Thanks Officers. No Thanks Talk Show Host.

                So I am departing the national media scene this week—mostly—because neither Fox News or CNN needs my advice as much as I wish they did. Instead I want to address a topic a little more personal to me because when I heard what I heard I nearly drove my car off the road screaming at my radio.

                Anyone who reads my blog regularly (God bless you) or even occasionally knows that my son is a police officer. A fact about which I am extremely proud and terrified every single day.

                So when I heard a caller to a popular afternoon talk radio show in Denver call in as the discussion wound around the potential resignation, or not, of Denver’s mayor for flirting with a female cop via email make the following statement: “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag,” I was outraged.

                But I didn’t have my meltdown until I heard the talk show host—whom I have grown to really enjoy most of the time—try and handle the caller gently and empathetically instead of ripping her head off for making such a patently ridiculous, stupid, biased and out-of-line statement. Talk like that is not only stupid it is not helpful and is actually dangerous to the well-being of law enforcement officers in a political climate still in the throes of trying to shake the Obama Legacy of racial division which includes cop-hating.

                After said talk show host finished drying the caller’s tears she seemed a little remorseful for not standing up for officers in the face of such extreme willful ignorance and mentioned the death of Jessica Hernandez as a result of an officer-involved shooting after the 17-year-old girl who had been out smoking pot all night with her pals in a car they had stolen aimed that car at two police officers who confronted her and drove all 4,000 lbs. of it at them like a weapon in a tight alley where the cops had limited options for dealing with the threat. She did ram one of the officers breaking his leg. She was shot three times and died.

                Tragic for sure. But completely justified according to the Denver Police Department Review Board and anyone with any common sense or parenting skills.  And DPD still paid the young lady’s family $999,999, money being all the family was looking for according to Jessica’s own cousin immediately after the shooting. (See my blog from 4/16/17, “The Million Dollar Question.”)

                The host allowed that while that shooting may have been controversial, the cops were probably justified in their response.  She didn’t say it while being confronted by Ms. Body Bag, but at least she finally got around to saying it.

                I know how liberals and the media, in general, hate, ignore and have no use for the facts, but let’s take a needless moment to deconstruct an asinine statement like “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag.” How smart does one have to be to recognize the hyperbole in that statement?

                And yet the talk show host let her get away with it. Shameful.

                There was no public information officer available when I called the DPD but the duty officer I spoke with at length was extremely confident that already this year (in then 69 days) the DPD had been called to close to 100,000 incidents. That seems high to me but let’s say the officer was engaging in a little hyperbole of his own and the number is half that, or even a quarter. I think 25,000 officer-involved incidents has a better chance of being on the low side than 100,000 does of being on the high side.

                So let’s pretend we’re CNN for a moment and run with 25,000 incidents as if it were a fact instead of merely an educated conservative guess. According to a timeline created by The Denver Post (a medium with its own well-documented anti-police history) there have been 16 officer-involved shootings in the entire state of Colorado in 2018 through the seventh of March, three of which involved Denver police officers specifically.

                Let me do the math for you, three incidents out of 25,000 supposed calls is .012%. That is a long way from one body bag per call (and they didn’t all end in death) and no one should be allowed to make a kick-me-in-the-head stupid statement like that and not get called out for it.

                On January 26, a DPD officer shot and wounded (in the left hand) a juvenile charged with first degree assault on a police officer and robbery for pointing a handgun at said officer when confronted.

                The DPD, in fact, managed not to kill anyone this year until February 6 when after 45 minutes of attempted negotiation with a man barricaded in a bedroom at his mother’s house where he had been threatening his mother with a “large butcher knife,” the man exited the bedroom and rushed at four officers brandishing the knife.

                Then on the 13^th of February a 22-year veteran of the DPD shot and killed a man as that man simultaneously shot his 86-year old father in the head over an apparent disagreement. Apparently.

                In the same time frame—statewide—two law enforcement officers were killed and three wounded (I could’ve sworn there were three officers killed this year but the Post says no) by bad guys as the officers were trying to keep us safe from armed criminals by enforcing the law.

                I am not a police officer but I pray to God that if anyone ever points a gun at my son, or rushes him with a knife or aims a car at him and accelerates as if it were a weapon that he empties his .45 into their bouncing and jerking corpse.

                I hate cop haters. As a society we cannot ask police officers to enforce our laws and do the things we are afraid, unwilling or just hesitant to do and then find fault with them for defending their own lives when they are placed in jeopardy keeping us safe. They have families they'd like to go home to when their shift is over too.

                Save the “one bad exception proves the rule” argument for your next liberal “ain’t it awful” whine and cheese gathering. Yes there are bad cops. Trigger happy cops should get the same treatment trigger happy criminals should get. Every cop I personally know thinks that.

                And allowing people to call talk radio and broadcast to however many thousands of people are listening a comment like, “If you call a Denver cop to the scene, somebody is leaving in a body bag,” without taking them to task for it is contributing to the level of danger those guys face every day because for every hysterical nut job willing to make that call there is one in the audience listening and they might have a gun.

                Things are dangerous enough for police in the wake of now citizen Obama’s hateful and fomenting words helping create and perpetuate the myth that our nation has militarized a band of irresponsible troglodytes that awake every morning hoping that today is the day they get to kill a young black male, or failing that at least someone.

                When you lay your head down on the pillow at night and sleep soundly because you don’t have to worry about an unpoliced populace of evil maniacs breaking into your house to steal your stuff or your life or to rape your daughter, maybe it wouldn’t be too much to ask that you remember because of whom that is possible.