Friend --

When I was a Marine prosecutor I had a recurring opportunity to give a lecture to new Marine recruiters.? One of the things I always told them was:? "don't lose perspective."

Unfortunately, we frequently lose perspective as a society.? We idolize the pop stars and athletes promoted by the media while overlooking true unsung heroes in our lives like parents or teachers.?

I fear that we as a state and a nation are making another perspective mistake right now.? We were all horrified by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.? But this event is being used by some to claim that our law enforcement community is racist.? Many of those same voices are calling for the elimination of police departments.

The statistics simply don't back up the progressive narrative.? You can read the statistics yourself here.

Our law enforcement community is not perfect.? Like any other microcosm of our society, it has bad actors who must be held accountable.? We must always strive for improvement and reforms.? But our law enforcement community is not racist.? On the contrary, our law enforcement families represent some of the best attributes America has to offer.

I'll end with some irony.? I was with Governor Pritzker in Carbondale when he was asked about non-citizen voting in Illinois (the Illinois Secretary of State had just admitted registering non-citizens as voters).??

Governor Pritzker responded with a perspective argument.? He pointed out that we were talking about only 19 out of 750,000 votes.?

So, should we give the benefit of perspective to illegal voting, but not to law enforcement?

Law enforcement deserves the benefit of perspective, as well.? Our police have over 375 million annual interactions with civilians.? 99.9% of those interactions occur without incident.?

Our police are heroes, not the enemy.

Thanks for reading and S/F,

Paul

Paul Schimpf
http://www.schimpf4illinois.com/