Soap Box

Okay, you’re in a dark alley in a high crime section of a big city answering a call about shots being fired and looking for a 5’ 10” male wearing dark clothes who an eyewitness says has run down the alley after pumping two bullets into a teenager who is lying on the sidewalk bleeding profusely and unresponsive.

You spot a person fitting the description hiding behind a dumpster and shout, “police, come out with your hands in the air” but instead of obeying your command the suspect comes out with his hands in his jacket pockets and rapidly begins to remove his right hand obviously holding something that is impossible to identify in the low light of the alley.

Is he holding a cell phone, a knife, or a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol?

You have one second to make up your mind and the decision you reach in the twinkling of an eye decides whether you’ll be going home to your family at the end of your shift or hauled out of a garbage clogged alley in a body bag.

Think about it, you have informed the suspect that you are a duly authorized officer of the law, that he should put his hands in the air and step out into the clear, but instead he reaches in his pocket.

What do you do?

Tough decision, right?

Well, law enforcement is faced with these types of situations on a daily basis and there are very few of them that could not be settled without bloodshed or injury if the suspect would simply comply with the officer’s request.

Officers of the law are given authority for good reason, because it would be impossible to enforce the law and keep the peace without it and when one of them asks you to do something as mundane as hand him your drivers license or as serious as to lie on the ground with your hands in full sight, it is a citizen’s own responsibility to do it.

Disrespect for authority is the major cause of the vast majority of shootings involving policemen in this nation, whether it be a citizen or a cop who is on the receiving end of a bullet.

It is sickening to see blatant demonstrations of disrespectful behavior such as we’ve recently witnessed in New York as water was thrown on officers in the act of doing their duty and it’s twice as sickening that the mayor and the officials charged with the running of the city are not enraged and up in arms about the situation and issuing stern warnings that every person involved in one of these water-throwing incidents would be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

What kind of reaction are policemen supposed to have when they are not being allowed to do their job, when they get such orders from their superiors as “let them destroy” or are left to hang out and dry by city hall, never given the benefit of the doubt by a hostile media and get kicked around by members of congress every time one of their number makes a mistake.

Are there bad cops?

Of course there are, just as there are immoral preachers, crooked judges and scores of bent politicians, but the vast, and I do mean the vast majority of our law enforcement officers are good and decent human beings, fathers and mothers, with the same desire to do their jobs and raise their families in peace as most all of us have.

Just for a minute, imagine the streets of America without police.

What do you think would happen, even if our police were to take just one day off the job?

I think we could all imagine the ramifications, robber, murder, chaos on a scale that our neighborhoods would never recover from.

I was brought up to respect the laws and those who enforce them.

I have heard it said that if you don’t like laws to go live in the jungle where there are no laws.

Conversely, if we had no law enforcement, we wouldn’t have to go to the wasteland, the wasteland would come to us.

I salute our men and women in blue who keep the wasteland and its inhabitants at bay.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops our police and the peace of Jerusalem.

God Bless America

— Charlie Daniels

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