Political Correctness Almost Costs an Alabama Cop His Life
Afraid to be labeled a racist by the media
While small acts of kindness from citizens can touch the lives of police officers many miles away, police officers across the country increasingly face public aggression, disrespect, and violence. In the wake of Ferguson and the execution of police officers in NYC and across America, America’s police face an untenable situation as they attempt to do their jobs.
Watch this report on police under attack:
The recent attention has brought with it a heightened awareness among police officers . . . and hesitation. An Alabama police detective, saying that he was concerned about media attention, was pistol-whipped with his own gun last week. CNN Wire reports:
An Alabama police detective is pistol whipped with his own gun. He says the coverage of deadly police shootings across America is partly to blame.
The police detective says he chose not to use force against a man attacking him because he didn’t want to be another headline. The brutal beating occurred during a routine traffic stop.
The detective, a six-year veteran, noticed a man driving on the interstate erratically. So he pulls the car over.
The two end up in a parking lot when the detective calls for back-up. It’s during this time, according to police, the suspect gets out of his car and gets aggressive with the officer.
Instead of following policy to try to get the man back in the car, the officer says he hesitates. It’s just enough time police say for 34-year-old Janard Cunningham to sucker punch the officer, knocking him unconscious. He then allegedly takes the officer’s gun and uses it to pistol whip him.
Watch the report:
The media attention and treatment of the nation’s police not only influenced the police detective’s response but directly contributed to this suspect’s actions:
According to the head of the police union, the suspect in the attack, 34-year-old Janard Cunningham, told police that the reason he did what he did to the officer was because of “The negative coverage he’s been seeing of police across the country.”
He was arrested shortly after the attack and has been charged with attempted murder.
Bob Owens reminds us of a CNN panel’s “hands up, don’t shoot” moment:
There’s no small amount of irony in CNN reporting this story, and the attack’s callous aftermath, which saw sick criminal supporters take mocking photos of the unconscious officer instead of attempting to help him. After all, they’ve done so much to fan the flames of discord that have bought us to this point, with their serially dishonest portrayal of lawful self-defense shootings by police officers and citizens alike.
Watch (if you can):
Of course, “hands up, don’t shoot” is a proven lie, but that didn’t stop CNN from defending it for its “symbolic meaning.”
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Comments
I sympathize with the ones who do their jobs and understand that their job isn’t an us versus them war or that citizens are to be generally treated with contempt.
That said, those who don’t do bad thing have allowed those who do to shelter behind the blue wall of silence. Yes I know it’s not good to rat our your fellow cops. Know why that is? Because the bad ones have been so effective at scaring the Sh!t out of the ones who might rat them out.
Too many shootings that never find no cop did anything wrong. Too many dogs shot for specious reasons. Too many aggressive physical and verbal behavior in their interaction with the public when not required.
The police are poorly trained in many places, and even the training that is done may be suspect. Makes for bad outcomes.
There is no excuse for some of the shootings except aggressive threat decisions due to lack of training.
So I’m reluctant to feel sorry for cops in general. They’ve brought a lot of the contempt and fear by the public on themselves.
They want the public to appreciate them and respect them, that’s a two way street.
Not saying it’s easy, just saying it’s part of the job.
Your self-righteous ignorance is stunning. Janard is an adult who made an unprovoked decision to assault a cop. Janard initiated the violence. And, you blame the cop and police in general? I bet your “thinking” makes sense to you. You have no clue as to how vulnerable cops are out on the street or how critical it is that cops initiate an encounter as did this cop. It was a peaceful encounter till the punch.
I can’t even articulate how angry I am right now. This post is exactly what’s wrong with the country today. Blame the guy trying to rein in the crime that could even touch you someday. I’m the mother of a LEO. He is a member of the best trained law enforcement agencies in the US (California Highway Patrol – no exaggeration, look up how they’re trained). His beat is the freeway and you would think that would be a piece of cake compared to inner city cops or rural sheriffs – it is not. He runs into all kinds of crazies. Several CHP officers have been killed in the last few years just executing a traffic stop.
Law enforcement is a job that will make you cynical to your core about the “human” beings that they deal with. Try it sometime. You might understand what we ask of them a little better. I tell my son all the time that the day he feels that there are no good people left in the world to get out, go do something else. He would lay down his life to save someone he doesn’t even know – would you?
JoAnne,
Bless your son.
I work for LAPD in a support position. 99%+ of officers are model citizens and human beings.
When I was an undergrad at UCLA (had to stay home and work in the family business while all my friends went away to school), my best friend attended UC San Diego. He was Jewish and became good friends with a Jewish classmate at school there. I would go down to visit when I could find the time and got to know the guy a bit as well.
