Really? Stop funding police departments?

Groups are advocating we eliminate police departments at all levels. This is a dumber idea than the one with all the insane rules and restrictions for the Payroll Protection Plan.

Just how will law and order be maintained? Will armed militias take over the control of street crimes and protect our children, our neighborhoods and our business districts?

Granted, we have a problem. Part of that problem is the terrible fact that we racially profile people every day and most of us can’t see that we even are doing it. We also compartmentalize people based on height (tall people must be good at basketball), overweight people (they must be jolly like Santa Claus) and how about even blondes (have you heard the joke about the dumb blonde)?

No one is disputing that four cops participated in a horrible crime against George Floyd. Each may have had a varying degree of excessive force, but they all were viewed as clearly handling the situation wrong, whether they were kneeling on his neck, holding his body down, or standing guard to stop the crowd from helping him or interfering with them.

That is four police officers out of how many across the country?

Are we lumping all officers as bad or corrupt and even criminal based on what these men did? They were white. That has been played as the major reason it happened, as all white officers are looking to harm black civilians?

There seems to be every possible form of discrimination in this case as well as profiling and typecasting. It sickens us to even try to sort it out.

Pittsburgh police and the mayor’s office made things worse in Western Pa. by not being lawful or transparent in their handling of the Pittsburgh protests. Black Lives Matter is truly a separate and more significant chant than All Lives Matter. Until Black Lives Matter, All Lives cannot matter.

But how do you translate all those wrongs to a platform that eliminates police forces?

It has been our privilege to know and respect many law enforcement professionals.

We hope that none of them are capable of what happened in Minnesota. Not because they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, harm a criminal that they needed to control, but because they have taken their training and their professions seriously and they respect the law they are sworn to uphold.

Let’s face it, there are good and bad in every profession.

There have been Pulitzer Prize winning writers who were found to have faked or stolen their stories.

There have been teachers and professors who have committed atrocities against students. There have been presidents of the United States that one side or the other considered to have defiled the Constitution.

That doesn’t mean all of them are guilty of the same. There is no easy answer to this problem. We fear the day when one of our own, who may be a man of color, is suspected of wrong just because he is not white. But we also hope there will be a respectable, professional police officer involved that looks beyond any skin color or religious garment to decide whether he is likely guilty of some crime.

Stop the foolishness of calling to defund the police. Defund the government first. It will take a lot longer for anyone to notice they are gone. (Has anyone seen the Lt. Governor lately?) You start decreasing the number of police or police departments and you need to get better home security because the real criminals are out there. They aren’t black, they aren’t white and they aren’t any other color. They are criminals. They will take advantage from the first day that we display our new weakness. Then where will we turn for help?