Police officers face tough times in cop-hating era
Bill Glen has no regrets about the three decades he spent serving Windsor as a front-line police officer, not even with those 100-plus shotgun pellets still lodged in his abdomen, but he wouldn’t dream of putting on a uniform in today’s cop-hating, camera-loving environment.
“I wouldn’t touch it now. You need a hell of a lot of restraint today, a hell of a lot more than I’ve got,” said the active, motorcycle-riding 77-year-old.
Last year, I wrote about Glen’s role in a
1973 Remington Park shootout that left a shotgun-wielding robber dead and Glen and his partner, the late William Pheby, seriously wounded.
Glen said the police have never been hugely popular. That goes with the territory when you hand out traffic tickets and arrest people.
He remembers, back in the day, being called a “pig” and hearing threats to burn down his house and worse.
But the current situation, with the police labelled the enemy and with calls to defund and dismantle departments gaining traction across America and spilling into Canada, all in response to the brutal, senseless police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis six weeks ago, is unlike anything he’s seen.
Glen was as appalled as you and I were by those horrifying images of Floyd begging for air while being suffocated by an officer’s knee on his neck, maybe more so because he’s made countless arrests and knows how wrong it was.
“They killed him. They murdered him. It was an ugly scene,” Glen said.
A contributing factor, he believes, was the innate fear rookie officers have of confronting a veteran, even one doing something disastrously wrong. One of the four officers charged in Minneapolis had been an officer for four days. Another was working only his third shift.
But Glen can’t grasp, and neither can I, how one awful crime could metastasize into continent-wide condemnation of all officers and their profession. Do we blame all nurses when one turns out to be a serial killer? Do we threaten to close all hospitals when a doctor goes berserk and kills a patient?
What troubles Glen is that the transgressions of the few (and few is still too many) completely overshadow the sacrifices made by many.
Most of the 85 officers killed in the U.S. in an average year, said Glen, die with little public recognition and even less media attention.
Most of us never hear of those deaths.
We don’t hear all that much about their daily acts of heroism, either. Only their transgressions make network news. Yet the internet is littered with accounts of police rescuing people from burning cars, blazing homes and half-frozen lakes. You’ve probably never heard of Jonathan Wiese, the San Diego K9 officer who scaled down a cliff to rescue twin two-year-olds following their dad’s suicide bid.
As Wiese put it: “You just do what you have to do, but after everyone was safe, it hits you and you just want to go home and hug your kids.”
And folks want to defund, dismantle and replace with empathetic social workers? Good luck with that. Welcome to anarchy and chaos.
The one certainty from this hatefest for police, said Glen, is that it will get more difficult to recruit officers, here and in the gun-happy U.S. That’s already a problem, according to Mayor Drew Dilkens.
Two decades ago, policing was still considered a hugely desirable job and recruiters could pick out “the cream of the crop” from hordes of applicants. Those days are long gone. Now recruiting, even with $100,000 salaries, is a challenge. So much so that Windsor has focused on poaching trained officers from Toronto and other regions.
Dilkens said the universal presence of cellphone cameras is one of the factors dissuading people from becoming police officers. It’s a positive development, in some ways. But who, he asks, would choose to work in an environment where your every move is potential online fodder? He said talk of defunding police services is “sheer nonsense” and painting all police as collectively guilty will only worsen recruiting problems, especially among minorities the city has been struggling to recruit.
“I’m still trying,” Dilkens said, “to understand the rationale connection between that event (the Floyd killing) and the notion that we have to take money away from police and give it to social services. Why does it have to be an either/or discussion?”
Why indeed?