Since the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day, most of the nation has been subjected to a daily reality that America is a place where white cops harass, brutalize, assault, and kill Black Americans regularly and with impunity. It actually got to a point that still exists for some folks, where if you said that “all lives matter you were considered racist and somehow were demeaning the Black Lives Matter movement. One Facebook post that I read said that any friends who said All Lives Matter were racist and would be immediately canceled and unfriended. Imagine the thinking that saying ALL LIVES MATTER WAS SOMEHOW RACIST AND SHAMEFUL. For Christ’s sake, all lives do matter regardless of skin color, religion, gender, or any other differences that separate us. To suggest otherwise is totally insane.

The cultural elites in America that have constantly spewed the rhetoric that cops have targeted Black folks because of skin color has been fed by a steady stream of hysterical news reports most times before even a semblance of an investigation began. The “HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT MOVEMENT” is a prime example. After an investigation by no less than 5 agencies including the United States Department of Justice, the officer was exonerated and “hands up don’t shoot” never happened. But not before several days of rioting and looting. I’m not writing this to be a cop defense attorney or trying to excuse or exonerate bad police behavior. To suggest it doesn’t take place is equally insane.

The call from these anti-police groups such as BLACK LIVES MATTER and many more is to defund the police and build an elite group that will be able to seamlessly deal with all of society’s ills, including violent and abhorrent behavior, sexual predators, killers, people with mental illnesses, and the other hundreds or so incidents cops come into contact with on a daily basis. The reality is we might reach that DREAM of AN ELITE GROUP in MAYBE a 1,000 years, especially in a big city like Chicago. Anytime you have HUMAN beings in places of authority and trust you wind up with HUMAN FLAWS. There are levels of fear, levels of reaction, levels of empathy, all the strengths, and shortcomings that humans beings bring to the job. Robots are programmed for every situation, humans are not as yet. The Marine Corps trained and trained us for months on end and we still wound up with that 2 to 3% that never measured up.

What the anti-police crowd is calling for when the shouts of police reform are resounding, is actually a shout for HUMAN REFORM. The perfect human simply does not exist, most especially in a profession where a split-second decision means life or death, the decision to shoot or don’t shoot is an excruciating decision unless one has been faced with that, no Monday morning quarterback is going to be able to explain it and indeed it sometimes takes months for investigators to make a decision of right or wrong that had to be made in a split second. Cops are NOT trained to retreat or flee when met by dangerous and unknown circumstances that occur on a daily basis in the life of Law Enforcement Officers if that were the case why even have cops and laws? A perfect group of people simply do not and will never exist and it’s not a reality but simply nonsense to suggest it is going to happen no matter how much training an individual is subjected to.

The police officers across America that most of you are exposed to on a daily basis fall into that 2-3%. What you do not see is the other 97% who get it right. Getting it right is boring and uninteresting so you NEVER hear of or see the results. Who the hell is going to read a paper or watch the news listing every time a cop does something right? Nothing is more despicable or abhorrent to good, hard-working, honest cops than a BAD COP. Whenever I hear the talk of police reform after an incident of police bad behavior it makes me ashamed of that 2-3% that caused you to think like that.

In Chicago this year, cops have been involved in nine shooting incidents, all have been thoroughly investigated to be sure and no wrongdoing was uncovered. Consequently, there have been 2,653 people wounded by gunfire and over 490 souls murdered, the overwhelming number of murder victims have been Black and the overwhelming number of shooters have been Black. The Gangs in Chicago literally have an entire City living in fear, and yet I ask the question, where is “BLACK LIVES MATTER”?  There is no outrage by anybody in that movement. There are no marches, there are no demonstrations, to save those neighborhoods or those folks living in fear. It seems there is only outrage when opposite skin colors are involved in incidents with the police.

We have seen lootings, rioting, arsons, and cops being assaulted with bricks, skateboards, frozen water bottles, bicycles, and even Molotov cocktails thrown at police vehicles while occupied. Over 100 Chicago cops have been injured and over 50 hospitalized in 6 weeks. The irony is those demonstrators against police brutality have turned into the monsters they say they are protesting against. The following was an editorial I wrote for the Chicago Tribune published a few days ago. “WHEN PROTESTING POLICE BRUTALITY, LET’S ORGANIZE AND GO HIT THE POLICE OVER THEIR HEADS WITH SKATEBOARDS AND  FROZEN WATER BOTTLES? SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG WITH THAT WHICH NEEDS SOME THOUGHT. BRUTALITY IS BRUTALITY, NO MATTER WHICH SIDE OF THE ISSUE YOU’RE ON. WHEN YOU BECOME THE VERY MONSTER YOU ARE PRETENDING TO FIGHT, YOU ARE NO BETTER……… ALL LIVES MATTER! WISE UP. OF COURSE, THEY DO….