I teach people who want to be in law enforcement.

According to some of what I have read in the past few days, police officers are all greedy freeloaders, whose call to duty is a fraud while they exercise their narcissistic self interest.

You can look here, here and here.

Now, you might object that the writers and speakers here did not directly attack police but attacked public employee unions.

Seventy-three percent of all sworn police officers are in unions.

No, they are not going to say police or the word, fireman. But that’s what they mean.

These attacks on unions and collective bargaining hit the police just as hard as any other public union.

I’m not going to get into, whether or not unions are good ideas for police. I am more interested in another issue.

Police work is motivated in many cases by the idealism of the young and the status of the job in the eyes of the public. How are we supposed to recruit good people to be police officers with this kind of talk going on? And what if it continues? Month after month, year after year, the words, “Greedy public employees are destroying the nation!” How do you deal with that? What kind of police are we going to get?

Does this hammer idealism until only those who become policemen gravitated to it as kind of a last chance employment?

What in the hell have we become here?

If most Americans don’t have good pensions or good medical benefits, the police shouldn’t have them either?

At two o’clock in the morning, when somebody is trying to jimmy your window, do you want a highly motivated police officer whose idealism and commitment to duty made him want to be a police officer? Or would you rather have someone who couldn’t do anything else?

I wouldn’t worry about it. You see, it takes motivation and guts to confront a robber outside a house, so the unmotivated uncaring policeman will just ignore the call.

Probably a lot of you don’t care one way or the other. Or you won’t until your law enforcement agencies have started taking damage.

I’m not waiting for that to happen.

Law enforcement is not a lucrative job. It’s not always a pleasant or easy job. But my heart is with those people, who do a job that must be done and deserve better than insults.

James Pilant