Police Publication Endorses Trump
By: Carol Burt
Tags: Police, Criminal Justice Reform, Police Reform, Criminal Justice

Police Publication Endorses Trump

Law Enforcement Today, a magazine owned and published by law enforcement officers, made an announcement this week that although they’ve never endorsed a presidential candidate previously, they are endorsing Donald Trump.

Well, color me surprised. Of course, they did. They joined ranks with the police unions and sheriff’s associations around the country. They know what side their bread is buttered on. They must support their readers’ and advertisers’ choices, even if he is a two-bit con man.

Nevertheless, it is despicable and shows the general fall of morals among police officers. Their publication supports a man who has been found to have lied over 2,000 times to the American public he supposedly serves. He doesn’t even try to make his lies believable anymore.

He’s “talked down,” as he told Bob Woodward, coronavirus and made people think it’s no big deal until we have 200,000 dead. He’s poo-pooed the idea of wearing masks as doctors and scientists beg us to. He and his administration were woefully unprepared for a pandemic, and largely because he had closed the arm of his administration whose job it was to keep us prepared for a pandemic. It was among many human services functions of the government that he deemed unnecessary.

If it’s ok to support a president who lies, is it ok to lie? Is that the takeaway?

Because it sure seems that way? Police officers were once looked up to as heroes in the eyes of the nation’s children. What now? They are heroes who support a lying, misogynist, racist president who is accused of raping numerous women and who was surrounded by a whole mob who went to prison — after he was elected.

I’m horribly disappointed in Law Enforcement Today, and disappointed in the law enforcement officers I once worked beside who support Trump. I do not understand. Do they support him just because he gives them lip service? Do they not know the horrible things he’s done to the country? Or do they not care? Are they so scared of having their budgets cut and not being able to buy all the state-of-the-art equipment sold by the sellers who advertise in their magazine that they will align themselves with an obviously corrupt president and administration?

Working in Law Enforcement blinds one to the rest of the world.

I know there are still some law enforcement officers with different and varying opinions. But I’ve been saddened and perplexed to learn in recent months that almost all law enforcement officers I’ve worked with in the past support Trump. Supporting Trump requires total disregard for what Trump has done to the United States. Unfortunately, I’m not sure many LE officers realize there is anything of importance outside the criminal justice system. Working in law enforcement blinds one to the rest of the world.

And they don’t care. They don’t care about our standing on the international stage; they don’t care that Trump has damaged our image so much it will take years to build it back. They don’t care, apparently, that he is a very thinly veiled white supremacist. They don’t care that he befriends the worst tyrants of the world and offends our long-term and faithful allies.

It’s heartbreaking, but I have longtime friends, many of them retired law enforcement officers like me, who don’t love me like they used to because I not only do not support Trump, I actively work against him. I guess they are lost to me since I will continue to oppose Trump and all he stands for. No matter what the crowd says.

The majority of us are done with Trump…

Hopefully, at the election, they and the rest of the country will find out in no uncertain times that the majority of us are done with Trump, with the clown house he has made of our government, and with the lies, and more lies.

Trump is the biggest factor in the loss of over 200,000 lives as he downplayed Covid19 and told people they didn’t need to wear a mask or take precautions.

He’s doing that still today as people continue to be hospitalized and die from the virus. He has coronavirus himself, and still, unbelievably, is putting others at risk by continuing to work in the West Wing, thereby exposing others. He should be staying in his residence in isolation, like everyone who has the virus is expected to do. He is probably a super-spreader. But his narcissistic egotism blinds him to any real concern about other people.

They’re hard on crime unless their president is the one committing them.

I’m having trouble with why law enforcement officers or their publication would be proud to support an obviously criminal enterprise. Of course, these are the same people who want to keep nonviolent offenders in prison. They’re hard on crime unless their president is the one committing them. Their sense of right and wrong must have been skewed by working “on the job,” as it is called. That can happen. I’m an example of how people working inside the system as police officers can lose their way. I did. But I have corrected myself. (I’ll write more about that later).

Over 1200 healthcare workers have died because they did not have the proper equipment to protect themselves.

