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It’s 0300.  You’re awakened, startled, out of a sound sleep.  What woke you?  Suddenly you hear what you quickly realize is someone pounding on your front door.  You equally quickly realize someone is trying to break in.

You call 911, and you’re fortunate to live in a community with a normally staffed police force who are mostly allowed to do their jobs.  Who do you want to respond to your 911 call?

Do you want a physically fit, mentally sharp officer, someone proficient with their handgun, someone well trained and experienced?  Or would you be satisfied with something less, someone who can check DEI boxes, who doesn’t have to meet any fitness standard, and who has less than average intelligence?  Would someone who only has to qualify with their handgun once a year and who gets as many chances as necessary to pass with generous pass/fail standards?  Or would you accept someone even worse, perhaps an illegal immigrant, perhaps someone with a criminal record including drug or and/or alcohol abuse?

“C’mon man!” you exclaim.  “That’s not the way things work!”

In too much of America, that’s exactly the way things don’t work.

I’ve always maintained we get the politicians, and the police, we deserve.  If we’re not paying attention, or vote on emotion, on the way we think things ought to be rather than on reality, we’ll find ourselves in real trouble that morning at 0300.  In many blue states/cities, no one is going to respond to our call for help, because the police have been defunded, harassed and prosecuted.  No police agency is ever overstaffed, but as regular readers know, convince the police you don’t have their back, convince them they won’t get the benefit of the doubt, convince them they’re more likely to be prosecuted than criminals when they properly and lawfully do their jobs, and your local police agency is going to be so understaffed they don’t have the chance to respond to your call, and they’re going to be reduced to hiring whoever they can get.

The Seattle Police Department, for example, has lost more than 700 officers in the last five years, and they’re so desperate, they’re recruiting illegal immigrants(?!).  What’s that you say?  Illegals can’t own or carry guns?  Do you think the leftists that run Seattle care about that?  They hate you, and guns too.

Consider the case of Megan McCarthy:

Meagan McCarthy was a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy before a near-death encounter with a violent suspect forced her into retirement. She said she always wanted to work for the public’s benefit and attended nursing school before she went on a police ride-along that changed her life.

‘The biggest takeaway that I honestly had from law enforcement … you really were the line between good and evil,’ she told Fox News Digital. ‘We responded to things that if the cops wouldn’t have gotten there when they did, it would be horrible situations for people on top of already dangerous situations.’

She thrived – at first. Now she says she hopes her three children choose not to follow her and her husband’s footsteps and choose another profession – like fighting fires.

‘I took a lot of pride in being a cop,’ she said. “I love serving the community, and I just wish that law enforcement was able to get that pendulum swinging back for them.’ [skip]

But her career ended after a schizophrenic suspect nearly killed her with her own gun, and a California jury let him off. She suffered post-traumatic stress and medically retired in 2022, she said.

Take the link and view the video.  It’s horrifying. McCarthy survived, but it was not due to a lack of trying on her attacker’s part.

A neighbor captured the chaos on cellphone video. Young scrambled to fire multiple shots, none of which struck her. Still, the struggle left her with a broken hand and black eye.

Backup arrived moments later, and deputies arrested him on the spot – but jurors later found him not guilty of attempted murder. McCarthy calls his lenient treatment the ‘Minneapolis Effect.’

Why did a jury acquit him of attempted murder?  Who knows?  Incompetent prosecutors who didn’t have their heart in it?  Maybe they thought McCarthy deserved it?  A dimwitted jury who thinks being crazy is an excuse for attempted murder?  Perhaps knowing it happened in California is explanation enough.  Imagine, however, what that verdict tells every officer in that area, and every officer elsewhere in the country?

Consider this from a former NYPD officer:

Taylor Marino, a former NYPD officer, said he traded in his uniform and badge to go business casual and work in IT – and he’s not looking back.

‘It all kind of fell through the floor,’ he told Fox News Digital. ‘Every year, it was like, it can’t get any worse than this. And then it just did.’

