Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Picture a city of about 35,000, or just picture Clovis.
Imagine this Clovis, for 15 years, experiences a fatal shooting every month. We know the shooter every time. Most shootings had witnesses, and some are on video, yet nobody goes to jail and only three are ever charged.
Do you feel safe in this alternate universe Clovis? We’ll come back to this.
This is the point in the column where I recommend another column. It’s by Leon H. Wolf on Redstate.com, titled, “The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This in Dallas Yesterday,” covering Thursday’s shootings that claimed the lives of five Dallas officers
Read it, because it deserves better context than this format allows. The following snippets, however, are the foundation of my long-held beliefs:
• “Societies,” Wolf writes, “are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.”
• There’s one law enforcement officer for every 266 U.S. citizens, a situation Wolf only finds tenable because, “the vast majority of people never think about confronting or challenging a police officer, and instead get up each day with the commitment to live their lives peacefully and lawfully, because they believe a) that they live in a society that is basically just and b) they believe that the few policemen who do exist will be there to protect them if something goes wrong and c) they have faith, by and large, that if someone commits a crime against them, they will be caught and punished.”
• Remember our city of 35,000? That’s the approximate size of the New York City Police Department. Wolf notes, “since 2000, NYPD officers have shot and killed about 180 people. Only three of those officers was even indicted for anything and only one was convicted, for a non-jail time offense. And these statistics are fairly typical of the nation at large.”
By putting Clovis’ and the NYPD’s population on the same level, I wanted to illustrate a few points.
First, an officer has a dangerous job, and we can concede those shootings are often justified and sometimes unavoidable. Second is that, even conceding the first sentence, seeing 179 of 180 shootings produce no conviction weakens those “ethereal and fragile concepts.” It breeds mistrust and motivates a fringe element, however wrong it is, to seek its own justice.
While I’ve gotten a speeding ticket I didn’t think I deserved, I’ve never felt mistreated by an officer. In my experiences, 98-99 percent of officers are great public servants who put my life first.
We saw it in Dallas, where officers protected citizens even as a sick man targeted them. The sick man deserved to die, and the slain officers’ families should be honored and compensated.
But let’s not bury our heads in the sand when the rare bad cop makes it harder for the good cop to protect and serve. We support good cops when we make bad cops experience the same court system as everybody else. We support good cops when we turn bad cops into ex-cops.
We don’t support good cops when we insulate bad cops with bumper-sticker slogans and straw-grabbing defenses. Public trust, and public safety, demand better.
Kevin Wilson is managing editor for the Clovis News Journal. He can be contacted at 575-763-3431, ext. 320, or by email:
