EDITOR’S CORNER
Our neighbors to the west—and not too far to the west—won’t be on the Live PD television program any more.
Williamson County is all of 12 miles from the western Rockdale city limits. Last week commissioners in that county voted to terminate the contract whereby the TV series places camera operators in patrol cars to record what transpires.
There may be issues of which the general public is not aware in this matter. I don’t know. One personal issue was reported by an Austin television station.
It’s notable that this issue involved something a person “wanted to happen,” not something that actually happened.
One report I heard included a sound bite from someone who was at the commissioners court meeting in which Live PD got the boot. They felt officers were “playing to the camera” instead of doing their jobs.
My wife and I have watched a lot of Live PD which features law enforcement agencies all over the country, not just Williamson County and we have come to a somewhat different conclusion.
There sure are a lot of jerks around.
Except we don’t use the word “jerks.”
Time after time you can see people acting like the south end of a northbound horse over the smallest thing and escalate an encounter with law enforcement far beyond what it needs to be.
Things like “can I see your driver’s license?” can bring on attitudes you’d never tolerate in your six-year-old.
If you dip into that thought-numbing swirl we call, for some unknown reason, “social media,” you can find hundreds of examples whose basic theme is “I beat the cops.”
They will tell you why you don’t have to obey an officer’s commands, why you don’t have to ID yourself and even why there’s not any enabling authority for police to do most of what they do.
These folks can be divided into two classes—Those who think they are smarter than everyone else and those who just plain don’t like police.
It’s essentially a self esteem problem. Some people have way too much.
What Live PD has done is essentially bring to a larger audience a portrait of what those of us who have worked with law enforcement over a long period of time already know.
Being a cop requires an extraordinary amount of patience and self-restraint.
For starters, an officer never knows when they walk up to a vehicle they’ve just stopped what they are going to find—a grandmother in a hurry to get to Sunday School or Charles Manson and his family with the arsenal of a small nation.
An exaggeration? A close friend of a former Rockdale law officer was shot to death as he approached a driver he had stopped to warn of a malfunctioning tail light.
Or an officer might find some mouthy jerk who wants to debate the Fourth Amendment, Supreme Court decisions and the Magna Carta when asked the provocative question “do you have an ID?” They do on Live PD.
Or, as I witnessed on a Live PD segment—I believe it was in California—one passerby stopped his car, came over to where a handful of officers were investigating something and loudly inquired “Does it take that many of you to do this?!”
Police have to put up with this every day. I wouldn’t last an hour. I’d be like my late mother when she saw a tackle at her first football game: “If somebody did that to me, I’d jump up and punch them in the mouth.”
But what about the bad cops? Yes, there are some, but not many. Doesn’t it follow that if you are stopped by that one bad cop in a million it would make even more sense to comply with their commands?
You can always get them later. No shortage of attorneys, or media, drooling all over themselves to make any police officer, anywhere, look bad.
I, for one, will miss seeing our neighbors do their fine work on Live PD.
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