A Facebook friend, who is a cop, messaged me privately to say he didn’t appreciate one of my posts this week that criticized cops. Even though I was careful to say “not all cops,” he still felt I painted with too broad of a brush. As a liberal, I had to think carefully about that. I didn’t want to be prejudiced against anyone—including cops. Yes, I do feel sorry for the good cops who have to take heat for the bad cops. It’s “cop profiling”—kind of like “racial profiling”—something that cops have been doing to blacks throughout American history.
Hmm. . . . If a cop gets unfairly profiled and doesn’t like it, he has the option of changing careers, and if he stays, at least he gets a paycheck and health insurance. A black person, on the other hand, can’t quit his/her race and doesn’t get paid to put up with the profiling. Therefore, after careful consideration, I say fuck it! If good cops get a little unfair profiling because Derek Chauvin and three others participated in a brutal murder in Minneapolis, so be it! No matter what happens, those good cops won’t have to go through a lifetime of prejudice for something they couldn’t change—and, perhaps, they’ll be more likely to stand up to cops who go bad.