Front, 95% of all police officers on all levels never fire their weapons once during the entirety of their careers other than on the range. The treatment accorded Nurse Wubbles was barbaric. Sad to say, all too many members of minority groups have suffered a similar fate at the hands of bullish officers. Dr. Ali S. Khan, formerly Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of combatting biological warfare, tells in his recent book The Next Pandemic about how he was held in small windowless room and interrogated over and over for hours by police at the Chicago airport because he was brown skinned and had a “Muslim sounding name”. US Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican of African descent, reports that he was stopped by police seven times in 2016, sometimes for reasons as flimsy as driving a new car in the “wrong” neighborhood. Even more disturbing is the recent miscarriage of justice involving the acquittal of Arizona policeman Philip Brailsford who shot and killed the unarmed Daniel Shaver as he begged for his life. Frank Serpico is now 81 and, following many years of exile in Switzerland and the Netherlands, lives in a tiny cabin
in the upstate New York wilderness. As a consequence of his wound, he remains deaf in one ear and still carries bullet fragments in his head. He continues to receive hate mail and death threats. The only thing he ever wanted was to be a good cop, and bad cops took that away from him. Serpico’s “own people” did get him. Still, he paved the way for others, like those whom I have been privileged to know, to continue being good cops. Dr. Lorin Swinehart
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