Skip to main content

Of shepherds, sheep, and wolves in sheep's clothing - with guns and badges.

When I was trained as a law enforcement officer a long long time ago, we were trained to use only the force necessary to protect others and ourselves; to use deadly force only as a last resort; to always act in a way that deescalated the situation, not escalated it; and most importantly, to be willing to sacrifice our lives before we took the life of an innocent. That meant that in the split second of making a decision of shoot or don't shoot, your duty was to sacrifice your life before you harmed or killed someone you weren't absolutely certain posed a threat to you or someone else. We were repeatedly reminded that the people we were engaging with were the people we had sworn to protect and serve.
Law enforcement is an extremely difficult and thankless job when its done the way I was trained and I was in awe of the officers who trained us and did this thankless job every day. They were/are heroes - true heroes.
Today's LE officers are not trained as police but as an occupying army, and this shouldn't surprise us considering how many service members who came home from Dessert Storm/the first Iraq War were snapped up by law enforcement departments at every level of government, a practice that continues today. When today's LE respond to a call, everyone is considered a potential hostile, and their primary concern is protecting their lives and the lives of their fellow officers. As a soldier in a foreign land, where anyone not in a uniform is considered the "enemy" - this training makes sense. In war, shoot first and ask questions later is a valid and important practice, and there is nothing heroic about killing the enemy to keep yourself safe - it's just necessary for the mission to be successful. Heroics on the battlefield are very different than the heroism required of civilian law enforcement officers.
As the public, we've got to recognize and come to grips with the fact that although the job of law enforcement demands respect, just because someone wears a LE uniform - or any uniform for that matter - does not make them automatically entitled to our respect. It is hubris to believe that because persons puts on a uniform, or a title, or a black robe they can then act any way they want because the uniform, the title, or the robe automatically makes anything they do honorable and just. But hubris becomes normal if We the People are willing to go along with it.
Only sheep stand by and justify the wolf slaughtering their herd simply because the wolf is wearing a sheep's hide, and America wasn't birthed by sheep. We the People, people, We the People. Please figure it out before we don't have any shepherds left.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roadmap to Disbarment

It should be obvious by now that if someone is determined NOT to know the truth, then it doesn’t matter how much truth is put in front of her or him, the truth will be ignored.  But for anyone interested in facts underlying my journey to disbarment, here they are. The underlying events dealt with allegations of abuse of two small children which gave rise to a custody case in Mississippi, an intra-family adoption case in Louisiana, and a petition seeking emergency relief, also filed in Louisiana. On July 20, 2011, Chancellor Deborah Gambrell, the Mississippi judge presiding over the custody case in Mississippi, issued  an illegal order  affecting custody and visitation of the children. The order was issued without prior notice to mom, and it was done in the judge's chambers so there was no record of what was said. Those two factors alone make is absolutely null, according to the U.S. Constitution and Mississippi law. The order allowed dad to have supervised (...
8 comments
Read more

Dear Mr. President,

  Dear Mr. President, I understand that you have some questions about why people serve and what's in it for them. Well, I can't speak for anybody but me, but perhaps my first-hand experience can offer you some insight, if not true understanding. I served 4.5 years on active duty in the US Coast Guard and when I left active duty to go to college, I remained in the active reserves. In November 1990, to my utter surprise, I was involuntarily activated for Desert Storm in the midst of my Fall Semester of my senior year in college. My initial orders were for 90 days, which I served in Galveston as a Small Boat coxswain. Our boat crews provided security to cargo vessels traversing the Houston Ship Channel loaded with military equipment and supplies headed for the Persian Gulf. It was the very antithesis of exciting or dangerous. As my involuntary orders were winding down, I was asked to volunteer for a brand new Port Security Directorate that the Coast Guard had formed in response...
Post a Comment
Read more

Home of the brave?

The author People - mostly people who call themselves republicans - keep asking, "what's wrong with a 'temporary' ban to make sure people coming here aren't terrorists?" Here's my two biggest complaints: 1) There is no evidence that this "temporary" ban (indefinite for Syrian refugees) is based on any imminent threat from those people who have already been subjected to extensive vetting (over two years) and are now cleared to come here but for Trump's ban; and 2) even if the current vet ting process could be better, and keep people here in the US "safer" (from foreign-born terrorists), we are already infinitely safer than so many of the people coming here, and certainly all of the refugees who are fleeing, literally, unimaginable horror, at least if you've lived here you entire life. Is there a risk that a "bad" person will slip past all of the extensive screening we already have in place? Sure - there is abs...
4 comments
Read more