Too many nightmares covering cops starting 40 years ago, nothing changes, just the hardware!
What does it mean to protect? To incarcerate? To uphold the law? What does it mean to strap on a gun and badge and go sadistically and forcefully into the night looking for stray people to shoot like rats?
What’s it like to be part of some paramilitary force and let the vengeance of the thin blue line overwhelm an entire city block with bombs and dead bodies ripped from the child’s bed?
What is it to be Janet Reno and firebomb a compound of religious nuts? To be that punk deputy who shoots a Seattle Pike Place woodcarver because he comes at you with a carving knife while you sweat in your Kevlar vest and mounted 12 gauge shotgun and automatic side arm?
What is it like to go into Ruby Ridge and blow away a child? Wounded Knee, and blow away Indigenous activists?
It’s been a hate-hate relationship with cops all my life. From the days of an army brat in Paris, where gendarmes hit the news with their lead-lined capes and batons and swagger going after beatniks and then hippies. From the days as a teenager in Arizona, all those run-ins with Pima County deputies.