![\"iStock.Cop.Police\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/9\/2014\/12\/iStock.Cop_.Police-e1419389476455.jpg\")
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While I fully understand there are bad cops \u2014 and there are good cops who make bad mistakes \u2014 the Left\u2019s recent wave of anti-cop sentiment is not only disgusting, it\u2019s dehumanizing. Essentially, the Left places an inhuman burden of patience and tolerance for risk on\u00a0police officers, then jumps on the inevitable failure to achieve an impossible standard as proof of police corruption and violence. <\/p>\n
They do the same thing to soldiers in combat conditions, imposing on them restrictions that defy reason and human nature, then decry alleged \u201cabuses\u201d as creating moral equivalence between Americans and their enemies.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the reality: Prolonged exposure to violence and the threat of violence creates a natural increased tendency towards aggression, and this response is not only logical, it\u2019s necessary for self-preservation and necessary to do the job. Unless you\u2019ve encountered a consistent threat of mortal violence, it\u2019s hard to describe how a person changes. I\u2019ll relate an example from my own life. In 2008, I was on a \u201cpresence patrol\u201d in an Iraqi village that had long been considered relatively\u00a0safe.\u00a0We\u2019d rooted out al-Qaeda weeks before, local markets were open, and the atmosphere was\u00a0somewhat relaxed. While I was obviously alert and scanning the neighborhood for threats, I wasn\u2019t nearly as tense as I\u2019d been on different\u00a0missions on uncleared roads (in other words, where\u00a0IEDs were expected), deep into territory al-Qaeda was deemed to control.<\/p>\n
The village seemed so safe\u00a0that a number of guys started kicking a soccer ball around with a growing crowd of kids (we were often followed by packs of young boys). Then, a rock about the size of a softball flew by my head \u2014 missing my face by a few inches. If I was walking down the street in my hometown, and a rock came flying past my face, my first response would likely be confusion. I wouldn\u2019t react aggressively, but instead with surprise \u2014 assuming a kid was playing somewhere, and accidentally hoisted a rock near an adult. In Iraq? I immediately wheeled around with my M4\u00a0up and scanning for threats, and I was not the only one. About a half-dozen other Sabre\u00a0Squadron soldiers also had their weapons up. The kids scattered, and the situation grew very dangerous, very fast.<\/p>\n
It turned out there was no true threat, an older kid had decided to throw a few rocks and run, but there was an immediate potential for a horrible, violent confrontation \u2014 one that could have resulted in killing a child. If the rock had been a prelude to a \u201cbaited ambush\u201d (where terrorists try to draw our troops into a designated kill zone), then the immediate reaction of weapons up could have saved lives. If the rock was just a petulant, childish prank (as proved to be the case), the weapons up meant a dramatically increased chance that even a good-faith mistake would have dreadful consequences.<\/p>\n
While a patrol in Iraq is obviously statistically more dangerous than walking a beat in an American inner city, I\u2019d submit that the prolonged psychological impact of exposure to actual and potential violence is similar. There is an immediate self-protective response that gets hard-wired into an individual, an aggressive response, that can be tempered with training and experience but cannot ever be removed, nor would we want it to be. That aggressive response more often than not saves lives, including not just cops\u2019 lives but the lives of civilians who call for their help.<\/p>\n
The best way to lower the temperature in a neighborhood \u2014 to decrease the chances for the kinds of encounters that result in unarmed civilians dying to police gunfire \u2014 is to continue to engage in the law-enforcement and criminal-justice practices that we know can and do dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. And that means focusing on getting violent criminals off the streets. I\u00a0strongly recommend Kevin Williamson\u2019s piece<\/a>\u00a0on this point.\u00a0Who commits murders? People with prior, violent criminal records. And so long as violent criminals are on the streets, police on those streets \u2014 who are properly and naturally more aggressive than civilians \u2014 will make exactly the kinds of decisions in the \u201cfog of war\u201d\u00a0that cause anti-police radicals to chant\u00a0for their deaths. It\u2019s inevitable.<\/p>\n Kipling,\u00a0in his classic poem\u00a0Tommy<\/em><\/a>, spoke of \u201cmakin\u2019 mock o\u2019 uniforms that guard you while you sleep,\u201d and the police-hatred of the last few months is truly \u201cmakin\u2019 mock.\u201d To make this point is not to excuse true wrongdoing or to relieve police officers from accountability for their mistakes, but we must take care not to hold them to unattainable standards of immediate pacifism when pacifism is warranted and immediate aggression when aggression is warranted. Life is not that neat and clean, and the constant threat of danger has real effects. Those who doubt this reality should don a\u00a0uniform, take their own turn on the wall, and report back with the results.<\/p>\n This article first appeared on\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>National Review Online<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Read more on the\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Patheos Faith and Family Channel<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and follow\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>David on Twitter<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While I fully understand there are bad cops \u2014 and there are good cops who make bad mistakes \u2014 the Left\u2019s recent wave of anti-cop sentiment is not only disgusting, it\u2019s dehumanizing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1341,1340,673],"class_list":["post-8076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-hatred-against-police","tag-kevin-williamson","tag-violence"],"yoast_head":"\n