Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

When I was a cop, I had the same contempt for “the media” that most other cops, then and now, had or have. “The media” seldom got anything right, put their own spin on anything they reported, so that it would look artificially good or bad, depending on their bias, and generally ensured that the reading/watching/listening public knew only what it was they wanted them to know.

Well, as Pogo said so many years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” I have become “the media.” Just in case I forget, every two weeks my paycheck arrives, bearing the logo of Cygnus Business Media, my employer and the owner of Officer.com.

Even so, I haven’t forgotten my roots, and I try to see that what you read on Officer.com has at least some basis in fact. This does not mean that we are not occasionally misled. Most of our news stories come from newspapers and television stations around the country, and until someone checks with a better source, that’s the information we’re stuck with.

Earlier this week, there was an aviation mishap at the Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky. All of the passengers and crew of a regional jet were killed, save for the co-pilot, who was pulled from the wreckage by three police officers. This was initially reported as “a Lexington PD officer and two airport security workers” by the local newspaper. As it turned out, the two “security workers” were actually airport public safety officers who are fully certified and empowered police officers, and are cross-trained and function as firefighters and emergency medical technicians, as well. We got that into the story by the end of the day (thanks largely to a source in Kentucky, who saw the error and got us the facts), but I felt badly for Public Safety Officers Pete Maupin and John Sallee, who had acted heroically, but had their role downplayed. This is not to diminish the actions of Lexington PD Officer Bryan Jared, but to underscore that there are a lot of cops, especially those in proprietary agencies that serve airports, colleges, events centers and such, that “the media” unfairly characterize as “security workers.”

The cops are sometimes not much help in this area. Officers in the specialized departments are demeaned as Not Real Cops because they may handle fewer of the high-profile incidents that the city and county cops do. When I hear this, I draw their attention to my late friend George Sullivan. George worked for the University of Nevada Police Department in Reno, and started in law enforcement about the same time as me. One night, George had just issued a traffic citation, and drove to a roundabout at the main entrance of the campus to write up his notes. He was assaulted by a criminal who was lying in wait, knowing that this was a common spot for university officers to write reports. George was beaten to death with a hatchet, and his Sam Browne and equipment were stolen by the killer. The killer used George’s gun to hold up a couple of convenience stores before blowing town, then shot it out with Salt Lake City cops a few days later, before being taken into custody. He’s on Nevada’s death row now. Don’t tell me that university police (and airport police, for that matter) aren’t real cops.

We had another story a couple of weeks back about the way that National Guard and Border Patrol troops were interacting to stem the flow of illegal immigrants. The Border Patrol was supposedly having to nursemaid the National Guard forces (the term used was “Nanny Patrol”) to insure that they didn’t get out of hand. I got another take on this situation through an intermediary. The writer is a National Guard officer who is deployed to assist the Border Patrol. I haven’t edited a single character.
TJ Bonner is their union boss, and a naysayer of the guard program all the way . He has an agenda, not sure what it is. There is some validity to the pawn statement, because personally I think we should have spent the money on thermal optics and infrastructure instead, but the mission is working as designed. I am at ground zero of the Arizona AO that he refers to, and I can certainly attest to what the “nanny patrol” statement is all about because it was my personal recommendation to make that a requirement for all of our points. It has nothing to do with “babysitting” and everything to do with border strategy. If my guys are sitting on a mountain top in Ajo and they call in a group of 30 with bundles crossing the border, it only works if there is actually a dang agent that can ACTION the information. Otherwise, we are screaming into the void and it’s a worthless endeavor. We requested that they be paired in this fashion so that we could ensure that someone with arrest powers is close to each location so they can act on our information. I could go into great detail about the strategy that we have developed, but it is better related in person. This has been challenging but rewarding, and you would cringe if you knew how porous it actually is down here. We ID’d an Iranian national crossing legally in the middle of nowhere just last week at a checkpoint, and he recrossed about 10 minutes later…you don’t hear THAT on CNN. It’s like shooting a BB through a tennis net, if you will. No prosecution for marijuana unless it is over 499 pounds, otherwise catch and release. What they need is more AUSA’s to prosecute the cases. Anyway, I had this very article in my hand and I went looking for the fella to tell him what I thought about it but apparently he is based in Washington….go figure.

See what I mean about “spin?”

Anyway, we’ll do our best to give you the facts here, even if we don’t always get it right the first time. If you see something here that doesn’t ring true and you want to be heard, never hesitate to get in touch (editor@officer.com). But know that sometimes we get “spun,” too.