I know, and the police know, too, that their demands that everyone has to do everything they want and give them all the equipment they request because they are in dangerous jobs are a bunch of malarkey. Compare on any given day how many people are killed violently (attacked or killed in car wrecks, fires, etc.) who were just living their own lives with how many police officers are killed that day in the line of duty. How about the healthcare workers who have lost over 1200 of their ranks to coronavirus this year? They did not have the equipment they needed while they did their terribly dangerous jobs.

Policing is dangerous, but far from the most dangerous job.

Believe me, in some locations these days it’s as dangerous to be a private citizen as it is to be a law enforcement officer. Many professions are much more dangerous. Farming is more dangerous, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So is professional fishing and working in related jobs in the fishing industry. Steelworkers, roofers, and construction and extraction workers are in jobs more dangerous than the police. (Bureau of Labor Statistics) Police don’t like anyone to know it, but their jobs are not the most dangerous in the country. They are dangerous, yes. But far from the most dangerous way to make a living.

We must take them off the pedestal we put them on by being told constantly that they are risking their lives for us. Most of them aren’t doing the job out of a sense of duty or desire to protect citizens. Most of them are addicted to the adrenalin rush and the authority. There’s a joke that cops would pay to do their jobs — and there’s some truth to it.

After I had already been a police officer, I experienced managing police through a police chief I appointed while I served as mayor of a small town of about 10,000 people. Managing police officers is difficult work. Any time budgets are discussed among municipal government, the police are the first to have their hands out, and, in truth, they get the biggest budgets in most city governments. Their lobby is hard to withstand, and they threaten the job security of any mayor or police chief who doesn’t go along with their demands.

…they are spoiled rotten.

Basically, among public employees, they are spoiled rotten. Because just as they bully on the streets, they bully municipal, county, and state governments. They usually get their way. You may not notice it, but the police departments in many small towns have more cars than they have personnel to drive them during any given shift. They buy the best cars. They convinced the city councils in numerous small towns that they need sports utility vehicles, usually with four-wheel-drive, instead of the lowly sedans that served them just fine for so many years. The purchase of expensive cars to ride around in is just one more way they’ve found to elevate themselves on the public dime.

They operate like a mob…

Police are the gossip masters. They can wreck a career in no time by spreading a rumor, true or not. And they will if someone gets in their way. They get what they want from city administrators because they make it their business to find ways to control things. They operate like a mob, deciding who they will support for an office, and often prevailing. They collect information on citizens who may be inclined to criticize them publicly. They collect information on political enemies. They have at least eight hours a day out in public to support or trash a political candidate. Don’t think they don’t do it.

They are not supporting Donald Trump because they think he is good. They are supporting him because he is the candidate most likely to keep up their sorry status quo. The entire police structure in this country needs to undergo profound change. Police are hard to manage. They are the bravest. They will rush to danger like bugs to a light. They thrive on it. They are able, and they are good at what they do — when they want to be. They carry life and death on their hips, and they are accustomed to it.

Some feel called to serve.

Even though I criticize what has happened to our police, I still love the police at their best and know some of them are working because they feel called to use their special set of gifts to serve. Some of them are out there to keep us safe. Some of them are ready to die to protect any citizen. But some of them are rotten, dangerous, outlaws. And some of them are cowards who shoot too soon because they are afraid. A coward is the most dangerous thing in the police force.

Get hired through the good ole boys network.

The way police get hired in too many small towns is who they know rather than how qualified they may be. In lots of mostly rural states, no one can get on the police department unless they are members of the boys club that run everything. There was an attempt to stop that with law enforcement standards invoked in most states. But they’ve found ways around it.

There are some exceptions. There are police agencies led by honest men and women, but unless they do what the rank and file want, they will find it hard to keep their jobs. That is the truth.

We’ve lost control…

We’ve lost complete control of the police. Cities, counties, and even some states have police writing their own rules and getting a rubber stamp from authorities. The average person has no idea how far out of control they are. We see from the police the result of what has been happening for a very long time.

We’ve allowed them to be bullies both on the streets and in the city council chambers to the point they now feel they are invincible.

We’ve allowed them to amass weapons of war to be used against their own communities, against the taxpayers who feed them. We’ve allowed them to develop training practices that are not representative of what their jobs should be. We’ve allowed them to become confused about the difference between a civilian law enforcement officer and a soldier in a hostile land.

