Every profession or trade has good and bad apples. Most are good, some not so good, and a rare few are extraordinarily good or bad. This is true of all professions and trades: medicine, automotive maintenance and repair, law, plumbing, etc.
Incompetence and corruption are found in every field. It’s up to professional and trade organizations, regulatory agencies and the general public to insist on competence and honesty in the marketplace, demand reimbursement or restitution for bad service, and exact penalties for egregious errors.
Calling for the elimination of an entire profession or trade would hardly be a measured response to an occasional instance of bad service. What person in his right mind would suggest getting rid of all doctors, mechanics, lawyers or plumbers just because he happened to have had a bad experience with one?
Nevertheless, in this moment of madness, we seem to be surrounded by frenzied fanatics demanding that police forces have their budgets drastically reduced or be defunded and eliminated altogether – supposedly for the benefit of inner-city minorities, the ones whose lives and property would be most endangered by an absence of police.
It’s ridiculous that any of this needs to be said, but it’s become obvious that it does, which prompted West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey to make the necessary argument this week in a guest editorial in this paper.
“The overwhelming majority of our police officers, deputy sheriffs, and state troopers serve their communities with honor and enforce our laws above reproach,” Morrisey affirmed, while conceding that “bad apples do exist.”
The bad apples are the ones we should hone in on and discipline or remove.
Morrisey argued that “the idea of ‘defunding the police’ is idiotic, absurd, completely misguided, and just plain nuts.” So it is.
“Taking away funding for local, county, and state law enforcement will lead to an increase in crime, drug overdoses, violence, vigilantism, and inequality,” Morrisey predicted, and it surely will.
We can avoid that unfortunate fate by supporting our brave men and women in blue.