7/27/9   Who you gonna call?

The recent brouhaha involving a Cambridge egghead and a police sergeant and a second officer has caused lots of discussion.  Of course, depending on the political persuasion of the discusser, the perspective goes different directions.

I hate nannyism and nanny laws that a handful of control freaks push through, and no one enforces.  Who cares?  City Hall nannies don't enforce existing laws.   I do want crimes against persons and property prosecuted. 

As usually happens in the summer, my little neighborhood (and probably yours) is under siege by burglars.  Coincidentally, school is out and little hoodlums have too much time on their hands.  They are hitting cars and houses with horrible regularity.  As you should, I subscribe to Avi Adelman's Dallas Crime Report for our crime beat, which is split between District 6 (south of Walnut Hill) and District 13 (north of Walnut Hill).   The crime is worse in the more affluent part of our crime beat than in my more modest neighborhood, but our crime rate is unacceptable.

Who's supposed to fix the problem?  The police, of course.  When officers step up to protect us from bad guys, they never know what might be the personal and/or professional result to themselves. 

If a woman calls 911 and reports she's being beaten by her significant other, there is no way an officer knows what to expect when he gets to the scene.  As likely as not, the woman will recant and beg them not to arrest her beater.  On many occasions, officers come under attack by both the beatee and the beater, sometimes with fatal results for police officers.  Still, they go when called.

Last year, a man in my neighborhood saw some teenagers hauling a plasma tv and other stolen goods down his alley in a recycling cart.  He talked to them, but he didn't call the police -- didn't want to get involved.  He actually admitted to other neighbors what he had done.  This summer, he's been burglarized twice.  After the first break-in and before his second burglary, he saw some unknown teenagers on a neighbor's porch.  He didn't call the police -- didn't want to get involved.  Poetic justice.

This past week, two DPD officers alertly noticed a problem with their squad car and evacuated it just before it burst into flames.  Rather than run for cover, like most of us would do, they started diverting traffic to protect the citizens they serve.  How would you like to stand out in traffic with drivers rubber-necking to see a burning squad car?  Those two officers put the public's safety before their personal safety.  They are better than us.

When Sgt. Crowley and his partner answered a burglary in progress call in Cambridge, he had no idea he would become the center of a national controversy.  What did Sgt. Crowley do wrong?  He had the audacity to ask for the identification of a pompous professor who has appeared on Oprah.  Prof. Pomp & CircumGate was outraged that a White man did not know he was in the presence of a celebrity.  Sgt. Crowley and his partner were simply trying to confirm that Prof. Pomp & CircumGate was the resident of the house after a neighbor had reported two men with backpacks trying to break into a house.

What if Prof. Pomp & CircumGate was not who he claimed to be, and the two officers just turned and left the house to him?  What if the true Prof. Gates was not the maniac who screamed obscenities at the White police sergeant and returned to find the local police had allowed a burglar to remain in his home and steal his stuff?  What would you do if you were dealing with a simple situation, and a stranger went wacko on you?  I've read the police report.  It's on the internet.

Cops are people.  They are better people than most of us.  For not a whole lot of money, they put themselves between us and the bad people.

They not only fight the bad guys, they spend a lot of their personal time doing community work, like working with Scouts and other youth groups.  Officer Alex Garcia has been stuck in Colorado since collapsing from dehydration and blood clots while representing the city in an Explorer Scouts program.  If you've ever been hospitalized in another state, away from your family and friends, you can empathize with Officer Garcia's situation. 

Who first came to Officer Garcia's aid?  His fellow police officers, of course.  To make matters worse, it took a man in McKinney to donate the money to bring Officer Garcia home to be hospitalized here in Dallas.  We have all these rich people in this town who get all these tax abatements.  Why didn't one of our local billionaires send a jet out to Boulder to bring Officer Garcia home?

If you want to help Officer Garcia, go to www.atodallas.org (Assist the Officer).  You can make a donation that will go directly to assist his medical costs.

Officer Garcia took time away from his family to work with Eagle Scouts.  Many police officers donate a great deal of their personal time to community work. 

When Mr. Obama admitted to not knowing the facts and then misstated the facts before calling Sgt. Crowley stupid, he couched his statement in "our" experiences with racial profiling by police.  That is so bogus.  This guy was raised by his White grandmother because his Black father abandoned his family.  Why doesn't Mr. Obama feel animosity toward Black men who knock up stupid White chicks? 

My natural father was married to my mother when he got her pregnant, but he was never a father to me.  My stepfather married my mother when I was 12 and my brother was 6.  He had four kids of his own, two older than me and two younger.  He was my dad in every sense of the word.  He wasn't perfect, but he was a good man -- maybe even a great man.  He was also a Dallas Police Officer for 22 years.  He was also "people". 

I don't know Sgt. Crowley's family situation, but he sure comes across as a calm and decent man trying to do his job.  Prof. Pomp & CircumGate comes across as a little Napoleon who has bought his own public relations.  They are both "people", but one is a public servant and the other appears to be a publicity hound.

I have a liberal arts degree from a state university, not from a prestigious private college.  You may be willing to assume any Ivy League graduate or professor has superior intellect to yours, I'm not.  You and I live in the real world where common sense is essential.  Prof. Pomp & CircumGate has multiple degrees and classrooms of adoring and malleable students, but he seems to be common sense impaired. 

Like most other police officers and firefighters, Sgt. Crowley has a personal life where he is "people", but he spends most of his waking hours protecting "the people".  Why not give him the benefit of the doubt?

If someone breaks into your home, who you gonna' call?  Prof. Pomp & CircumGate?  Or, a police officer?

sb