It's been....

...a bad week.

No matter how you want to describe it, paint it, view it .. whether you ascribe to the differing view points that are pro-protestor, pro-police, anti-riot or ACAB (all cops are bastards) -- it's been a week for the record books. 

And I find myself today having "the talk" with my 14 year old daughter, and trying to explain it to her.   Because I know she's getting some things from her friends, and some from online (which is essentially left slant heaven, every major media source), and from my ex (which is essentially ACAB), and...she needs perspective.  She's growing up as someone with dark skin in America, and more and more her features are developing into those of a young lady - she can't pass for a darkly tanned white girl anymore.  It's past time she's had the talk, for all that I despise the fact that she has to receive it.  

So where to start. 

Start with this.   If you aren't a minority in America, you don't understand what it's like.  You just don't. So don't say you do, don't try to, and don't try to "emphathize".   That's not an insult.  It's not a slam, or an attack.  It's a factual statement.  Until you've been "that person" in America, you can't understand what it's like.  I explained to my daughter that, at her age, she can't understand it...yet.   But she will, and I HATE that. 

I spent fifteen minutes caveat-ing to my daughter that, even so, the US is still by far one of the best places to be a minority.  In parts of France, hypocrisy still abounds and being black will get you ignored or beaten.  In Japan, being anything other than Japanese gets you treated like trash.  They rarely even try to hide it, beyond using Japanese language to hide their insults behind smiles.   In the middle east, being gay still gets you thrown off of roof tops or stoned, and it's not even considered a crime.  In parts of Russia, there's still enough anti-semitism that being openly Jewish gets you beatings from the police when you get pulled over.  

The fact that the news media here in the US picks up these stories, and makes such a big noise about them (and CAN make such a big noise about them) speaks volumes, if you have the education to step back and think logically, about just how rare they really are.  There are over 800,000 officers in the US, and that's municipal and troopers...not counting "aligned" law enforcement like MP's, Parole, Corrections, Deputies, AG's Investigators, and others.  Over 35 million interactions with the public by those municipal officers, per year.  So if you hear of between 20-30 minorities killed or seriously injured a year due to officers who should be prosecuted... it's horrid, but statistically it's still better than any other nation. 

Even Canada, yes sweet Canada, has issues.  Ask someone in Ontario about how a Newfie gets treated by local police.  Or ask someone from the First Nations about their treatment at the hands of the RCMP out in Newfoundland.  The difference is, their media doesn't pick it up and make a spectacle the way ours does. 

And that's not a bad thing.  The behavior of these officers should be brought to public attention when an officer goes bad.  Bearing in mind that sometimes the officer is innocent, so long as we protect their due process - being brought to the public eye is necessary to show the public that nothing is being hidden.  I've explained to more people than I can count in the last week - 10% of officers join a force for noble reasons.  10% join for the power.  And 80%...we join because it's a job.  So that 10% on a power trip - they need to be caught out, and called out.  But we still need to balance that with the knowledge that officers are citizens, and they have the rights to due process, the 4th and 5th amendment, and legal representation (and privacy, at least until convicted, as well).  

In the last week, we've seen a lot of video, back and forth.   We've heard a lot of vitriol, back and forth.  None of it is complete - never will you hear the entire story.   Because, as I've also been telling people for the last week - "everyone is the hero of their own story".  Nobody will post the part of the video where they ignore lawful orders for three hours.  They post the part after they've already thrown a brick at the cop, and the cop is now pushing back while they scream "please don't hurt me".  

Or they post conspiracy theory frame-by-frame bits of a man's head hitting the ground, to "prove" that the man was wearing a blood pack instead of having his head legitimately injured when it hits concrete. 

So in the last week, we've heard a lot of spin.  And thanks to an anti-law-enforcement media, most of it is anti-cop.   But there's also the push back (mostly from the kind of people I don't personally want supporting me quite so vocally), and it has a distinctly "they're all thugs anyway" flavor that turns my stomach as well. 

I've been stopped on the sidewalk by Philadelphia PD for a terry stop.  For those of you who don't know, a Terry Stop is what we used to call "Stop and Frisk".   Philly PD banned it years ago.  Most police departments did, after NYPD got their fingers smacked for doing Terry stops in a racially biased manner, back in the 90's, by the Department of Justice. We can still perform terry stops, so long as their incident to arrest or connected to reasonable and expressable suspicions (ie, we were going to stop them /anyway/, and the search/pat-down is just connected)...we can't stop them JUST TO pat them down.  So randomly performing a Terry Stop is a huge no-no.

Yet there I was, hands on the hood of my personal car, being patted down by a white cop while his equally white partner stood there with one hand resting on his holster and the other on his radio.  Because I was dark skinned, in an area that had been robbed the night before, and I was dressed street (unshaved, in a hoodie and ripped cargos).     

