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It would have been wonderful if\u00a0Mr. Lynch had woken\u00a0up this morning\u00a0and had the good sense to say “Sorry, I was overcome with emotion last night. I spoke out of turn. Most protesters are trying to make\u00a0a better world for their families; most cops do the best they can and we all have to work together to weed out\u00a0the members of both groups who don’t.” It would have been great if somebody had talked that much\u00a0sense into him.<\/p>\n
But of course\u00a0that didn’t\u00a0happen. Today instead brought\u00a0statements by Rudy Guiliani and Scott Brown (and I’m sure plenty more) screeching\u00a0that the problem is ‘divisive rhetoric from the White House’ and City Hall. Groups of police were shown turning their back on Mayor De Blasio arriving at the scene.<\/p>\n
Nobody in any official capacity incited\u00a0violence. De Blasio and Obama said nothing\u00a0divisive. What\u00a0they did – a sin beyond redemption – was acknowledge that not every police officer does the absolute\u00a0100% totally correct thing all the time. They made it worse by suggesting that, when police officers\u00a0screw up, it’s appropriate\u00a0that they be\u00a0indicted and stand trial like the other 98% of the population.<\/p>\n
A policeman has a difficult, near impossible job. He deals with bad people all the time and good people only\u00a0at their worst. He is charged with protecting us from unforeseeable dangers and blamed for every bad or even imperfect decision he makes under continuous, extreme pressure. I get that.<\/p>\n
But that’s the job, tough. You don’t want to live with that, don’t do it. Be an electrician, a plumber, an architect, a soldier, a writer, I don’t care. When you take on the badge and the responsibility, we demand you be responsible. We demand you live up to that job. And most cops do most of the time.\u00a0But when dumb cops – or good cops, for that matter – screw it up, they have to be indicted the same way we would.<\/p>\n
I said indicted, by the way, not convicted. The protests were over lack of indictments. The man gets a day in court, he gets the chance to tell us all why he did what he did. Maybe we all learn it’s not so easy. Maybe some cops realize that what sounds funny and right in the station house doesn’t always sound so good when you’re saying it out loud to the people you’re supposed to be protecting.<\/p>\n
Grand juries indict 98% of the individuals brought before them. They indict 1% of the police officers, even when they shoot unarmed civilians, even when they choke them to death using an illegal hold on videotape.<\/p>\n
In a world that pays bosses $100 million a year while workers\u00a0struggle to get by,<\/p>\n
-where Walmart has managers on public assistance while the Walton family has as much money as the bottom 42% of the American population,<\/p>\n
-where citizens\u00a0defaulting on their mortgages lose their homes and savings while\u00a0the banks that sold securities based on those fraudulent loans get bailed out and pay hundreds of millions in bonuses the same year,<\/p>\n
-where a man\u00a0gets tackled by a gang of cops for selling loose cigarettes while Jamie Dimon can call the Attorney General’s office and have them postpone an\u00a0indictment against JP Morgan Chase\u00a0over $7 billion in fraudulent transactions because when Jamie Dimon\u00a0calls, they pick up the phone and say ‘Yes, Sir!’<\/p>\n
– in a world like that, the bottom-line issue for a whole lot of us is fairness.<\/p>\n
We’re\u00a0fed up with a system that’s rotten and corrupt to the gills and that is treating us like what’s left on the bottom of someone’s shoe at the end of a rainy day. So it’s not your guys, Pat Lynch, it’s certainly not just your guys\u00a0–\u00a0but the cleansing\u00a0starts here.<\/p>\n
The favoritism ends, the favoritism that’s everywhere, has to end and it’s the\u00a0rest of us, the millions of the rest of us,\u00a0who are demanding that guilty parties large and small be called on the carpet and held accountable. Not just the powerless ones, not anymore; we want to see in the block\u00a0even\u00a0the ones who can call the Attorney General or pull out a police courtesy card.<\/p>\n
That’s how this is all\u00a0going to end. It can\u00a0take a while or it can\u00a0happen fast. It can end with political reform, voted in by the legislature and signed in polite solemn ceremonies by humbled politicians – or it can end with rows of guillotines in the public square and who the fuck knows whose head is coming off today.<\/p>\n
Let’s all acknowledge it would be really horrible if it turned out to be the latter.<\/p>\n
The difference between one and the other might be restraint on all sides, not escalating at a reflex, not tarring everyone you disagree with because of the tragic acts of today’s headline\u00a0lunatic, but instead making an effort to understand how the other side feels. Believe it or not, Pat and Rudy and Scott and Bill Bratton and the good cops I see on the streets, I’m trying real hard to see your side.<\/p>\n
Try a little harder to see mine. Please.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two NYPD officers were shot dead Saturday. Their blood isn’t cold yet. Apparently the man who shot them made ‘anti-police postings’ on Instagram before he carried out this assassination. Pat Lynch, the president of the Policeman’s Union, wasted no time …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[240,241,238,239],"class_list":["post-2247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cop-shooting","tag-eric-garner","tag-justice","tag-ny-protests"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2247"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2264,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2247\/revisions\/2264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}