Retired police chief: “What I’m seeing today in our country scares the hell out of me.”
May 20, 2020 in News, Video by RBN Staff


Source: lawenforcementtoday
Posted by: Pat Droney|May 19, 2020
This editorial was written by a former chief of police and staff writer for Law Enforcement Today.

In 1980, I swore an oath. I swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, the laws of the state of Connecticut, and the ordinances of the town I worked in. Most police officers and sheriffs across these great United States swear the same or similar oath.
I worked in law enforcement for 31 years, retiring at the rank of chief of police in 2014. I have friends who still work in public safety.
What I am seeing happening in our country today scares me to be honest. What scares me most is the fact that my brothers and sisters in law enforcement are being put in an extremely difficult situation.
Clearly we are in somewhat uncharted territory. One can argue that the current situation with coronavirus is either vastly overblown or is truly a crisis. My feeling is the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
The problem as I see it is police officers are being put squarely in the middle, mostly by overzealous governors who are using the COVID-19 pandemic to assert their authority, mostly outside of the legislative process.
Look, I know and have known a lot of police officers and I can tell you this much: A vast majority of them are not comfortable with the situation they now find themselves in. I have spoken to several who said that they would actually rather retire than enforce these “emergency orders.”
What is truly ironic to me is that government officials, mostly Democrats, have spent much of the past 20-something years, primarily since the Rodney King incident, railing against cops, pigeon-holing all police officers as racist, gun-happy thugs, whose only goal when they leave for work is to shoot someone.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have said that the criminal justice system is “inherently racist,” with far-left liberal Elizabeth Warren saying it was “systemic from front to back.”