There was a moment of palpable embarrassment, and more ... fear, when the officer searching me pulled my badge out of my pocket.  

I decided on my position on this whole mess when he folded my wallet closed, shoved it into my chest, and told me "this didn't happen" before they walked away.  

It didn't happen? 

The hell it didn't.  

You know what happened? 

Two mouth breathers who probably can't spell Terry Stop or Reasonable Suspicion shoved me across a hood because I looked like what they think a thug looks like.  Their gear was a mess, their boots looked like the unpolished wal-mart specials of a minimum wage security fluffer, and the one searching me had a stain on his uniform.  Not a recent one.  No decent cop would have turned out for role call looking like that - and yet these two had been assigned to foot patrol, interacting with the community - looking that way. 

It's official.  Macho idiots have infiltrated the Philadelphia PD.   

And I blame you.  

(Surprised by where this is going?   Don't worry ... we're not down the rabbit hole just yet...)

For the last thirty years, police budgets have starved, and police departments have shrunk, and now we have the bottom of the barrel filling out departments with such short training times and such small yearly training budgets that hair dressers are required to do more training than many municipalities are.

Good cops are making do with a tenth of the budget they need, and relying on high school drop outs who should be relegated to working for AVIS security for minimum wage as partners  -- because the departments aren't offering enough to attract more talent.  The 10% of the "hero"cops are there because they want to be, and the 10% of the bad ones are there for the power... and in the middle you want to staff as many "solid" guys to try and out number the bad ones and push them out the door...but you'd rather cut budgets, save pennies, and leave departments with training budgets that look like your monthly grocery bill.   

So for 30 plus years we've been cutting and cutting and cutting police budgets and training budgets and recruiting budgets...

And here's what you are now reaping, America. 

Police officers no longer need a college degree in the overwhelming majority of cities and states.  In a few, they don't even need a diploma, just a GED.  Some cities have even done away with a credit check (that's how you tell if someone is open to a bribe, folks), or requiring personal references, and I know one city that will allow you to have a drug conviction (as long as it's only a summary or marijuana). 

That's not to say the guys getting hired are "bad" cops.   They aren't.  But you want the best quality people you can in that 80% in the middle, because those are the guys who are going to push the bad 10% out or the department.  That's where you're gonna find the career guys who stick around long enough to know what a bad cop smells like straight out of the Academy, and set him straight or set him on the path out the front door.  

Meanwhile, thanks to tiny budgets, municipal officers are required by most states' licensing to have only 40 hours of ongoing training a year. 

That's not even an hour a week, folks.   And a lot of states will accept "online" trainings.  Not because they don't want high quality cops - but because they know there's no budget to pay for anything else.

( ....   My Agency, and we're tiny by the way, the red-headed step child of a rented mule of a law enforcement agency in our community, has more than that many hours of mandatory training, in person, pass/fail, per year just as requirements to remain qualified and in possession of our firearm.   A single tool, of which we carry several and have to train and qualify yearly for each.  It's not possible for an Agent in my Agency to not get their 40 hours...they average 70, just to maintain possession of their weapons, taser, baton, OC, cuffs, and arrest authority for the year.  To only require 40 hours for a municipal officer...and worse, NOT TO FUND IT (most officers have to turn to outside organizations, like MAGLOCLEN, RISS, Killology, etc, for training hours) is disgusting.  ...  )

You may think this is becoming an ACAB rant - (all cops are bastards ... keep up now,) - but the reality is, YOU are the ones who cut their budget.  No cop in the world will vote for less training, or turn down the opportunity for more training.  I know this, because I work with officers of all stripes.  I work with Sheriff's deputies in prisoner transport, I work with Marshals in a task force, I work with AG investigators when we share intel on cases we're building, and I work with municipal cops every day while I'm in the field.   NONE of us will turn down extra training, if only the budget was there.  

You are the ones who are accepting the current level of training as "adequate" when you vote, or tell the people you elect to vote, against funding training for police.  Training takes money.  Training takes time, which also means man hours paid out - so you have to have enough officers to cover.  Training takes an officer off the line, so now you have to have 11 officers in the department instead of 10, in order to rotate everyone through trainings for the year.  That costs, on top of the expense for the training itself.  

And requiring officers to have college degrees, and clean criminal records, and clean credit histories, and letters of recommendation before you hire them?   That means you have to offer them a salary, and benefits, and a retirement, that's more than what you offer the local garbageman.  (In Philadelphia, the sanitation and streets department has a better retirement plan, salary, and raises schedule than most surrounding connected municipal police forces.  They can retire earlier too.  Tell me how that's supposed to make for good recruiting for Philly PD?)

