Shut Up Officer: “If Law Enforcement Officers Want Respect They Can Start By Deserving It”

This article was originally published by Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker.

Time to start picketing these so-called “memorial” funds and funerals if this sort of mindless fearmongering nonsense doesn’t stop.

“With the increasing number of ambush-style attacks against our officers, I am deeply concerned that a growing anti-government sentiment in America is influencing weak-minded individuals to launch violent assaults against the men and women working to enforce our laws and keep our nation safe,” said Craig Floyd, chairman and CEO of the memorial fund.
“Enough is enough,” he said in a statement. “We need to tone down the rhetoric and rally in support of law enforcement and against lawlessness.”

Bite me Craig.

Here are the facts.  There were 126 on-duty deaths reported among all officers in 2014.  There are approximately 1 million sworn officers between federal, state, county and local government entities (and another couple of million employees who are not sworn; that is, they are not officers and do not have arrest powers, such as dispatchers and clerks.)

This is a rate of fatality of 12.6 per 100,000.  Sounds bad, right?

Wrong.

If you’re a logger, you have a fatality rate ten times that of a cop.

A fisherman?  Almost ten times — 117 per 100,000.

A pilot?  53.4 per 100,000.  Yes, really — it’s about four times as dangerous to fly a plane or chopper than be a cop.

The guy who puts your roof on?  40.5 per 100,000 — about three times as dangerous.

How about iron workers — you know, the guys who put up the buildings you work in?  Yeah, those dudes.  Three times the risk of a cop in dying, most from falls, being crushed by heavy materials or welding accidents.

Your garbage man has a risk of death twice that of a cop.  Why?  He gets hit by cars or crushed by heavy equipment (yes, it would suck to get caught in that trash compactor in the garbage truck!)

How about the lineman that repairs your power lines?  Slightly less than double the risk of a cop, and of course the means by which they die are falls and electrocution, mostly.

Truck drivers?  Close to double the risk, most from traffic accidents.

Farmers?  Same risk, roughly; getting caught in a combine is a ****ty way to die.

Or you could just be a construction laborer.  Your risk in that profession is materially higher than that of a cop (17.3 .vs. 12.6) as well but nobody cheers for you.  Never mind that without said laborers you wouldn’t have a house or an office to work in.

So let’s cut the crap, eh?  Being a cop isn’t particularly dangerous as occupations go.

Sworn officers are in fact officers of the court.  Lying is unacceptable among both them and any organization that represents them.  That means this butt-clown as well as the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in NYC and Patrick Lynch, their President.  Pathological liars are worthy of the middle finger, not respect, no matter who they are.

Further, these organizations are not going to get any sympathy from me as long as we have cops arresting anyone for “DUI” when they choose to sleep off their alcohol in a parking lot rather than drive, nor are you going to get to claim “valor” without a loud pushback from people like myself as long as there is even one cop who reaches a settlement for his alleged attempt to create pornography with the intended target being solicited as a means to void an alcohol possession citation.  That’s official corruption and if I pulled something like that I’d be prosecuted instead of being able to slough off the “settlement” on the taxpayers of the town.

Then there’s this sort of corruption:

It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.
NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.

So either 94% of the stops and summonses were never justified in the first place, in which case the entire NYPD is nothing more than a band of felons committing armed robbery by the tens of thousands a week or this “action” constitutes acting as an accessory to crime after the fact.

Either way these are not cops they’re crooks.  In either case every single one of these “officers” deserves to be arrested and thrown into prison for decades; odds are it’s the first of the two possibilities, by the way, which means that this “action” is as close as you’re going to get to an admission of tens of thousands of armed robberies committed by the cops each and every week.

If law enforcement officers want respect they can start by deserving it and that means cutting the crap — including false claims of “outrageously dangerous” working conditions that in fact are less hazardous on a statistical basis than the guy who picks up my household trash, an immediate and complete cessation of false arrests on bogus charges and full prosecution of each and every member of such an agency who is alleged to have abused someone in the line of their duties.

Let me know when that happens and at that point my middle finger will be retracted — but not one second before.