A Sincere Thank You Thursday – To Police Officers for the Multitude of Good Things (Videos)
We know the best media ratings don’t come from the ‘good stuff’, nevertheless we feel compelled commit today’s Thank You Thursday blog to our nation’s Police Officers and all the good that they do. Law Enforcement has taken an unfair pummeling in the press lately and in our own small way we’re hoping to make a significant statement.
We will grant you, there have been some seriously disturbing events in the news. Exactly how many stories have you heard about officer-involved situations gone bad? Seems like a lot, right? Now contrast that number with the 1.1 MILLION members of Law Enforcement nationwide (as of 2008). The reality? There is far, far more good than bad in those numbers.
We found the video directly below on USA Today’s website and it broke our hearts. It also made us very proud. Proud of the men and women who find a way to keep it together at the very same time that they are saving the lives of others around them. Proud that our culture is such that it produces folks who choose to dedicate their career, and in fact their lives, to serving our communities. A life in Law Enforcement is an enormous sacrifice, but it’s also the little things that we appreciate. A great article on AZCentral (excerpt below) illustrates that we have even more to be grateful for than we know.
ALL LIVES MATTER and there’s no one who understands that better than Police Officers.
We just need to say… Thank You for that.
Officer: There is no shortage of videos depicting police negatively. But there’s a lot more positive work happening.
For the average person watching the nightly news or surfing Facebook or YouTube, there is no shortage of videos depicting police officers in a negative light. It is easy, even for the best of us, to start to lose faith in our own profession if we allow ourselves to be sucked into the vortex of what seems to be an endless litany of negative media coverage.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a media-driven world in which information is shared in video clips and sound bites through social media, not to mention a plethora of news websites accessible to anyone with a smart phone. In our tech-driven culture, fewer people get their news from nightly TV broadcasts or newspapers, instead relying on news feeds, blogs and info circulated on social media.
Viewpoints: The 10,000 good things police do each day that you don’t often see
I’m talking about all the extra things cops do that aren’t required by the job but they do anyway because they care. Things like shooting hoops with neighborhood kids, combing a neighborhood looking for a lost pet, giving food or clothes to a homeless person, repairing a broken down car to get someone back on the road, paying the tab for a hotel bill so a displaced family has a place to sleep for the night, delivering groceries to an elderly shut in or buying gifts so a needy family can have a Christmas.
Ten thousand out of 2.5 million contacts equates to about one half of one percent (0.5 percent). I believe this number is, in all reality, probably much higher.
Considering these numbers, we find that instead of concentrating on the 10,000 exceptionally good things the police did on any given day in America during their contact with 2.5 million citizens, we succumb to the victim mindset of a society that chooses to ignore the good in exchange for the next salacious viral YouTube video that is played and re-played, tweeted and re-tweeted and passed around on Facebook and Instagram until the next video showing a real or perceived misdeed by a cop surfaces.
It reminds one of the old quote attributed to the Communist Socialist Vladimir Lenin, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” In this case, the lie is that police are brutal thugs that lack patience, are corrupt and routinely trample on the rights of citizens. The point is that the endless cycle of negativity has a brainwashing effect that can persuade the average citizen that the police can’t be trusted and given enough time, can make just about anyone have doubts about themselves or their profession.
read the complete article on AZCentral.com
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