On April 27 in this blog, commenting on training at the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, I pointed out that some of the instructors saw \u201cMumbai coming to the USA\u201d and mentioned the roles of both first-responder cops and armed citizens at mass-murder sites. Since then, Osama bin Laden has been whacked, and the wire services have reported, \u201cAl-Qaida\u2019s plots are usually large-scale and involve planning over months or even years. But Western intelligence officials say they are seeing increased chatter about cheap, small-scale attacks \u2013 perhaps by individuals or small extremist groups inspired to take revenge for the killing (of bin Laden).\u201d\u00a0 It turns out that those ILEETA instructors were prescient.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, for the last couple of weeks this corner of the Backwoods Home<\/em> blogs somehow got turned into a cop-bashing fest. I\u2019ve deleted no commentary, and have tried to avoid repeating good points made by many posters, and I haven\u2019t individually answered every comment. In my last blog entry here, I answered some of the questions raised by critics. Some more have come up since on commentary, so I\u2019ll address those now.<\/p>\n \u201cIsn\u2019t militarization of police reflected in their changed uniforms? BDUs?\u201d For cops, Battle Dress Uniform means mainly\u2026cargo pants. Cops need pockets.\u00a0 The change was frankly overdue: dress uniforms aren\u2019t practical for manhunts in the woods or searching the swamps for lost kids. The still-incomplete changeover from spiffy Sam Browne belts to fabric utility belts reduces weight constantly carried around the waist, which is one reason so many cops retire on disability with lower back problems. Blood-borne pathogens also wash out of nylon much more easily than they clean off of leather.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t mind you having AR15s, we just don\u2019t want you pointing them at little old ladies on traffic stops.\u201d Uh\u2026we DON\u2019T.\u00a0 If you find a cop doing that, let me know. Let his boss know, too.<\/p>\n \u201cWe resent cops being able to get fully automatic weapons more easily than us.\u201d Um, that\u2019s been the case since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and it\u2019s just now constituting a \u201cmilitarization of the police\u201d? Please.\u00a0 Good Lord, wait \u2018til folks like that find out that soldiers and Marines have machine guns, too\u2026will they fear and distrust all of them, <\/em>as well?<\/p>\n One commentator mentioned that some of the other Backwoods Home <\/em>writers have published anti-authoritarian essays and asked if I considered them cop-haters, too. No, of course not: none of them to my knowledge has ever said that all cops are to be feared and are unworthy of trust, as so many commentators have said here.<\/p>\n My take on the several YouTube video clips sent along? Analyzing video is a separate topic in and of itself. By definition, each camera gets only one angle of view at any given moment\u2026the two dimensional eye of the camera lacks the often-critical third dimension of depth\u2026what went before and after is lost to the camera\u2026and if people don\u2019t know what to look for, it\u2019s human nature that they won\u2019t see it. If anyone would care to debate that, I\u2019d be happy to offer a tutorial with examples.<\/p>\n Thanks to Big Tex and the others who have injected an articulate, much needed dose of reality here. One blog reader implied that he lost faith in all cops when one of his friends, a policeman, told him he thought the world broke down into cops and everybody else. The reader thought, rightly, that was horrible.\u00a0 It has appalled me for these two weeks to see how many people said that because one cop might be bad, they had to assume that all cops were bad. And dammit, that\u2019s just as horrible.<\/p>\n Some folks need to wake up and smell the hypocrisy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On April 27 in this blog, commenting on training at the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, I pointed out that some of the instructors saw \u201cMumbai coming to the USA\u201d and mentioned the roles of both first-responder cops and armed citizens at mass-murder sites. Since then, Osama bin Laden has been whacked, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1302","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}