Let’s Support Law Enforcement but Law Enforcement Leaders Should Also Join and Support Popular Efforts to Reduce Gun Violence

More than a month into this effort to help achieve a safer and more secure America, I am both encouraged and discouraged. 

Encouraged because I try to see things through a positive lens, to believe that people love their children and truly want to make the world a better place for them and in turn their children, and simply that common sense, good will, and concern for our fellow women and men will prevail over time. And I see so many individual Americans, organizations and group reflecting this same hope and concern.

Discouraged because a realistic sense of life and the world brings me back to where we really are at this moment of our history, living in a wealthy but violent society where far too many people are losing their lives as a result of gun violence, with the newspapers continually covering the latest random civilian victim or fallen police officer as though such incidents were the weather, everyone talking about it and no one doing anything about it.

These past several days have been particularly awful in this regard, police killed in New York, Houston and elsewhere, a visiting British scientist randomly killed as so many others, including children, by gun fire in their neighborhoods and I could go on. The Gun Violence Archive reports the number of firearm victims continues unabated this year. 

Today, I would like to challenge our police and law enforcement leaders to step up to the challenge that they and we all face every day, every night, every week, every month, every year. 

I for one share their outrage at attacks on their personnel, people who we rely on to preserve public safety and stability in our society.  My personal experiences are just minor data points in the general scheme of things, but they had a real impact on me and my motivating principles and I recognize that they are certainly peripheral to what our police officers face every day.  Watching the 1972 film New Centurions and doing a day ride along with the police in Baltimore some years ago, along with decades of following the news, have brought me to the immutable conclusion that the fundamental problem of policing in America is that law enforcement is called to police a well-armed population, with no way of knowing who is a threat and who is not. 

The killing of Philando Castile on July 6, 2016 in Minneapolis by a nervous officer, and the streaming of his death agony over the internet stands as an irrefutable example confirming the everyday challenge facing every police officer, and underscoring the tragic mistakes that have resulted. So many, many similar cases, where innocent people, and the officers involved, have their lives ended or altered forever.

In writing this, I spent some time on the web page of the National Association of Police Officers (NAPO), hoping to find indications of concern about gun violence and proposals and measures to counter the threat to rank and file officers. 

Unfortunately, there was little of substance on the gun violence threat and challenge. 

Rather the focus was, understandably, on recaps of NAPO’s successful and certainly worthwhile efforts to improve the circumstances of their membership.  I sincerely applaud them for their commitment to addressing the mental health dimension of their policing challenge, including peer support programs, and to using federal CARE Act funding to bolster financial compensation to officers in the line of duty.  That NAPO is working with key Congressional representative who intend to introduce legislation to reauthorize and improve the Justice and Mental Health Collaboration Program (JMHCP) is clearly a good thing for police and the community alike.

This link will take you to their January 14, 2022 Washington Report (https://www.napo.org/washington-report/latest-news-updates/napo-priorities-117th-congress-mid-term-review-draft-presidential-executive-order-police-reform-leakednapo-supports-bill-give-sm/), and you can see their concerns and their efforts.

But still, the daily issue of gun violence and its police and civilian victims is missing. 

Perhaps the association is cautious about stepping forward on Second Amendment constitutional issues. 

But NAPO is active on legislation in their members’ interest, and also clearly in the interest of law enforcement are such long proposed gun safety legislative measures as credible background checks, firearm registration, training in firearm use, limits on magazines, red flag laws and related measures.  Such steps would clearly reduce threats to officers on patrol and to people on the streets, and, perhaps most important of all, create a better climate of trust between the police and the community with regard to public safety overall. 

If press reports of police briefings are true, the fallen and wounded officers in this past weekend’s New York City incident faced an assailant whose Glock 45 carried a 40 round magazine. Forty rounds? For what sane or legal purpose could that be justified?  In what world, or country, does that not represent a deadly threat to law enforcement?

So, as my tweet of yesterday said, police and law enforcement leaders, please step up to this continual and mounting challenge.

That means taking as deadly serious the nerve wracking prospect that ongoing red state legislature actions to increase scope for open carry in many states will combine with the possibility that a Supreme Court ruling in New York Rifle and Pistol Association (NYRPA) v Bruen in June in favor of the NYRPA petitioners will bring an even greater number of firearms to our streets and communities. 

Such an increase in guns within our public spaces will no doubt greatly complicate the task of law enforcement throughout the country.  It will certainly place police officers and civilians in even greater peril, every day and in every everyday situation.   

As we have seen in the news over recent months, that peril can strike any of us (or any police officer) while we shop, work, stroll in a park, cheer for our favorite team in our neighborhood sports bar, attend church, relax in our apartments, nap on the couch, drive around town, encounter incidents of road rage, or do whatever, whenever.  The possibilities of death or wounding are endless and limited only by one’s imagination.

Let’s always respect and support our law enforcement institutions, organizations and rank and file officers.   But let’s also urge and press their leadership to engage on the widely accepted and supported measures that, consistent with the Constitution and Supreme Court jurisprudence through two centuries, will help reduce societal gun violence, and make the country more secure and safer.

If police leaders don’t, and if they don’t do so with urgency, we will sadly see the perfect gun violence storm this fall – greater open and concealed carry -- with any of us or many of us the next random and unfortunate victim.  Our survivors will grieve and mourn, but will always wonder “why, and for what?”.

Call, write, email, tweet or Facebook post to your local police, their leaders, and to national associations to tell them that the time is now, not tomorrow, next year or next century.

Law enforcement deserves continual support, but we and our efforts to curb gun violence deserve the support of law enforcement leaders as well.

Let’s do this together and do it this spring.