Dissonance

The splits are starting at one of the local cop shops.

There's starting to be two camps and it's looking to get ugly.

One side is "Blue Lives Matter, OUR safety is paramount to all other considerations."

The other is on the more traditional side where the community is paramount.

Interestingly to me, it's the younger officers who're less "the only thing that matters is I come home safe at night," group.

We've got a couple of cops from this department who help with The Boy's bowling league and they're very interesting to chat with on some of these issues.

Of note was a comment the older one (still a kid to me) made about trainers and training with the blue lives matter thing so many were putting out.  "They're presenting it to a class in a very positive way because there's non-cops in the class.  The same class with the same instructors often give a more severe presentation when it's cops only."  This "kid" hates that kind of thing.

He wants everyone to come home alive, and thinks there's ways to do it.  He's proud that his department, despite having a large black community, isn't having riotous breakouts over cop behavior.  Of course, he admits, such riots happened in the early '90's and the department changed its policies on policing to good effect.  Crime and racial tension are way down since then.

The younger one coined a funny too, "SWAT stands for Steroids, Whisky And Testosterone."  They're both of the opinion that SWAT has a role, but it's a tool designed for a specific job.  "We don't use a hammer to tighten a bolt, unless it's a SWAT team."