http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/commentprint082800b.html
8/28/00 12:50 p.m.
Real Cops, and Others Don't believe the cops' photo ops for Gore.
By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police
Department
A prediction: Between now and election day you will see,
perhaps several times, images of Vice President Gore
addressing an audience while standing before a backdrop of
uniformed police officers. Mr. Gore will speak of the
thousands of new cops who will soon be patrolling your
neighborhood through the beneficence of the federal
government. He will speak of trigger locks and waiting
periods and the success of the Brady Bill at "keeping guns
out of the hands of criminals." All of this will be
demonstrably false, of course, but at every suitable pause
in the speech, at a cue from some unseen handler, those
police officers in the background (who will surely represent
both sexes and all races, ethnicities, and sexual
orientations) will dutifully applaud and enthusiastically
lend their image to the absurd notion that Mr. Gore enjoys
the support of law enforcement from sea to shining sea.
The careful viewer, having been here educated, will note
that though the guns, uniforms, and badges worn by those
officers are indeed authentic, the officers themselves are
not in fact Real Cops, at least not in the same sense as
that guy who gave you the speeding ticket last year. (I
know, everyone else was going just as fast.)
Take those nicely pressed uniforms, for instance. Notice how
unfirm flesh spills over some of the collars. Notice how
some of those buttons are severely taxing the tensile
strength of the thread securing them, threatening to maim
some unlucky spectator or the vice president himself should
the officer breathe too deeply or applaud too vigorously at
Mr. Gore's latest thoughts on gun control. That uniform has
likely been hanging in a locker for years, only to emerge
for this occasion and to remind the officer that it's time
to cut back on the Krispy Kremes.
In police departments large and small there are any number
of specializations: patrol, traffic enforcement, detectives,
SWAT, and a host of other subspecies of Coppus Americanus.
But all those subspecies can be broken down into two basic
types: those who put crooks in jail, i.e. Real Cops, and
those who don't. The police officers you see clapping and
carrying on over Mr. Gore's shoulder are those who don't,
and they are viewed with varying levels of disdain by those
who do.
When a cop has worked the streets for a while there can be a
tendency toward burnout, and if his spirit is unalterably
depleted he begins searching for niches within his
department where he might find deliverance from the grit and
tumult of a job in which he is expected to run toward
gunfire while all other sane people are running away. When
he reaches that point in his career, there are a number of
avenues from which to choose. He may become an
administrator, in which case he will supervise those poor
wretches unlucky enough to remain in the trenches. He may
become a DARE instructor and teach the dangers of drugs and
gangs to schoolchildren. Or he may seek office in the police
labor union and become a burr in the saddle of city
government. In short, he becomes a government bureaucrat, a
schoolteacher, or a union hack. To put it even more simply,
he becomes a Democrat. And soon he finds himself standing in
the hot sun, crammed into a uniform that no longer fits and
applauding the inanities spewing from the lips of Al Gore,
while the Real Cops assigned to crowd control stand at the
back and avoid the cameras, biting their tongues at the
silliness of it all.
I am a dues-paying member in good standing of the Police
Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers
at the rank of lieutenant and below, but every time an
election comes around I am amazed, even appalled, by the
endorsements printed in the union newspaper, The Thin Blue
Line. There is apparently no candidate too far to the left
to win such an endorsement, which is in turn used to blunt
any soft-on-crime criticism from Republicans. The League
endorsed Gray Davis for governor of California, though I'd
bet a paycheck that no more than five hundred of its 9,000
members actually voted for him. In private conversations,
some League officials admit voting for Republican Dan
Lungren even as they were publicly extolling Davis. As has
been recently and gloriously demonstrated by Joe Lieberman,
political exigencies can inspire a certain elasticity of
conviction.
Once elected to office, police-union officials happily shed
their uniforms and begin jabbering on cell phones,
consorting with left-leaning pols, dining at nice
restaurants, and traveling to places like Las Vegas and
Miami for "important meetings," all at the expense of the
membership. In other words, they begin behaving like any
other group of labor meatheads. In police unions, as in the
Teamsters or the A.F.L.-C.I.O., vociferous support of the
"working man" is one of the surest ways to avoid actually
being one.
So don't be fooled. Real Cops will be voting overwhelmingly
for Bush. So should you. And if you are unfortunate enough
to find yourself at one of these campaign appearances, wear
your sunglasses - those buttons can put out an eye.
To read Jack Dunphy's diary
from the Democratic National Convention
during his scout assignment among the protestors,
click here for Among the Lunatics, Part I
and here for Among the Lunatics, Part II.
(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.)
===================================
The Second Amendment Police Department (in CyberSpace) www.2ampd.net
To Protect & Serve the Individual Rights of All Citizens!
Please visit www.2ampd.net
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
2ampd-unsubscribe@egroups.com
8/28/00 12:50 p.m.