Fast forward a year or two after we’ve finished school and my friend is back living in L.A. It’s a Friday or Saturday night and we’re going to go to a nightclub when this school friend calls him up to say he’s in L.A and wants to get together.
I hadn’t seen or talked to him in at least a couple years and just before he arrived my friend told me he had become a cop. I was very surprised that a Jewish guy with a degree from a UC university had decided to become a cop and looked forward to asking him all kinds of questions.
We got our beers and I started to quiz him. He seemed down and depressed and revealed to us that, although he’d been a cop less than a year, he’d already decided to quit.
It became obvious he didn’t want to talk about it so I didn’t ask much. I just remember him talking briefly about the overwhelming stress of the job. He was sick of being scratched and bit and spat upon as well as the constant verbal abuse and threats. He’d recently been sucker punched trying to restrain someone they’d detained and he decided at that moment he’d had enough.
I asked him what his plans were. He said he’d decided he wanted to go to law school. (Better fit for a mild-mannered Jewish boy, I thought.)
He added that his experience as a cop made him want to be a prosecutor. I don’t know what happened to him, but if he did make it through law school … my bet would be that he is one tough law-and-order prosecutor right now.
I work with a number of African Americans at LAPD, almost all of whom are Democrats I would guess. But boy oh boy are they a rare, almost extinct breed of no-nonsense, law-and-order Democrats.
When I’m finished speaking on the phone with an officer or detective, I always tell them to have a good day/evening.
One African American lady with whom I worked until she recently retired would always say goodbye to them on the phone in her own unique way … “You stay safe out there, you hear me?”
Those videos that LI ran challenging anti-police demonstration leaders to go through use-of-force training really say it all. When they end up “shooting” an aggressive suspect who is not only not complying, but threatening them, in a staged (i.e, playacting and not life-threatening) situation, they admitted it opened their eyes to what law enforcement officers have to deal with … where a life-changing decision has to be made in a split-second … and where a moment’s hesitation in the wrong situation can cost them their lives.
Add to that unenvious ask what is in the back of the mind of every law enforcement officer in the country right now … that a use-of-force decision that must be made in an instant that is either completely justified or the result of an honest mistake (e.g. a sudden movement by a suspect the officer interprets to be going for a gun or other weapon) could likely effectively ruin the rest of his life with the media making him known and notorious to millions of people, many of whom will then want to do him and his family harm, no matter how unfair.
Hard to take part in a witness protection-type program when everybody in the country/world has seen your face on TV.
Those in the torch and pitchfork mob all want their 15 minutes of celebrity. But these officers end up with a lifetime of dangerous, unwanted, and undeserved fame.
I pray your son stays always safe.
Thank you. I appreciate that. My son’s first assignment after the academy was in the Northern part of California, along the coast. Beautiful assignment, no? NO! He got a taste of what being a rural sheriff’s job is like. That area is rife with weed growers and distributors and meth makers and users. His first week on the job was an eye opener. He told me he was glad to come home for his long weekends just to remind himself people were supposed to have teeth. His first month there, he had to deal with a meth-fueled young woman who threw herself off a cliff into the Eel River – they found her body the next day. He dealt with domestic abuse all the time. His job on the road in the Bay Area seems like heaven compared to the hell hole he trained in. So far he is maintaining a good attitude. He has a lovely wife and darling baby girl but I worry about him all the time.
I don’t usually like to say it, but OMG!
You must be kidding.
The formula is simple: Comply.
Law enforcement officers really, really, really want you to comply, because failure to comply leads to escalation and they sincerely don’t want that. Not only does it put the subject’s life in increasing danger, the officers know it puts their lives in increasing danger,too.
When they retire after 30+ years of dealing daily with situations we non-cops hope we never have to deal with one single time in our lives, over 98% of officers have never fired their firearms in the line of duty.
With the hundreds of thousands of officers in the country and the millions of daily interactions in which they take part with many of these involving anger and emotions and adrenaline running high with subjects often intoxicated or on drugs and very aggressive … I think a good metaphor to put things in perspective is the safety of airline flight. We obsess about the extremely rare crash, but think nothing of the tens of thousands of daily flights involving large, heavy, flying machines filled with explosive fuel often flying through horrible weather conditions … which take off and land safely every day, day after day. If you stop and think about it, it almost seems amazing that in this country of over 300 million people that there aren’t many, many more police shootings. It’s really amazing how very few there are. Again, after decades on the job dealing daily with dicey situations, over 98% of officers never once fire their firearm in the line of duty their entire career. Think of all those tens of thousands of airline planes taking off and landing safely every day which we never ponder. Then the extremely rare crash comes along once every five or 10 years and all the focus is on that. We know we can’t make flying 100% safe, but it is so safe (safer than all other forms of travel) that we don’t denigrate the pilots and crew and air traffic controllers and Boeing, etc., when the extremely rare crash occurs.
