Like the Wall Street brokers who trashed the country with their recklessness but still demanded we be in awe of them and respect their feelings, it seems that police want the right to murder with impunity and still be worshiped by polite society. Anything less, and the whining begins in earnest:
The president of the police union in Cleveland, Ohio, said over the weekend the “Justice for Tamir Rice” shirt worn by football player Andrew Hawkins was “pathetic.”
Hawkins, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns, dressed in a shirt that read, “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford” on the front, and “The Real Battle for Ohio” on the back, during pre-game warm-ups on Sunday. Twelve-year-old Rice was shot by police outside of a recreation center in Cleveland on Nov. 22 for holding what was later determined to be a toy “airsoft” gun. Crawford, 22, was fatally shot by police for carrying a toy gun inside an Ohio Wal-Mart in August.
Jeff Follmer, president of the Cleveland police union, reportedly said that Hawkins’ shirt was disrespectful, and demanded an apology from the football team.
“It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology,” Follmer wrote to a local ABC News affiliate. The police union didn’t immediately respond to msnbc’s request for comment.
The Browns responded, saying that management respects both the Cleveland Police Department and NFL players’ rights to support certain causes.
This loudmouth meathead is speaking on behalf of the very same Cleveland Police Department that gunned down a 12 year old and was cited by the Justice Department for being an insane clown posse with actual circular firing squads of innocent people, among multiple other crimes and transgressions too numerous to count.
Meanwhile in NYC, New York’s “Finest” continues their wankfest/whinefest, with Patrick Lynch, still feeling misty eyed about the cold shoulder people are giving cops after they were caught on tape murdering Eric Garner, has decided to up the cop douchebaggery a notch:
New York City’s police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, is urging its members to ban Mayor Bill de Blasio from their funerals, the latest episode in the ongoing clash between the mayor and the city’s law-enforcement power structure.
Officers are encouraged to fill out a form on the union’s website titled “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” to request that neither de Blasio nor Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito attend their funeral, should they be killed in the line of duty.
The form reads:
I, _____________________, as a New York City police officer, request that Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito refrain from attending my funeral services in the event that I am killed in the line of duty. Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice.
For months, PBA President Patrick Lynch has complained about what he views as insufficient support from the mayor, particularly after the July 17 death of Eric Garner, who died after NYPD officers put him in a chokehold. In the wake of the incident, de Blasio recounted telling his 17-year-old biracial son, Dante, about the need to be careful around police officers. Lynch accused de Blasio of “stirring the emotions of the street” and throwing officers “under the bus.”
Man, fuck these guys. Just do your goddamned job and stop killing innocent people. How fucking hard is that? And spare me the bullshit about how dangerous your job is:
In 2013, out of 900,000 sworn officers, just 100 died from a job-related injury. That’s about 11.1 per 100,000, or a rate of 0.01%.
Policing doesn’t even make it into the top 10 most dangerous American professions. Logging has a fatality rate 11 times higher, at 127.8 per 100,000. Fishing: 117 per 100,000. Pilot/flight engineer: 53.4 per 100,000. It’s twice as dangerous to be a truck driver as a cop—at 22.1 per 100,000.
Another point to bear in mind is that not all officer fatalities are homicides. Out of the 100 deaths in 2013, 31 were shot, 11 were struck by a vehicle, 2 were stabbed, and 1 died in a “bomb-related incident.” Other causes of death were: aircraft accident (1), automobile accident (28), motorcycle accident (4), falling (6), drowning (2), electrocution (1), and job-related illness (13).
Even assuming that half these deaths were homicides, policing would have a murder rate of 5.55 per 100,000, comparable to the average murder rate of U.S. cities: 5.6 per 100,000. It’s more dangerous to live in Baltimore (35.01 murders per 100,000 residents) than to be a cop in 2014.
Oddly enough, when loggers, fishermen, pilots, roofers, and garbage collectors commit murder, we arrest and prosecute them, and they don’t take to the media demanding a tongue bath from the public and the mayor. So just stfu. I’m sick of it.
This whining is enough to make you want to write a song.