Colorado is goofy...and heres why.

Opinion: Colorado, Yes they are Goofy.

And the reason is: The recent decision by the Denver Police Department to acquiesce to the demands of the Justice Department in allowing Non-US Citizens to become Police Officers.

Ok, before you freak out let me stop a moment…

What?!?!

Yes, you heard it right. NON-US Citizens are going to become Police Officers. Now this is wrong on so many levels but let’s look at this historically shall we?

In Ancient Rome, the decline of the Empire directly coincided with Non-Roman Citizens becoming part and parcel of the Military and Government establishment. Why is this significant you ask? Because, those inducted into the military and government force were following their own agenda and allegiance and NOT of the government they were hired to support and defend. And yes, a Policing Organization is a Para-military group, not to mention part of the hosting government’s establishment.

A simple oath is sometime all it took. And I know today oaths are taken and broken like taking off a pair of shoes after work, but for some that simple act means a lot.

That’s a historical reasoning, let’s look at modern society, but before we do that let me give a little bit of background as to where I am coming from with my own personal experience.

I served in the Military for over 20 years. During that time I was part of a number of Policing as well as straight Combat Actions. I was deployed over Eight times in major operations not to mention the innumerable amount of times I was deployed on small three to six month ‘excursions’. Was I Special Operations or some other elite force? No, I was just an ordinary Soldier, so that should tell you something about how much THOSE guys get deployed.

During that time, on many occasions I was in the midst of a language and cultural barrier. Communication was hard when we were in contact with indigenous or local populations. We had to learn the signs, the language on how to communicate our intent. There was no other way to do it, disaster would strike otherwise. What could be a mundane or innocuous gesture in our culture could spell doom in another. COMMUNICATION, any kind of communication was key. We had translators in some cases and that was our saving grace, but on one occasion my Translator was Kurdish and the people I was dealing with were Shia. Again…gesture, intonation and dialect came into play. They, meaning the people I was dealing with, knew immediately my translator was a Kurd. We nearly came to blows over a deal for some tires on one occassion. TIRES!!!

The point of all of this is, Law Enforcement is one of those jobs where not only does the person being hired need to hold and serve the public trust; i.e….be a Citizen, but he or she must be able to speak the language.

That brings me to the next part of Colorado’s goofiness; which I have alluded to in the above. Not only is the Denver PD acquiescing to the Justice Departments fine of 10,000 dollars and re-looking at all of the Non-US citizen applications they rejected, they are ALSO adhering to a ‘Law’ by the Colorado legislature that says they MUST produce all applications in various languages for these Non-citizens.

So let me get this straight. And I am exaggerating, by the way or maybe not depending on the circumstance: An Officer, who cannot speak the language, is responding to a crime or call for assistance: These are the various ways it’s going play out:

Officer (we will call him/her A) responds to a call of domestic violence. Let’s say (A) is of Eastern European decent. He/she speaks Czech or some other Slavic language. The people calling for assistance are Spanish speaking…

Now, before I go any further, let me go ahead and address the ‘nay-sayers’ that will say, “Why is this any different from Police today that can’t speak Spanish and are called to assist a Spanish speaking citizen?”

The difference is, A) Most departments have on hand a great number of officers who speak Spanish or have officers who are bi-lingual. And those that are not are making moves to do so. A perfect example is the San Francisco Police Department, who is so diverse in its languages that they often have Police Officers who represent the diverse background of that area patrolling said areas they represent. (If that makes sense) B) The officers are often part of the community they patrol, i.e…they speak the language, grew up there, know the people. CITIZENS!!! C) Have a vested interest in the community they serve. CITIZENS!! None of these are meant to be divisive or to ‘hate on’ immigrants. They are meant to state a simple fact of those that we trust to protect us DO IN FACT have vested interest in keeping us safe and ARE IN FACT from our community.

Back to the scenario…

So ‘Officer A’ shows up, knocks on the door and has to communicate to someone holding a knife to a woman’s throat that this person needs to put the knife down and back away from her or that he/she, ‘Officer A’, will in fact shoot him.

None of the various ways this could end have a positive outcome for either the Officer or the people involved.

And here is the arguments you are going to hear from the people who wrote this law or our ‘beloved’ president’s Justice Department:

“Well how often would an officer find himself in that situation?”

Answer: Every damn day. According to the FBI; in 2015 Aggravated Assault sat at 63.8% of all crimes reported. Robbery was second at 27.3% with Rape and then Murder following third and forth respectively. For the purposes of this model the FBI used I am assuming that Domestic Assault and Battery count into Aggravated Assault as a subcategory.

“Well, what if he/she is just an admin officer, I mean really…they don’t have to fight any REAL crime?”

So we just make someone who can’t do the job a drain on our resources; which prevents someone from actually doing the job from getting on the Force. As a matter of course, most military and police are trained in basic fundamentals of their craft. Meaning, they all can be cops, regardless if they are driving a desk or a squad car. At some point, he or she is going to come face to with someone breaking the law.