They are training as an army of occupation, not as peace officers. There’s a huge difference between police patrol and occupation by a hostile force. What we see now is occupation by a hostile force with weapons of war.

As someone who was once a police officer and loved it — I know what it’s like to be a police officer, and I know the prevailing attitudes. Before it got so bad, and before I personally realized how wrong the training and goals are for police, I was an officer. Police have lost sight of the goal. We have built a monstrous machine with allegiance to no one or nothing — except the police force itself and the members thereof.

The bad guys have taken over.

In case people don’t know it, they believe it is their place to “own” the streets and decide whether we can use them or not. They carry out vendettas. They seek revenge often against someone who has testified against them in court or criticized them in a letter to the newspaper, etc. They do. Not all, but enough to make it an extremely troubling situation.

The bad guys have taken over. We brought back many badass soldiers from Middle Eastern wars and put them on the police departments without sufficient retraining. They then started training other cops to operate like soldiers in an enemy town. Once I was teaching a law enforcement class, I got into an argument with a group of other officers. I told them they are civilians, and they argued that they are not. They do not know they are civilians. Anymore.

Them versus us has grown into a feeling among them that we are theirs to control. Watch police. By what law do they make people move from where they are standing? By what law do they block a group of people from walking down a street together? They do not recognize civil rights just as they would not recognize rights in conquered enemy territory.

We have to take down their entire structure and start over…

And we know and can see that these things have happened to them. We have to do more than reimagine them. We have to take down their entire structure and start over by making a police officer a job like any other public job, and stop letting them occupy our cities and towns — which is exactly what they are doing. They need to be busted down to what they are meant to be — public servants with authority. Some authority. Not complete authority.

We need to make them no more exempt from the justice system than any other public worker. We need to make them adhere to the laws they supposedly enforce.

Many of our law enforcement officers are dangerous, puffed up, full of themselves and their authority. They say, and I’ve been told many times that they are the only people alive who can act as judge, jury, and executioner on the street. And they emphasize that police are the only people in the country who are not expected to avoid danger or move out of harm’s way. No, they think they should kill anyone who represents a threat. The big difference between them and regular citizens is they have no obligation to back away from trouble if possible. They’ll go right to it.

The whole criminal justice system is a mess.

That is not the way they should be trained. It is a mess. The whole criminal justice system is a mess, and that’s only a small part of what is wrong. The police unions are running the police departments in most large cities — not the administrators. If chiefs get crossways with the police union or try to make big changes, they will get run out of a job.

It’s happening all the time.

The public needs to know what really goes on amongst the police and what most of them really think of everyone who isn’t them. Sometimes we are prey.

As I’ve said repeatedly, there are good, honest cops who want to protect their communities and all its citizens. But they are in the minority and will either be whipped into line or leave the job. The best individuals hired are soon sickened by what they learn about what really goes on and how the group-mind thinks.

Take it from me, a former cop, that something has to be done about the police. I’ve been there. I was infected with a cop-virus that makes monsters out of good people who become cops. I realized at some point that I no longer recognized myself, and it scared me away. I finished my career in law enforcement, working as a public safety officer on a college campus. It was much easier than working for a political entity, and the academics who were my bosses had no patience for heavy-handed police tactics. Colleges and universities should lead the way into criminal justice reform.

Reinvent their training, bust their unions…

We must stop the criminal justice system’s growing threat in this country — beginning at the bottom, with the rank and file officers. Reinvent their training, reinforce chains of command in their ranks, bust the unions that keep the brass from running agencies. Take the damn tanks and flame throwers and all that crap away from them. The average police shooting happens within 3 to 10 feet. They don’t need all that junk. They need negotiation and de-escalation training. They also need help from social service, psychiatric services, and counselors, but they aren’t going to want it.

It shouldn’t be theirs to decide. Somehow, we must move back into a position where police officers work FOR the community, not against its citizens. Somehow we must stop hero-worshipping the police and apologizing for their jobs being dangerous and make being a police officer a job and not an attitude.

If we don’t get control, we will all be living in occupied communities. It sort of feels like that already.