Cop out

Like Bernie Kerik and Joe Arpaio, an officer offers his regrets

After days of protests against the Rochester Police Department in light of the death of Daniel Prude, its top officer and his deputy announced Tuesday they are retiring from the force. Along with the police chief, the city's entire command staff announced it will vacate their roles.

Rochester Police Chief La’Ron Singletary said in a statement that he was honored to serve the city in upstate New York for 20 years and commended his staff. However, he said the protests and criticism of his handling of the investigation into the March 23 incident “are an attempt to destroy my character and integrity.”

When I first became Chief of the Gollywog, Kansas police department, it was a dream come true. Ever since I was a little boy, throwing kids I didn’t like into dumpsters, letting air out of the tires of illegally parked tricycles, and “arresting” stray dogs that had made a nuisance of themselves begging for food and “sentencing” them to the bottom of Lake Quality, I wanted to be a cop; and when I got on the force I was thrilled at the chance to keep order in our fair city as it had never been kept before.

As an adherent of the Broken Windows school of policing, I knew that Gollywog could only be kept safe if I attacked crime at its source. I worked hard, setting arrest records for jaywalking, loitering, and failure to obey the lawful order of a police officer. Soon the cells of our small jail were filled near to bursting with malefactors who, under a more permissive administration, would have been let go with a fine or even a warning — which, I explained to my superiors and to local Fox News affiliates, would only encourage them to continue hanging out in the park after sunset, laughing loudly in residential neighborhoods, and trading stolen toiletries for food, in defiance of public order. (And we got the fines anyway, which swelled the city’s coffers.)

When I was promoted to Commander, I welcomed the opportunity to pursue justice even more aggressively. Liberals called homelessness a “social problem,” but I treated it the way it should be treated — as a violation of the law to which no quarter should be given. So-called “undomiciled” miscreants got run in, and I don’t mind admitting their accommodations were not the best, and sometimes they were made to take their morning wash-up in a filthy toilet and their daily exercise by cowering under blows from my baton. Then there were the homeless who simply disappeared from the streets of Gollywog — who can say where? Maybe those pain-in-the-ass mutts would tell you if they could talk! But in short order our streets were cleaner, and even before this coronavirus pandemic you would have thought the place was deserted, so orderly had it become.

Things looked so good when I was made Chief that I could only imagine better days ahead for the Gollywog PD, especially when through my contacts in the Department of Justice I managed to acquire three tanks, six MRAPs, and hundreds of tactical weapons heretofore not seen anywhere outside a war zone. Gollywog would never be safer!

But I had not reckoned with the ginned-up riot-protests over the criminal George Floyd and the protest-riots they would spark across the country. The citizens of Gollywog have endorsed my administration with their silent approval, but after years of corrupt Democratic rule the jaded civilians of the big cities now tolerate and even celebrate this so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement. As a person of color myself, I was frustrated, especially when prisoners sassed me about it; their broken teeth and bleeding mouths and noses were cold comfort for the madness that had taken over our country.

The last straw came when 15 of my best officers were vilified and humiliated when their forceful treatment of a loathsome suspect allegedly led to his alleged death by alleged suffocation. Gollywog should have stripped its activist district attorney of the power to prosecute, as other cities have done. But it is too late, and there is nothing to do about it but resign and take a much higher-paying job with a private security contractor that guards prisoners in red states, Guantanamo, and patriotic facilities smeared as “black sites” by Democrats and liberals.

As a true guardian of public order, I would like to take this opportunity to threaten you all with rape, murder, and every other crime you fear as a consequence of making me feel bad and failing to agree that our homes can only be kept safe from chaos by a military buildup, state-sanctioned random violence, and the transfer of so-called “social” outlays to the police budget. I will add that I have contacted several of my neo-Nazi friends who will be coming to Gollywog soon to assist our remaining officers in dispensing justice with extreme prejudice. Goodbye, Gollywog. I weep that our peace officers are no longer treated with the respect and affection they are due, and I swear to make you bastards regret it to your dying day.