“We have to do this; I mean it’s only fair. To not do it would be discrimination!!!”

Ok, so if a cop WHO is a US citizen from the streets of say….Harlem, applies to be a cop and also happens to be Black, doesn’t get hired because he’s black; that’s discrimination. If this same cop doesn’t get the job because someone who is not a citizen gets the job over this same person; that’s not discrimination, that’s unfair. And the department in question is shooting themselves in the foot. More ways than one.

Let’s not forget, weak as our immigration policies are at the moment, there is still a vetting process. To become a citizen there is a series of interviews and an investigation that one has to go through. I know this because my wife was not originally a US Citizen, she is naturalized. It took us nearly five years to get the whole process done. And we were living in Washington DC at the time and I was in the service still. Weak as it is, the Immigration and Naturalization Service still does investigations into a person’s background and sometimes they find out if that person from another country did something illegal by the other countries standards. We need to make sure that those serving us and our public trust are NOT criminals. How do you do that if you are taking non-citizens off the street? Are we saying that the Denver Police Department is in fact going to find and run their own Immigration and Naturalization Service? They would have to, there is no other way to ensure that the person they are hiring is trustworthy or not. I mean, I don’t want someone convicted of murder in another country holding a gun and enforcing my laws in my city. And yes, they are MY laws; they are yours too.

Not only does the person who usually applies for these jobs come from among us and we trust them with the privilege of holding a badge and enforcing our laws; they have a vested interest in seeing us safe. Because our safety is their safety. We open a whole different can of worms in this day in age when it is tough to be a police officer by considering non-citizen worthy of the Public trust. Times are hard out there and lots of people are walking away from doing ‘the job’ just because of the politics, red tape and oversight associated with enforcing the law right now.

That’s not to say that some of the oversight is not justified, it is. Most definitely it is. But the rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement was Ferguson Missouri. A CASE that in and of itself should not have been a rallying cry at all. The cop was right and the perpetrator was wrong. Thank goodness for that oversight, if we left it up to the populace of that community they would have hung that cop in the town square just based off hearsay and innuendo.

There is also a liability aspect I doubt that the citizens of Denver have considered. And YES I mean citizens because guess who has to pay for it? CITIZENS!! So ‘Officer A’ feels discriminated against because no one speaks the language, perhaps he/she feels slighted by their fellow officers due to the language barrier or even cultural differences. ‘Officer A’ decides to sue. He/she has every right to as a sworn law enforcement officer. And most likely they would win.

There is an underlying, unspoken world in the law enforcement community, much like the Military. You don’t lie, you don’t betray and you never forsake your fellow officers. ‘Officer A’ coming in off the street is not going to fit in, will feel that they don’t fit in and the others on their squad are going to act appropriately. Now yes, that’s just opinion, but I can see it happening. That long blue line is really long and they don’t like it broken because someone can’t do their job or pull their own weight. Being able to pull their share of the load is big deal in both the policing and the Military community and if you are not doing it, they let you know very quickly.

We are playing with lives here. In this case the lives of every citizen of Denver Colorado.

Times are hard for the policing community these days. Not many want to do it and that begs the question as to why? Why would Denver try to recruit or hire non-US citizens for policing duties? It is because of this backlash nationwide against law enforcement that they can’t hire officers? Are there not enough applicants? Is something going wrong with the policing community in Denver?

Am I the only one that fails to see the craziness involved with what’s going on in Colorado?

Lets look at some solutions. I will speak on what I know and that’s the military. For decades we allowed foreigners to join the US Military, but there was a catch. You serve, you get to become a citizen. I can see that working in Colorado. Some form of government service associated with the desire to become a citizen. That would be a win/win for all parties involved. Here’s the thing, becoming a cop in order to get citizenship should be a reward for service, not your sole desire in wanting to do it. Also, these numbers would be small. I don’t see 20 or even 25% of a department’s force being non-citizens. That would be a number inconsistent with the community they serve. Which coincidentally was one of the gripes of the community in Ferguson; a mostly white government and mostly white law enforcement operation overseeing a predominately black community. There is a whole different argument to be made about the problems in that community of underlying issues, but I digress.

Finally, why do I care? Why do you? If you don’t live in Colorado you shouldn’t have any opinion what-so-ever. Wrong. If the US justice Department can do it to you, they can do it to any community who has a non-citizen applying for a job that serves the public trust. That requires a person to be a citizen for the reasons stated above.

At the end of the day, it breaks down to absolutes. Lives in my opinion are one of the biggest absolutes. Lives are precious. It is the one thing we come into the world with and it is the last thing we lose when we die. It is a commodity that can’t be frivolously played with and it is my belief that this move by Denver is playing with that life. Those lives, every citizen of Denver, Colorado.