Just look at 'em.
The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.
Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?
Except they didn't.
When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.
What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.
Think about who those coppers actually work for.
You? Me? Those kids or their parents?
C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.
The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland".
When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?
That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.
But they don't do it for you.
And neither do the cops.
Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.
Now.
I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.
Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.
But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.
Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.
I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.
But think about it.
Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.
Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.
Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.
Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.
I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.
In real life?
The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.
And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.
Yeah, like that.
So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?
Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.
I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.
But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.
It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?
No.
The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.
Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.
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