Ironic that activists are mad about Seattle Police’s use of ‘team sport’ language

Taken from Monday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.

An internal memo was sent last week to the East Precinct staff of the Seattle Police Department and it’s got the typical anti-cop activists up in arms.

In the email from watch commander Lt. Bryan Grenon, obtained by KUOW, he says there’s been a disturbing and apparent trend that’s actually impacting officer safety or has the potential to impact officer safety.

He writes, “Some officers are very hesitant to use force in situations where force is clearly needed. Please communicate to our officers that it is OK to use force when needed. We expect officers to use force when necessary to protect themselves, fellow officers, the public, and the suspect from harm.”

All of that makes sense to me. When your life is in danger, or the life of someone else is in danger, you use force if you are a police officer, as much as necessary given the specifics of the situation.

It’s important to understand the context that this email is being written in. There has been confusion amongst officers in the Seattle Police Department on the use of force policy. The feds have come in and decided to babysit how the SPD behaves, so you’ve got some officers who are choosing, it seems, not to engage in much use of force because they don’t want to get in trouble under a policy they believe is confusing.

It’s not that they aren’t using any force, obviously you sometimes have to, but they’re being a little hesitant in how much they’re going to use it or when in fact they end up using that particular force.

The email continues, “Even in situations where officers are using force, in many cases the force used is not proportional to force used by the suspect and officers are waiting to use force way beyond the time considered reasonable.”

So, you’ve got officers that are so hesitant to use force and potentially break SPD policies that when they’re actually going ahead and using the force, they’re holding back, they’re not going as far as maybe the situation warrants. Of course the subtext of this is that is potentially putting lives in danger. That’s not just putting the life of the actual officer in danger, it could be the lives of the officer’s colleagues, or civilians in the area.

This email, so far, makes perfect sense, unless you are firmly in the anti-cop camp where you never think that use of force is necessary or you never think use of force is proportional when you’re talking about SPD.

In this city, some folks just hate the police department. I don’t think that is the majority of people, but it is a loud, vocal minority. There are a lot of people who are activists in this city who see cops and think bad guy automatically.

There’s one portion of this email in particular that these types of activists are just jumping on, using it to try to further criticize the Seattle Police Department.

This is that portion of the email, “The failure to use team tactics. Arresting suspects is a team sport and is always accomplished when two or more officers work together to take a suspect into custody. This helps prevents injury to both the officers and the suspect.”

What do you think really bugged the activists in the community? The use of the phrase “team sport.” Apparently, there are people out there who think “team sport” means the SPD is somehow treating this as an actual sport and not something that has to be done as a group for the sake of being safe.

There was a pamphlet around Capitol Hill that was picked up by the Capitol Hill Seattle blog. It is a flier that reprints this email in full, but at the top they have a header, and the header reads: “Pigs: The cops are mob enforcers for the rich and powerful.”

There’s no doubt that “team sport” was a poor choice of words, but only because they should have known that the activists out there will hop on anything possible to continue to bash police. There are a group of people who think all cops are bad.

There is absolutely no doubt that there are bad seeds in the Seattle Police Department. There are bad seeds in every single industry, in every single job, in every single facet of American life. You are always going to have the bad seeds, but the problem is you’ve got some folks who decide to define the entire police department by those bad seeds. That, of course, is irrational thinking.

Ironically, that kind of activism, jumping on police officers for the sake of jumping on police officers, and criticizing them and calling them out as pigs, that has become a “team sport” in itself.

When Seattle police do something wrong, they should be punished. But we’re talking about a very small percentage of people in the department that actual are those bad seeds, and it is not fair to judge the entire department based on those actions. Someone needs to tell that to the activists who are piling on cops.

Taken from Monday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.

JS