At the close of the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, TN, where I was signing my police novels, a woman walked up and told me that police officers need to be screened better. I asked her what she meant and she responded that the psychological screening was woefully lacking. I informed her that the average time to get through the testing to become an urban police officer was six months long, then six more months of police academy, then twelve to sixteen weeks with a Field Training Officer.
She said that was not enough.
She said that white police officers were killing black males at an unacceptable rate. When I said that not all the officers involved in Officer Involved Shootings were white, she said it did not matter because they were police officers. She raised the OIS in Fort Worth, TX as an example. She did not want to hear that the facts of the shooting were not in because the media had reported that it was a bad shoot. She was not interested in facts, she only wanted to hear that which supported her misgiven ideology. When I tried to explain that the case would be fully investigated, she turned and walked away.
It merely supports the axiom, “Never allow facts to interfere with ideology.”