Clearly, the members of Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery should elect David Anderson to a leadership position. Anderson, a detective sergeant in the Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct, wrote a commentary published in Theo today in which he claims that “constant attacks in the media on law enforcement” and “a stream of negative stories about local police” might mean the end of community policing in Portland.
(For what it’s worth, Blogtown is where I first spotted news of the commentary, although Metroblogging Portland weighs in now as well.)
Setting aside how that almost sounds like a threat — “stop criticizing us or we’ll stop working with the community” — I can’t help but wonder whether Anderson was recruited by King, or perhaps by Detective Peter Simpson (editor of the union’s newsletter), to write this piece (if in fact one of them didn’t write it for him to begin with) since they all partake of the same general arguments and positions.
Those arguments and positions boil down to one thing: Police work is beyond public discussion and outside of the public’s ability to comprehend. The priesthood of law enforcement, Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery believes, should be left alone to do what it does in secret and behind the thin blue line of silence.
Anderson misses a crucial point in his zeal to derail public discussion of police procedures and officer actions. If he and his cronies over in union leadership believe that discussing police work is outside the purview of the public for whom the police work, then the police themselves already have killed any chance of true community policing.
