I support the police. They are each human beings. There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of them from all across the country and they are each individuals with their own lives but who also happen to work for a larger department. Some of the policies and tactics that these departments may use I definitely don’t support. But even so, most officers will go their entire career without ever having to fire their weapon on the job. There’s probably a fair amount of cops who actually follow this page. I do support you. I wish you each protection and good health and clear minds. I stand against the collective blame that you will ultimately suffer when a bad apple police officer goes out and abuses his power to whatever degree. We’ve seen egregious examples of this, both the abuse of power and the sad statements that are made against all police in the aftermath. Many people in the public domain will react to such incidents with anger and thus say things that scapegoat all cops. That’s not fair. It damn sure isn’t right. I’d guess it’s mostly emotion-driven and primarily comes from a place of frustration, and from a sense of a lack of justice being served.

This page, being a Pit Bull-centric page, knows all too well how collective blame works. The ideology of collective blame is the enemy to humanity and to the truth and to justice, not all cops or all Pit Bulls or all whatever else that you’d want to add to this list. I’d say to the readers of this page, be consistent with your point of views and with your arguments on issues and with your tones, or else they intellectually cancel each other out.

Now with all that being said, there’s a loony and loud fringe of society (mostly online and mostly repetitively fake) that absolutely hates Pit Bull-type dogs and any dog that looks like what they’ve determined a Pit Bull to look like or any other dog that they may vitriolically fear by appearance or learned bias alone. They devote their entire lives to highlighting the less than 0.1% of dogs that have ever killed or seriously injured a person or another dog. They ignore the 99.9% that prove daily they’ve done nothing of the sort. They shout from rooftops that x-amount in whatever calendar year have killed people! They subjectively categorize these things by breed when on most occasions they are strictly going off of media statements and nothing further.

Did you know that at least 91 people were killed by police in January of this year alone? That’s more than 2x the amount of people that were killed by dogs of all breeds in the entire year of 2014. At least 85 more people were killed by police in February. Looking backwards, there was at least 1,106 people killed by police in 2014. By that figure, that’s almost 27x the amount of people that were killed by dogs. To further crystallize my point, there’s many (many) millions more dogs in the United States than there are police officers.

I say all of these things solely for objectivity. Not to demonize the police as a whole. Just scaling something for perspective. Look at Sgt. Mills from the Tampa PD who just yesterday was photographed saving a Pit Bull who had been shot and tied to the railroad tracks (to link these subjects). These are human efforts. Cops are mostly really good people. And to those that are acting in an opposite way, remind them of their humanity, don’t just vaguely give them more reason to forget that.

Should we be looking at individual officer conduct? Yes. Should we be allowed to call for changes in police policy and take issue with the almost robotic move to always justify use of force after the fact? Yes. Should we be asking for wearable lapel cameras in an effort to get more transparency? Yes. Should dog owners be asked to keep their dogs on leashes and not let them freely roam around neighborhoods? Yes. Should dog owners be asked to treat their dogs like living beings and not lawn ornaments or alarm systems? Yes. Should individual dogs who have proven that they are indeed vicious then ultimately be treated as such? Yes.

None of this should be offensive. What’s offensive is when certain folks move to blame completely uninvolved entities for the actions of an individual anything. That’s offensive, and ignorant, and completely pointless.