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Sunday, February 27, 2022

Strib editorial board writes, "Reform policing through better hiring -- Tough times require even higher standards in a now-beleagured profession."

 Strib's item. Apart from detail, the headline stands.

Here is an image of Bob Kroll.


Is worse hiring feasible?

For a perspective, the neighborhood where I live includes a retired police officer. He is a decent and intelligent human. No complaints, only respect for him. Hiring is a hit and miss thing, which no amount of editorializing can paper over.

Sometimes a weed in a garden, when starting, looks like something else. When it shows itself a weed the thing is to remove it. Prompt, Clean, Better removal might deserve editorial words.

In searching out that image it was linked with this URL, stating in part:

Case in point: the flap this week over Minnesota Lynx players wearing warm-­up T-­shirts expressing their views on the killing of Philando Castile, the five Dallas cops and other recent violence. Four off­-duty city cops walked off their free-lance security jobs at Target Center in protest and Minneapolis Police union president Bob Kroll weighed in, like a sledgehammer on a moth, a move that earned his remarks the apt description of “jackass” from Mayor Betsy Hodges. Additionally, we had an op-ed and an editorial in the Star Tribune that whipped up enough hostile emotion that protesters took their cause to the ground atrium of the paper’s offices.

And we’re not done yet. In some of the crannies of social media there were complaints that other than Mark Rosen, WCCO­-TV’s long-­tenured sports anchor, not one of the two cities’ hard­-boiled columnists, metro variety or sports, waded into the Lynx/Kroll episode, as ripe a target for passionate commentary as you could hope for. [...]

Says Mark Rosen, “All I said, following a ‘Reality Check’ Pat Kessler did, was something to the effect of, ‘Sorry Sgt. Kroll, but the Lynx players have every right to speak up about something like this.’ [...]

“What bothers me, really bothers me, though, with the attitude of Kroll, is this kind of ‘You run along now ladies and bake cookies’ thing. It’s a form of the old ‘Everyone has to stay in their lane’ thinking, where athletes should just play their game and stay out of the serious stuff going on all around them. I mean, what would Muhammad Ali say to something like that?”

Ali had to fight bum-of-the-month because of warmonger backlash. Colin Kaepernick is a quarterback without a job quarterbacking. Fairness weeps.