historically trusted the media to hold them to task on this issue, but in that arena the media has also failed.  Corrupted officers who have shown a continual disregard for the rights of the citizens they serve, are punished (if they are ever punished) by being given a few days of paid vacation and returning to work, committing the acts on more people.  The administrations of these agencies have continually failed to show good judgement in regards to handling these kinds of people.  Most news organizations will sit silently and speak little of this practice for fear of alienating the very agencies they rely on for their news stories and soundbites.

There was one particular officer that worked at the Police Department where I live for over a decade.  “Officer X” was very well known in the community.  I distinctly remember sitting at a bar one night downtown as he drove by in his cruiser.  “There goes crooked cop Officer X” I heard one patron say to another.  Now, almost the entire community knew that this guy was dirty.  He had a very long history of abuses and crimes he had committed on the job.  Administration did very little if anything to curtail it because he was a “good producer”.  They let him go on violating peoples civil rights for almost 10 years in my community and did nothing to stop it until he got himself into such a pickle legally, they had no choice but to fire him.

The Sheriff in my county is no better.  Several years ago, two of his deputies leveled allegations against my wife of interfering with an official investigation.  After six months of internal affairs work and investigations, these two deputies finally revealed that she had not in fact interfered with their investigation, and they admitted that they both lied under oath.  The Under Sheriff’s response to this: A shoulder shrug. I guess these things happen huh?  I caught that same Under Sheriff stealing from the citizens on election night several months later.  He had just been elected the new Sheriff of the county, and he celebrated the victory by having the Sheriff’s office helicopter do three flyovers at his party.  This being a violation of several election laws in Florida, I took the footage of the event that I shot to my then supervisor in the news business.  I was assured the story would be “handled” and then,  it quietly went away.  This happens because the news organizations do not wish to stir bad blood with the law enforcement agencies that they deal with.  It happens every day folks.  It happens in every agency, in every community in this country.

Offten times, when a foreseen disciplinary action is appearing to actually be a severe one, the officer is allowed to resign with no mark on his record.  That way he can move to another law enforcement agency and continue his disregard for laws.  This activity got so bad, that the Sarasota Herald Tribune built and maintains an entire website dedicated to tracking these officers in Florida and the agencies they move to.  You can check it out here:  Unfit For Duty.  When we take this back to our “Bad apple” analogy, if you remove all the bad apples from one pile and put them into another pile, well then you have still solved nothing. 

If you think that citizens have not noticed, that people who act more like the law,  than law enforcement officers, are being protected, then think again.  People see it, they talk about it, they share it.  It angers them.  That anger has been building and bubbling for years.  The recent trend in violence against law enforcers was not an overnight decision.  The people we have trusted for years to to be responsible for throwing out the “bad apples” have failed time and again.  Citizens know it, and they are letting that anger manifest itself in the most horrific way possible.  And it needs to stop-right now!

From where I sit, I can tell you the things that I can see that we need to do to.  It would probably go a long way if we formed some kind of organization that deals exclusively with allegations of police brutality and civil rights violations.  This agency should contain no current law enforcement officers-I’m sorry, but you have proven yourselves inept at policing your own.   It will take money.  It will take time.  It will take the commitment of retired law enforcement professionals with a track record of honesty.  Next, we need to seriously strengthen the whistle blower laws.  The first hand witnesses to these events are usually other law enforcement officers who are great at their jobs, and terrified to speak up.  Lets get them some real protection and let them speak out to help end this.   Affirmative action laws that insure that unqualified candidates are being hired to fill empty positions need to be repealed.  I know for a fact that there is a man working in my community as a law enforcement officer who can not read or write.  He was hired because he is black.  He was hired to fill a quota. Lastly, we need to abandon this unconstitutional war on drugs.  During prohibition, it didn’t take us nearly this long to figure out why gangsters were shooting at cops with Tommy guns.  Do the math people. Moving to make these changes would show people that we understand the problem, and we are trying to fix it.  But instead, we are standing around scratching our heads and pretending to wonder why people are so pissed off.

We have our officers operating under guidelines to fill Universal Crime Reports, quotas, mandatory minimum actions for maintaining federal grants and conviction rates for our county and state attorneys.  Hey, here is a novel idea: How about we let our law enforcement officers be law enforcement officers?  Make no mistake, EVERY single agency in this country has quotas for their officers to fill, despite the fact that numerous courts have found it to be unconstitutional.   Just because you don't call it a quota does not change what it is.  I have actually had it explained to me from a sitting Sheriff that there is no other way to gauge an officers performance.  Really? Here is another novel idea: How about you get off your lazy ass and review your officers performance individually. I thought that's what we were paying you for in the first place.  Quotas force officers to make bad judgement calls because they fear for their own "performance" and need to keep someone in handcuffs to make the boss happy.  That leads down the road to rotten apples. 

“The administrations” silence on this issue speaks volumes.  From our inept President down to our inept Police Chiefs and Sheriffs.  It really sucks that I feel like I have to be the one to point all this out, but I have been waiting, and no one else seems to want to.   The recent actions of these people, if escalated could possibly lead to either a mass abandonment of law enforcement officers, or a civil uprising or both.  I fear both scenarios, but I can tell you without hesitating, that if it comes to the latter, I will proudly stand on the blue line and defend my officers to the death.  I still believe that a vast majority of them are great people and deserve our support.  However, the apple cart needs to be upended.  We need to pick through the apples and toss the bad ones once and for all, and we need to save and protect the good apples for our future.  The apple of my eye is a law enforcement professional.  She is one of the good ones.  I write this today because I fear for her safety, and the safety of her peers.  I honestly hope that it will pry peoples eyes open just a little…. But I fear that it wont.