Officer Alex is seriously annoyed by recent events. Seriously.
Sorry, kids, but no stories this week. The truth? I prefer them myself, but on occasion I can’t think of awkward anecdotes because I’m too annoyed to focus on telling stories that make me look like a functional alcoholic dealing with a gun-wielding honey badger on LSD on a small chunk of ice in the northern Atlantic. Sometimes I just get annoyed, and I am compelled to address it. Or “them” in this case.
First comes the president’s recent assault on “all things law enforcement” at a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards dinner last Saturday, in which he said the widespread mistrust of law enforcement “that was exposed after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, is corroding America, not just its black communities, and that the wariness flows from significant racial disparities in the administration of justice.”
Well, Mr. President, let me just sling out a great big ol’ “Thank You” for casting every cop and L.E. agency in the country right in the ol’ pooper with that one. If there’s one thing Law Enforcement needs in this nation, it’s the President of the United States validating the paranoia and hype of every race baiter and “V for Vendetta” mask-wearing Occupy type in the country.
Encouragement? Support? “Hope?” (Oh, the irony)? Nah. You just put that in the pocket of your church suit. Why help when you can just irritate the shit out of a situation, despite it being against every one of your best interests as the leader of a nation? When in doubt, pander, my good man. How am I not a political consultant, I swear?
Second though, is the Chattanooga Times Free Press. An editor recently felt the need to flame the month-old flames of Ferguson and briefly compare it to local cases. I’m guessing the revenue from the Star ads that line the ditches of my street in their yellow plastic bags isn’t cutting it, so Pam Sohn opted to throw a little water on our bacon grease. (That is if it was Pam…conveniently, there was no name attached to the editorial where I read it on their website.)
Awesome. That’s great, you should do that every time. But six paragraphs detailing the accounting of a retired chief in a case you clearly had no working knowledge of? Color me incredulous.
Your own newspaper identified the boy’s Americans with Disabilities Act issues that you conveniently avoided here. I’ll leave that alone as well, and just focus on two key points that clearly found their mark under my skin. One is that you close the story by judging why he left the kid on the porch (throwing flower pots the size of his head at him). Staying where the fight was is your solution? Keeping it going was your solution? Based on, what…your own experience in dealing with combative mental health consumers? I’m not saying what the guy did was right, wrong, or otherwise, but that’s the difference between us: I’m not judging him because I don’t have any idea of the dynamic there.
And second, your topic is about their training. Do you know what “retired” means? It means he hadn’t been there for nearly three decades, so the training you are complaining about (despite having no first-hand knowledge of) in his case is from nearly 30 years ago!
You’ve started a dialogue, all right. You’ve alienated yourselves from local law enforcement, you’ve encouraged and enflamed any perception of mistrust, and you’ve exposed your galactic lack of wisdom regarding both.
Strange that this doesn’t surprise me.