So when you vote against, or tell your elected officials to vote against, money for police budgets?   You aren't "saving the world from militarized police".   You're cutting training budgets and making it so departments have to make due with cops that are the bottom of the barrel.  

Those "military" pieces, by the way?   They come from the 1033 program (look it up).   They're essentially free, and they actually free tax money up for other things - because the Army was just going to junk that equipment anyway, so the police department only has to pay shipping.  And it's not just armored vehicles, btw - it's also coats, gloves, boots, medical supplies, and training ammunition.  The PSP (Pennsylvania State Police) recently received "military grade"...parkas and gloves, from the 1033 program.   Anything the military is going to throw away, the 1033 program offers to law enforcement for first pick through.   It saves money -- and there are Democrats on Capital Hill even now trying to cancel THAT too.  

Sometimes I don't know if the cuts are because you're all cheap, or because you think that cutting budgets is punitive...and somehow, it will make police "better", to have punishments in the form of less training and lesser officers.

You want body cameras?   Those cost money.   And then the storage for the data on them costs more.  And a technician or two, to monitor and certify the data so it is admissible in court, also costs money.  I live at the corner of four townships, and three of them have Karens constantly complaining that they have no body cameras on their cops...yet if you check the voting records, they've voted down the funding referendum for it for 4 years running.  

So you voted to save yourself a few dollars in your paycheck, by cutting police budgets for the last thirty plus years.   And now?  Now you're getting exactly what you voted for.   You're getting exactly what you deserve. 

You pay for cops with little to no training, low quality, no required degrees, short Academy training times (some are as short as three months!!), and what you get are cops who kneel on a man's back while he very clearly says "I can't breathe".  And three other cops who stand around, because they're too timid to smack the senior officer in the back of the helmet and pull him off a dying man.  

Make no mistake.  Those four cops in Minneapolis should be prosecuted.   They commited a crime, and they should serve time for it.  (The prosecutor is grand standing though... he's charging 2nd degree murder, and it's not likely he can prove that.  Every cop following the case agrees, 3rd degree murder (which, with an abuse of official power enhancement carries the EXACT same penalties), is an easy slam dunk conviction...but the prosecutor wants to be a big man.)  

But those four officers?  They were set up. 

By you.  You voted to put cheap officers behind the badge, and now you want to wash your hands of the consequences when people with my color skin are dying. 

You wanted to save a few dollars from your paycheck by voting in "budget cutting" officials, and "do more with less" electors who have turned police forces into departments staffed by high school graduates with per officer training budgets smaller than my monthly grocery budget.  

You want to get riled up, and offended, and protest, and get loud about "save the brown people!" ... when you couldn't be bothered before, because it might have raised your taxes to actually insist the police be well recruited and highly trained.  

You want the recognition, and the retweets and loves online ... but you don't want to part with the extra few cents in your pay check to make sure that there are good quality men and women behind the badge. 

So to hell with you. 

And to hell with the antifa and proud boy protestors both, who keep turning what might otherwise be peaceful protests into riots and looting, all while pretending they're doing it in the name of a man who ... while no angel, never would have wanted his city destroyed as his legacy.  His family has been clear about it, even as Minneapolis burns.  Or rioting in the name of cops who then have to respond to the fires and looting and risk their lives to address the damage you've caused in their names.  

And to hell with the cops who keep transfering from department to department to bury their history of complaints, keeping just ahead of firing.  You know who you are, "gypsies", and the rest of us know who you are too.   We know what it means when you have four departments in ten years on your record.  We can't do anything about you until a citizen files a complaint, and you're oh so slick at making citizens too afraid to file those complaints...but times are changing.  This week proves it.  And you're gonna take all of us down with you.  

And to hell with Black Lives Matter, which took a simple and pure and IMPORTANT message, that it is NOT okay to kill someone just because our skin is darker than yours, and let their leadership turn it into a political nightmare that assaults cops, props up protests and turns them into riots, and then smiles guilelessly as if they've done nothing wrong. ("Pigs in a blanket, fry'em like bacon," sounds familiar? How about "Blue Lives Murder!"?) 

And to hell with the people who are so blindly pro police that they can't see that there are seriously systemic problems, and who would rather invent conspiracy theories about a 75 year old man hitting his head on concrete, or would rather retweet a dead man's criminal record to drag him, on the day of his god damned funeral, than accept that not all cops are perfect and a good number (that 10%, in fact) need to be dragged into the light and burned out of the department.  

But mostly, to hell with you.   For spending the last thirty years dragging down an entire profession that was once a good place to be, where the bad 10% were easy to see against a backdrop that held less complaints and better quality officers, and for voting down budgets over and over until most departments have less money for training and hiring quality officers than a garbage department does.