Thugs & Animals...oh, the irony!

[kadee79]

At a press conference Tuesday, Mike O’Meara, the president of the New York Police Benevolent Association, offered an angry plea to anyone who would listen. “Our legislators are failing us. Our press is vilifying us,” he said, calling for empathy for the police. “Stop treating us like animals and thugs and start treating us with some respect. That’s what we’re here today to say. We’ve been vilified. It’s disgusting. 

“I am not Derek Chauvin,” O’Meara said, referring to the officer who put his knee on George Floyd’s neck. “He killed someone. We didn’t.” Three times in his speech, O’Meara asked reporters to look at the numbers: Out of the 375 million interactions with the public every year, he said, he couldn’t understand why there isn’t more focus on the ones that didn’t end in violence.

What can I say, Mike O’Meara? I relate. I bet tens of thousands of protesters do, too. I’m a Muslim American man who turned 11 just before 9/11, around the age when many people—and especially the police, in my experience­—began to see me not as a child but as a threat. I haven’t planned any terrorist attacks. But I learned early that it doesn’t really matter what I, or any black or brown person, has done as an individual. It’s about how other people see us as a group. We were all taught this through our experiences with authority figures who allowed their impressions of us—from the media, from politicians—to form their opinions of who we are. 

“We’ve been left out of the conversation,” O’Meara complained Tuesday. Yes, exactly. Muslims have been saying this for years. Nightly news conversations about Islam and violence rarely ever include Muslim voices. Yet those discussions in many cases influence policy. Fourteen states have adopted anti-Sharia law bills, even though not a single Sharia court exists in this country. In a speech widely panned by Republicans, freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar pointed to the pain many Muslim Americans feel for being constantly falsely associated with terrorists. We know this feeling.

And, well, I don’t need to tell you that people compare Muslims to animals.

slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/mike-omeara-police-union-head.html

Do I really need to make a comment?  I'm a union person, have been most of my life...police unions need to disbanded, done away with...GONE!
Police unions also happen to be the only union that the RNC supports...not fire, not teachers...only police.

[busymom]

I was raised in a union household, BUT, there is something wrong with the police-style of unions, where an officer accused of violence can not only keep his job after a violent incident, but gets sent back to work in the same community he previously bullied.  We don't need to protect bullies, especially bullies with weapons who can do serious harm.

[NomoreDramaQ1015]

Thoughts & Prayers.

[Tennesseer]

Clean up the police houses.