It is the dysfunctional trend of certain subcultures, egged on and encouraged by an irresponsible and reckless media, as well as political demagogues, to cause grievance fetishists to feel no responsibility nor reason to comply with officers’ orders that is causing this recent phenomenon, which has the cause-and-effect consequences of skyrocketing violent crime rates in certain inner cities as well as a spike in the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty compared to last year.
You comply. If you feel you have been wronged, then you have your day in court.
That’s a civil society. Why is that hard to comprehend?
There is no war on black males in this country. But more and more there is a veritable war on police officers.
Please rethink what you have said.
I can see that many didn’t bother to actually read and comprehend what I said. Knee jerk reaction.
I never said the cop deserved to get pistol whipped. I referred to the attitude the cop was saying exists toward cops.
An attitude felt by many law abiding citizens who live in fear of the cops AND the crooks.
So I expressed some reasons why that attitude exists. And now one addressed any point that I made directly. No. What I said was taken as some sort of attack on cops etc. etc.
Glad to see that reactionaries still exist. Just like the radicals still exist.
I read your post three times before replying. I suggest you go back and read it. Mine was not a “knee jerk” reaction. You are blaming the police and not blaming the citizenry for the cynicism that the kind of “people” they have to deal with breed. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying that the things police have to deal with on a day in, day out basis is mind boggling and it’s a wonder more of them don’t go over the edge. Put the blame where it should be – on the criminality of an awful lot of people.
A local lefty rag where I live attributed a local shooting of an “unarmed” teen (the cop was fully cleared by an independent investigation headed by a black prosecutor) to the cop being part of the SWAT team, and therefore having TOO MUCH training.
That cop could have been killed with his own gun. If political correctness is more important to him than his own life, then he needs to find another occupation.
Wrong. If he kills the “perp” then his career and life are essentially over, along with the lives of his family (a living hell thanks to the cop haters). If he dies the family grieves, but they have peace and insurance money. I do agree that he needs to find a new job.
Political correctness was on the part of others, not the policeman. The policeman was aware of what happens to white cops who shoot unarmed blacks and let that over rule his better judgment. I’m sure he made a mistake in doing so and may very well have paid for it with his life and thus is actually and idiot. But it does go to show what the problem is with #blacklivesmatter. In a sane world, this man would be hailed as a hero by black people everywhere and every black person in America would be singing his praises for sparing a black man’s life who deserved to be shot, but of course we all know that won’t happen.
A millisecond of hesitation can make all the difference in the world.
This is a no-win situation officers are increasingly in.
I would hesitate, too.
If the cop is white and the perp black, shoot and there is an almost 100% chance you and your family’s lives are ruined, no matter how justified the use of force may be.
If that is not running through the mind of any white cop, he is oblivious.
A study that came out recently showed that white cops actually hesitate to shoot black perps compared to shooting white perps in situations that justify the use of force.
Law Enforcement are in a ‘damned if you do, dead if you don’t situation.’
Obama, Holder, DeBlasio/Wilhelm, Sharpton/Malik Shabazz, Farrakhan and the rest of the BLM, FTP ilk have blood on their hands.
Yep…complete travesty that working police officers have been placed in an unwinnable situation.
This is what happens when you have yellow journalism controlling the “narrative” – painting images that are false, and then perpetuating them for their gain (ratings, cred with the left, maybe even monetary…..).
This guy was AFRAID of doing the right thing, out of FEAR that he would be the next Darren Wilson, the next Baltimore cops, the next Headline News drive-by casualty.
This is not “free press” – this is mob-like criminal dissemination of propaganda, by choice, to bring peril to society. Regardless of the motive(s), that is what it is.
A lot of the problem is that the administrative levels in most police/sheriff departments are very political. “Officer Survival” has a totally different meaning for the street cop and for anyone lieutenant and above.
In many departments they have prioritized diversity and political attributes above ability and leadership.
You can not count on your own administration to back you even if you are 100% in the right.
To the idiot down ticking the comments – you are part of the problem. Speak up, little person. I want to know who you are.
“Here’s an idea: Try listening to police during stops.”
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20150814-michael-j.-larosa-heres-an-idea-try-listening-to-police-during-stops.ece
Why does the article not say that he is black, did I miss it? And what about the bystanders, what was their race?