Real Cops, and Others Don't believe the cops' photo ops for Gore.
By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police
Department
A prediction: Between now and election day you will see,
perhaps several times, images of Vice President Gore
addressing an audience while standing before a backdrop of
uniformed police officers. Mr. Gore will speak of the
thousands of new cops who will soon be patrolling your
neighborhood through the beneficence of the federal
government. He will speak of trigger locks and waiting
periods and the success of the Brady Bill at "keeping guns
out of the hands of criminals." All of this will be
demonstrably false, of course, but at every suitable pause
in the speech, at a cue from some unseen handler, those
police officers in the background (who will surely represent
both sexes and all races, ethnicities, and sexual
orientations) will dutifully applaud and enthusiastically
lend their image to the absurd notion that Mr. Gore enjoys
the support of law enforcement from sea to shining sea.
The careful viewer, having been here educated, will note
that though the guns, uniforms, and badges worn by those
officers are indeed authentic, the officers themselves are
not in fact Real Cops, at least not in the same sense as
that guy who gave you the speeding ticket last year. (I
know, everyone else was going just as fast.)
Take those nicely pressed uniforms, for instance. Notice how
unfirm flesh spills over some of the collars. Notice how
some of those buttons are severely taxing the tensile
strength of the thread securing them, threatening to maim
some unlucky spectator or the vice president himself should
the officer breathe too deeply or applaud too vigorously at
Mr. Gore's latest thoughts on gun control. That uniform has
likely been hanging in a locker for years, only to emerge
for this occasion and to remind the officer that it's time
to cut back on the Krispy Kremes.
In police departments large and small there are any number
of specializations: patrol, traffic enforcement, detectives,
SWAT, and a host of other subspecies of Coppus Americanus.
But all those subspecies can be broken down into two basic
types: those who put crooks in jail, i.e. Real Cops, and
those who don't. The police officers you see clapping and
carrying on over Mr. Gore's shoulder are those who don't,
and they are viewed with varying levels of disdain by those
who do.
When a cop has worked the streets for a while there can be a
tendency toward burnout, and if his spirit is unalterably
depleted he begins searching for niches within his
department where he might find deliverance from the grit and
tumult of a job in which he is expected to run toward
gunfire while all other sane people are running away. When
he reaches that point in his career, there are a number of
avenues from which to choose. He may become an
administrator, in which case he will supervise those poor
wretches unlucky enough to remain in the trenches. He may
become a DARE instructor and teach the dangers of drugs and
gangs to schoolchildren. Or he may seek office in the police
labor union and become a burr in the saddle of city
government. In short, he becomes a government bureaucrat, a
schoolteacher, or a union hack. To put it even more simply,
he becomes a Democrat. And soon he finds himself standing in
the hot sun, crammed into a uniform that no longer fits and
applauding the inanities spewing from the lips of Al Gore,
while the Real Cops assigned to crowd control stand at the
back and avoid the cameras, biting their tongues at the
silliness of it all.
I am a dues-paying member in good standing of the Police
Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers
at the rank of lieutenant and below, but every time an
election comes around I am amazed, even appalled, by the
endorsements printed in the union newspaper, The Thin Blue
Line. There is apparently no candidate too far to the left
to win such an endorsement, which is in turn used to blunt
any soft-on-crime criticism from Republicans. The League
endorsed Gray Davis for governor of California, though I'd
bet a paycheck that no more than five hundred of its 9,000
members actually voted for him. In private conversations,
some League officials admit voting for Republican Dan
Lungren even as they were publicly extolling Davis. As has
been recently and gloriously demonstrated by Joe Lieberman,
political exigencies can inspire a certain elasticity of
conviction.
Once elected to office, police-union officials happily shed
their uniforms and begin jabbering on cell phones,
consorting with left-leaning pols, dining at nice
restaurants, and traveling to places like Las Vegas and
Miami for "important meetings," all at the expense of the
membership. In other words, they begin behaving like any
other group of labor meatheads. In police unions, as in the
Teamsters or the A.F.L.-C.I.O., vociferous support of the
"working man" is one of the surest ways to avoid actually
being one.
So don't be fooled. Real Cops will be voting overwhelmingly
for Bush. So should you. And if you are unfortunate enough
to find yourself at one of these campaign appearances, wear
your sunglasses - those buttons can put out an eye.
To read Jack Dunphy's diary
from the Democratic National Convention
during his scout assignment among the protestors,
click here for Among the Lunatics, Part I
and here for Among the Lunatics, Part II.
(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.)
===================================
The Second Amendment Police Department (in CyberSpace) www.2ampd.net
To Protect & Serve the Individual Rights of All Citizens!
Please visit www.2ampd.net
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
2ampd-unsubscribe@egroups.com