We are truly living in unique times. I avoid the word “unprecedented” for several reasons, not the least of which I don’t think it’s applicable. While most of you readers weren’t alive for it, or if you were you were so young you don’t remember it, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s created as much paranoia and distaste for law enforcement officers as some places are seeing today. To my way of thinking there are two big differences between then and the challenges we in law enforcement face now.
First, there wasn’t mainstream media as we experience it today. With television still relatively new and without the ability to livestream video material from “the field” back to the station, mainstream media lacked the ability to really drive angst, hatred, fear, panic, etc. They could show still images, even then usually in black and white or grayscale, but the “tone” of the presentation was set by the narrator. Few in mainstream media in the 1960s would blatantly twist the truth or push an anti-law-enforcement narrative.
Second, there weren’t any personal media devices. Sure, you might have the “camera bug” who walked around with a camera all the time just looking for something to take pictures of and either collecting those photos as a hobby or looking to sell them to the local newspaper. We didn’t have a still and video camera in everyone’s hand and there was no internet powering worldwide access to the captured media within moments of it being recorded.
Today we face those challenges as we go about protecting and serving. If you follow only the mainstream media and the negative social media about law enforcement, you get inundated with nothing but hatred, criticism, and fear of “the police.” Most of the people pushing that narrative don’t even know enough to recognize the difference between police officers and deputy sheriffs much less the jurisdictional differences between county, state, and federal. Many a citizen will expect a city police officer to arrest a subject for violating a federal law. They simply don’t know any better.
The challenge we face—those of us who wear a badge of any shape, and who took an oath to enforce and uphold the laws of the Constitution, the state, the county and city where we were employed—the challenge we face is not only on the street doing the job but also at home managing the stress. In my 37+ years of law enforcement, I’ve not seen the external stressors impacting law enforcement at any time in the past like it has today. Even if you have the greatest stress management skills in the world, you can’t avoid feeling the additional stress being created around you.
Now more than ever we need to remember that the Thin Blue Line is a family. We stand together. Yes, we need to police our own and make corrections as necessary, but those among us who dishonor the badge number much much less than the family. Unfortunately, the mainstream media handpicks events, sensationalizing them through careful editing (to the point of being dishonest), and then using them as “proof” that “all cops” are bad.
We all know better. Not many of us are feeling very appreciated right now. It’s important that we all take advantage of our support systems, practice the best stress management we can, and hang tough together. We ARE in this together and all of society, even the parts that don’t appreciate us, need us to continue on doing our job as best we can—just like always.
Stay safe.
