Whenever one becomes part of a movement such as Black Lives Matter, it's easy to see things in stark dichotomies of good and evil. Life is never that simple. Here's a breaking story of the death of a man who is part of a group that is reviled by many on this web site. He is a cop, part of a family of cops, who was doing a job he loved. Quotes from this Washington Post story.
Police video showed Steven Vincent, a 13-year state police veteran in southwest Louisiana and member of a law enforcement family, very professionally trying to talk a man out of the vehicle stuck sideways in a ditch, Police Chief Edmonson said during a news conference Sunday.
Here's what happened:
The truck door opened and man inside, Kevin Daigle, age 54,came out with the shotgun. “That shotgun wasn’t to do anything else but hurt someone. Kill someone,” Edmonson said.
He said the tape shows the shotgun blast. “I saw my trooper go backwards and back toward his unit, where he was going to try to get some help out there,”
Snip-
two or three drivers stopped immediately, one of them spinning around on the two-lane highway. That driver wrestled the shotgun away from Daigle, and, with the others, got him to the ground, and snapped Vincent’s handcuffs on his wrists, Edmonson said. As far as he knew, he said, the good Samaritans were unhurt.
Snip-
Vincent leaves behind a wife, Katherine, and a 9-year-old son, ....... one of Vincent’s brothers is also a state trooper, while another is police chief in the nearby town of Iowa. ........His family lives and breathes law enforcement,”
I'm posting this on Dailykos for a reason. I have seen comments to the effect, "all cops should be ..........." I won't go further. The worst don't get recommendations, but when I have tried to state that there are decent police officers, those who are part of a profession that is obligated to confront and interact with people that civilians may simply ignore, it places me on the "other side."
The murderer of Vincent Stevens was a white man who had his own hatred, and despised those men who arrested him for drunk driving. But a cop never knows the mentality, the mood, the anger of someone whom they are stopping, and in this case trying to help out of a ditch.
It would be good when castigating police for patterns of racism and cover-ups, to carve out a space for the many decent police, deputies or troopers who actually give a damn, and put their lives on the line every day.