The Police Are The Enemy

Just ask anyone who participated in the January 6th coup

Washington, DC, USA — Jan. 10, 2020: Police officers line the streets to watch the procession for the body of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died during the Capitol Riots on January 6. (Photo by Nicole Glass Photography via Shutterstock)

The yearly reminder of the January 6th coup attempt can hardly be called an anniversary. That word is reserved for happier memories and the 6th day of January is hardly a moment of celebration. Unless of course, your address is Mar-a-Lago.

During that attack on our Democracy, 176 police officers were injured. One died. Four more were to take their own lives within seven months.

I’ve got a lot of police officers of one kind or another in my family tree. My brother is a retired Honolulu Police Officer. My father was a Military Policeman in WWII. I had an uncle who was police chief in a small Central New York Town. Even I did my bit as a Park Ranger in our New York State Parks. Which is about as far down the pecking order as you can get. It’s kind of a would-be rent-a-cop who gets paid minimum wage to be eyes and ears for the real Park Police.

And, while I’m not one with a blue light outside my front door, or who has a blue stripe on my flag, I do believe in the thin blue line that protects people like you and me from the bad guys.

These days it seems, nobody likes a cop until they need one.

That's why I don't understand my law and order neighbors who sport the “Fuck Biden” signs outside their front doors, fly Trump flags, or continue to support the conspirators of January 6th, particularly the chief conspirator, then President Donald Trump.

The people who stormed the capitol believed the police were the enemy and assaulted them in the cowardly way of a mob unleashed.

If you want to know the real story of that day, you can find no better documentation than Republican House member Liz Cheney’s book Oath and Honor which came out at the end of last year.

Her account is the definitive narrative. She was there. And, with meticulous detail documents the horrifying events of that day, the circumstances leading up to it, and the warning of the aftermath.

Here’s how one of the Capital Police Officers, Officer Caroline Edwards, described her participation in protecting our Nation’s Capital.

When I fell behind that line and I saw, I can just remember my — my breath catching in my throat, because what
I saw was just a war scene. It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up.

They were — you know, they had — I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. You know, I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law-enforcement officer, I
would find myself in the middle of a battle.

You know, I’m trained to detain, you know, a couple subjects and you know, handle a crowd. But I am not combat trained. That day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that were way beyond what any law-enforcement officer has ever trained for.

I just remember — I just remember that moment of stepping behind the line and just seeing the absolute war zone that the West Front had become.

What she is describing is “law and order” proponents taking down police officers, methodically, one by one.

All the while, the one person who could have stopped it all, President Donald Trump, sat was watching it on television from the safety of his sanctuary. And, when the attackers started chanting, “Hang Mike Pence,” he commented, “He deserves it”.

The sitting President of the United States suggested that the Vice President be hanged by an angry mob.

It’s enough to scare the pants off me. It should scare the pants off you, too.

WTF is going on?

How in the world can any American think this is ok? How can they support this lunacy?

I’ve lived through presidential assassinations, riots in our streets in the ’60s, and the gunning down of unarmed students at Kent State. But as long as I live, I will never be able to understand the carnage of this attack, nor the support many people still hold for the man responsible for it all.

Hopefully, the commemoration of the events of that day will be remembered with a moment of silence each January 6th, but with a giant, noisy clamor for justice for those dead and injured police officers come November’s election.