In response to Jamala Rogers’ column, “FOP fosters ‘us vs. them’ mentality,” I agree that the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) lobbied for the passage and signing of the “Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu National Blue Alert Act of 2015” and that the FOP is the world’s largest organization of law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, that is where our agreement ends relative to her article.
Rogers states that the Blue Alert Act “will issue warnings when there are threats to police officers, with the authority to hunt down the suspects who make or carry out the threats.” In fact, the Blue Alert Act does not increase or impose any additional authority to law enforcement.
The Blue Alert system will work much like that of the highly successful Amber and Silver alerts. Issuing a Blue Alert must meet strict guidelines when there is serious injury or death of an officer in the line of duty, when an officer is missing in connection with his official duties, or when there is an imminent, credible threat that an individual intends to cause the serious injury or death of a law enforcement officer.
The passage of the act was so uncontroversial in Congress that it passed both the Senate and House of Representatives by voice vote and the language was not amended from that which was originally filed.
Rogers takes umbrage with the FOP’s attempts to add assaults and murders of police officers to the federal hate crime statute. For over 10 years, the FOP has advocated that if the motivation for an attack on an officer is simply because he or she is or is perceived to be a law enforcement officer, then federal protections should be expanded to include officers.
Rogers asserts that the FOP condones illegal or unethical behavior by police officers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We strongly believe that the right to due process should apply to all, including police officers.
Rogers states that the FOP does not address illegal behavior by its members and cites that “137 rounds were fired into the bodies of Melissa Williams and Timothy Russell by Cleveland police.” The FOP did not beat its chest when a “not guilty” verdict was handed down in this case. This was a terrible tragedy, and we only asked for due process.
The economic downturn of the last decade has had lasting effects on policing in America. Cities were faced with budget crises. Some of the first budgets cut were public safety. Police departments had to downsize, and unfortunately some of the first programs they cut were community policing programs. Police departments only had enough officers to respond to calls for service, and they were faced with going from call to call without the adequate time to problem-solve.
Community-Oriented Policing and Problem-Oriented Policing programs are fancy terms for doing what good police work has always been: getting to know your community, building trusting relationships and solving problems. Instead of just handling the call and going to the next one, officers really do want to find out what the underlying issue is and to help the community fix it.
But this is not mainly a police issue. The roots of many of the problems facing us today lie with deep societal issues: poverty, economic inequity, joblessness, lack of adequate education and predatory municipal court systems, to name a few.
Rogers took a few words out of the FOP’s mission statement, noting that the FOP’s focus is promoting and fostering “the enforcement of law and order.”
However, she left out the rest of the mission statement, which ends with “to cultivate a spirit of fraternalism and mutual helpfulness among our members and the people we serve; to increase the efficiency of the law enforcement profession and thus more firmly to establish the confidence of the public in the service dedicated to the protection of life and property.”
Re-establishing lost relationships and forging new ones are key first steps in establishing the confidence of the public in the police. Finger-pointing only makes that process more difficult.
Kevin Ahlbrand is president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, a sergeant in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and a member of the Ferguson Commission.
