Obama praises 34 Top Cops
15 officers from Detroit among those honored in D.C.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama, along with his vice president and the secretary of homeland security, honored 34 law enforcement officers chosen as the year’s Top Cops, 31 of whom joined them on a spectacular Saturday in the Rose Garden; the three absent winners are recovering from gunshot wounds.
Obama, with the honorees standing behind him and their families in the audience, said they had survived “the day when just doing your job and being a hero are exactly the same thing.”
He earlier met with each officer in the Oval Office.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden praised the officers, and also each other, in their first public appearance together after a week of tension over the issue of same-sex marriage. Biden’s unexpected comments in a TV interview last Sunday saying he supported the issue, which he had once opposed, appeared to have forced Obama to announce his own election-year change of heart on same-sex marriage Wednesday, sooner than he had planned.
Afterward, the two men went golfing. Biden’s son Hunter and Marvin Nicholson, Obama’s travel director, completed the foursome.
At the ceremony, Biden was especially effusive, crediting Obama with fighting to win $1 billion for the federal Community Oriented Policing Services program that Biden, as a senator, helped create in 1994, and for a new communications system to avert the breakdowns that first responders faced after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“And this is the reason why it happened — this man right here,” Biden said, gesturing toward the president. Without specifically naming congres- sional Republicans, Biden added, “They tried to make him have to choose between this and other equally important things he cared about, but this was a showstopper.”
And without naming Republican governors who have tangled with public-sector unions, Biden drew big applause when he said, “It also takes leadership, the type demonstrated by the president, to stand up for folks who want to take away your collective-bargaining rights. To say you’ve earned those rights would be the understatement of the day.”
After Biden and Obama embraced, Obama said of his vice president, “It is especially good to be with somebody who has been fighting on behalf of law enforcement all his life.” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was also present at the event.
The National Association of Police Organizations has picked Top Cops annually since 1994. This year’s winners included men and women, whites, blacks and Hispanics, and officers from New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago as well as from small towns such as Copley, Ohio; Paramus, N.J.; and Woburn, Mass.
Nearly half were from Detroit — 15 police officers who were attacked in their precinct station by a gunman; four were wounded. Obama, without naming individuals, recounted their heroism and that of five New York police officers who flew a helicopter to rescue two West Point cadets from a cliff at night despite powerful winds, and the Paramus officer, who was shot three times by a suspect she had pulled over on a highway and was reloading in the snow when a colleague arrived and killed the gunman.