“We should have been firemen,” he said quietly but matter-of-factly.
I was at lunch in Kingman, Arizona with 16 police officers where I was conducting K9 team training on explosive and narcotic detection. The officers were from multiple jurisdictions and represented a cross-section of America.
There were white, Asian, Hispanic, and black male and female officers representing a wide range of age and experience. This lunch took place almost exactly a year ago.
A lot has transpired since then.
They were reacting to the negative attention that police officers were receiving and the increased danger to their profession.
Police officers have to deal with the worst that our society has to offer. Drugs, thefts, child endangerment, domestic battery, murder, rape, the list goes on and on.
They are constantly exposed to negative situations but through training and their commitment to serve the public they go to work every day to protect our society.
Since that luncheon, police officer deaths have increased almost 80 percent in 2016 compared to 2015. They have become a focal point of the Black Lives Matters movement and they have been attacked, beaten, and killed. Who is to blame for it coming to this point?
Yes, there are some police officers that are racist, just like some civilian citizens.
But the overwhelming majority are decent, honest, caring men and women who became police officers to serve society and protect the citizens against those who would cause harm to us.
The issues of racism are deep and broad-based but much of the blame for what is happening now can be directed at President Obama and the Justice Department.
In 2008 America elected a president that brought hope to those who felt that they were living in a racist society. They felt that they now had a leader that would advance their cause and improve their lives.
In retrospect, the exact opposite has happened. What the government has tried to do since the 60s to halt racism and bring equality is to enact legislation to give opportunities and protections to minorities.
The rationale is that those who were unable to go to good schools or get good jobs because of race or economic conditions needed to have laws to give them those opportunities.
On the surface that makes perfect sense.
Sometimes (too often) we have needed to have doors kicked open with legislative action because those doors were indeed closed to minorities. When President Obama was elected there was a subtle but profound shift in how minorities viewed how the government would solve many of the issues that they faced. It became an “entitlement” mindset by many who felt they were “owed” by the government to take care of their needs.
They now had a president who they felt was sympathetic to their issues and would be proactive in improving their lives. The rhetoric from Washington only reinforced that belief.
But entitlement can be a tricky issue.
Sometimes it can create a lack of effort by those who are getting the entitlement while simultaneously creating resentment by those who are paying for the entitlements.
Entitlements transfer the responsibility from the individual to the government to solve their individual issues. This change to an entitlement mentality has essentially compounded the problems of racism, prejudice, and bigotry in our society.
Minorities feel like they have been betrayed. But they don’t know who to focus that blame on.
For the last 50-plus years, they have been promised that the government would improve racism in America.
Hope for greater change heightened in 2008, but just a few years later minorities have recognized that things have not improved. That anger and resentment has been slowly smoldering.
The only thing it needed was a spark to ignite the flames. It got that spark with the highly-publicized deaths of black men by police officers.
The deaths became the focal point that brought all that anger to the surface. The facts of the deaths didn’t matter. The Judicial Department and the White House were quick to fan the flames. It suited their need to deflect attention away from their failed programs and redirect it to someone else.
The president and the Judicial Department came out against the police and police departments.
The police had become the fall guys (and girls) for the government’s failures and the focal point of racism in America. No matter how illogical it is do so.
The police are not in charge of creating jobs for minorities and they do not keep minorities from attending schools.
Many officers’ lives could have been saved if our government had the courage to support them and not support the rioters and those who came out against the police.
Perhaps now with a new administration taking office in 2017 things will change.
We need to take the focus of racism away from the police departments and officers and refocus it on areas where racism can be more effectively overcome.
Education, jobs, hard work, and family values have been foundations of our society and will continue to be so.
Our role now must be to move the focus away from the police departments and back to those areas where we can diminish racism to move our country forward.
“We should have been firemen,” he said.
Tim Burke is a Pahrump resident