Granted, there are cops in this country who shouldn't be in their jobs and some of them belong in nut houses. The latest shootings of two in Chicago exemplifies that: a 19-year-old armed only with a baseball bat was fatally shot and an innocent 55-year-old grandmother was also fatally shot. The cops say the young man was being "combative," but the simple rule of firearms is that you can only shoot if someone's life is in danger and then... only until the threat is mitigated.
Why do you need to shoot dead a kid with a baseball bat? On top of that, the guy was known to have mental problems.
As for the grandmother, shooting her was "accidental." There has been little information released to the public about how the shooting happened, but city officials are apologizing.
I think we will all agree that there have been some pretty bad shootings by cops in the country this year. Many of them defy common sense police tactics; many of them border on the verge of outright murder.
None of that, however, justifies painting cops with a broad brush of guilt-by-association. Just because there are bad cops in Chicago doesn't mean there are bad cops in Oakland or anywhere else. And it seems to me that some cops who were totally in the right have been wrongly accused. There also seems to me to be a growing attitude in this country that all cops are bad cops, so it is no wonder that cops sense they have lost the support and backing of politicians and citizens.
Is anybody in her or her right mind going to lay their life on the line for a city or town whose support will vanish into thin air at the slightest provocation, justifiable or not?
We as a nation need to tackle this problem head-on in 2016. We need better dialogue between cops and their employees, better relations between cops and citizens, and we need to keep Obama and his racist, anti-gun, anti-cop agenda out of the equation.
That's MY AMERICAN OPINION, respectively submitted.
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