Why Aren't Cops Rioting?

>Patch file photo of National Police Week by Todd Richissin.

A few years ago I attended a candlelight vigil held in Washington as part of National Police Week. I went even though I knew it would probably make me cry, and it did.

The scene: Beautiful music playing over speakers; thousands of candles held high for fallen police officers, the thousands killed in the line of duty over the years, so many of them so young. Lots of officers held the candles while tears rolled down their cheeks. Some held onto each other, and you could guess these were cops — and moms and dads — who were those closest to the officers being remembered.

Cops do a lot right and some cops do a lot wrong but what they exceed at as a group is this: They really know how to take care of their own; they can really put on a service.

And no wonder. Who else is going to do it?

All around this country, the many in blue — white officers and black — have come under fire, sometimes literally, for the actions of a few in their ranks. Most people who watched the cops handle the riots in Baltimore, I have to believe, did so with some mixture of admiration for the officers on hand and the dreadful feeling about the summer ahead. Some, no doubt, felt those cops brought the trouble on themselves.

Debate that if you want. Freddie Gray’s death in police hands, which led to the Baltimore madness, should never have happened. Neither, of course, should the riots have happened, but they did, and they did because this was supposed to be what? The fifth, sixth, eighth, twentieth guy killed by police over the past year?

If this isn’t cause for rioting, what is?

Well, the FBI just released a report that said this: Last year, criminals killed 51 cops, close to double the number during the previous year.

Nobody is rioting about that. Few people aside from families of cops and friends of cops, though, seem to have done much more than tsk, tsk and shake their heads. How sad, those who are most generous say, how sad.

Being a cop isn’t the most dangerous job in the United States. Of some 780,000 local and state officers, the 51 killed by criminals, even when added to the 44 who died last year in accidents while on duty, doesn’t even crack the top 10 in terms of deaths per capita.

But people out there aren’t shooting or throwing bricks at loggers or fishermen or roofers or miners. And when people are burning down their own neighborhoods, it’s not the farmers or electricians or construction workers trying to bring the peace.

What bothers me most about the way police have been treated isn’t that their jobs are so dangerous, but so thankless.

Full disclosure about why I’m writing this piece should mean telling you that my dad was a cop, in Cleveland, a patrolman during the Hough riots of 1966 and those in Glenville two years later. The riots were not only ugly but obscene, leveling neighborhoods that have yet to fully recover nearly 50 years later, and leading to deaths, 11 by most counts, including three police officers who were gunned down in Glenville.

But that’s not really full disclosure. That’s not what’s making me remember all those candles for all those officers.

It’s Brian Moore. And Brian Moore’s death a week after the Baltimore riots.

Moore was a New York City police officer when he was gunned down May 2. He was one of the young ones, 25 years young, and he was the son of a cop, too, the son to a father who outlived him.

The son was on patrol May 2 when reports say he and his partner noticed a man acting suspiciously and fiddling with his waistband. Still in their patrol car, the officers told the man to stop. He spun. He fired a gun. Moore was shot in the head.

He died two days later.

Did I mention he was 25?

Here is what I wonder most about that night: Did Officer Moore wait a split second too long to react because he wanted to make sure the man was going for a gun?

Because you know what likely would have happened had it been a cell phone or a starter’s pistol or something other than a loaded weapon: All kinds of screaming and accusations, and, if we’re lucky, only peaceful protesting.

There was a gun, though, so many of the same people who would hurl bricks at cops and many of the same people so quick to cast blame took note. They moved on, hardly a peep among them.

Did I mention the cops never thought of rioting?

God help us if they did.

I am not naive. I have been around cops my entire life, first as a son, then as a brother, then as a reporter chatting up uniforms on the beat for crumbs of news. So, I know how some cops can be. Some can be raucous and loud and abrasive and, yes, some can be racist.

Some can be brutal. The worst cops are criminal.

I’ll tell you who despise those criminals most: the vast majority of cops, the honest ones, the ones who honor their badge and their uniform and their fathers and who, sometimes when they’re 25, are called on to keep the peace, in some cases at the cost of their lives.

The proof of this majority is in Washington this week taking part in another candlelight vigil, part of the ceremonies at the National Law Enforcement Memorial. The curved walls that form both the skeleton and the heart of the memorial have etched into them more than 20,000 names, all of them officers who have been killed in the line of duty. More than 20,000 names.

Still, there is no setting of fires, no looting, no beating honest business people senseless.

Instead, tens of thousands of good people, in uniform, are gathering not to riot over criminals who have claimed so many lives in their ranks but rather to honor those lives lost.

They’ll pray, they’ll sing, they’ll mourn, they’ll caress the walls with all those etched names, and they’ll salute the dead and they’ll light their candles.

And they’ll do it almost solely among other cops and their families, nobody else. Just wait, though, how many people show up when another cop is due some blame.

Patch National Editor Todd Richissin writes from New York.