He voiced similar concerns about progressive oversight agencies, which he said had no understanding of how policing works.

‘Their power grew over time, it was almost like they were your boss,’ he told Fox News Digital.

Retention problems also took a heavy toll on officers who remained on the job after their colleagues left for greener pastures, he said.

‘The lack of manpower over the years … slowly but surely, a lot of people were starting to leave,’ he said. ‘There were less people to work with, and that’s an increase in workload for you, an increase in liability. That was a huge concern.’

When he started in a busy Brooklyn precinct, he said, there were 12 cars on patrol. Two years later, there were just four.

When a police agency loses 2/3 of its personnel, there are consequences.

Officers could often work 16-hour days, spend hours commuting home and then be expected to report back after barely five hours at home with their families, he said.

‘It just wasn’t worth it,’ he said.

It was especially rough, he said, when experienced officers he looked up to started leaving.

‘I was like, ‘Oh my God, where did everybody go?’ he said. ‘Everybody saw the writing on the wall, and I think it was time that I started seeing what everybody else was seeing.’

That’s reality.  When an agency is normally understaffed, even if that understaffing isn’t critical as it is in Seattle, NYC and many other blue cities, the stress on the remaining officers is cumulative and debilitating.  Police agencies hate overtime because it’s budget busting, but the very nature of police work requires overtime.  Officers like the extra money, but it doesn’t take long for it to damage their health, psyche and their family life.

When an agency is badly understaffed, overtime becomes mandatory rather than situational and voluntary.  It doesn’t take many double shifts before officers become dangerously tired and stressed out.  For dedicated, professional officers, knowing they can’t respond to dangerous calls for help is also damaging.  Worse, knowing they don’t even have to make a mistake to find themselves disciplined or even prosecuted, is more than enough to chase away the kinds of people sane Americans want in the uniform.

And that leads to terrible trouble recruiting:

‘From our boots-on-the-ground cops, we’re seeing kind of a resignation to the new normal,’ said Betsy Brantner Smith, who spent almost 30 years on the job and is now a spokesperson for the National Police Association. ‘I talked to some recruiters in the Midwest recently, and they just accepted that the days of 500 to 1,000 applications for four to five jobs, those days are gone.’

Some departments in small towns and suburbs, especially in parts of the South and the West, are finding success in attracting good candidates, she said, but staffing shortages are plaguing much of the country.

Police retention and recruiting problems are still very much a blue state/red state issue.  As I last wrote in December of 2023, many police agencies will hire only candidates below average in intelligence.  Sound crazy?  There is a deranged sort of logic at work.

Keep in mind one doesn’t get to be the chief of police, particularly in a major, red, city, without being willing to do exactly what the leftists running the place want.  Law enforcement experience and ability tend to take a back seat to political flexibility.  Such people, who usually need to be able to check a variety of DEI boxes, tend to see police officers as dangers to their jobs, not very bright people who need to be constantly watched to make sure they don’t violate DEI/CRT standards, which is what really matters in such dysfunctional places.

So it might seem crazy for them to make sure they don’t hire anyone brighter than average.  They fear, you see, really smart people will get bored quickly.  They have to spend a lot of money to equip and train them, only to see them quit after a short while.  Practically, they also worry that really smart people might threaten their jobs, not only because they’re smart enough to see what they’re doing wrong or illegally, but they might want to replace them.

With that factor as a baseline, it’s impossible to hire even the somewhat below average people they seek.  People with other options are no longer seeking police jobs, and police agencies are finding their applicants not only a lot below average in intelligence, badly lacking in judgement and character but not lacking in criminal records.  Many big city agencies are actually hiring people with DWIs, histories of alcohol and/or drug abuse, even convictions for some felonies, problems that used to be immediate disqualification for any police agency of any size.

Add DEI requirements on top of all that, and your 0300 call might be answered, if it’s answered at all, by someone of indeterminate gender who has a history of drug abuse, is obese, substantially below average in intelligence, has enough piercings to set off an airport metal detector from the parking lot, and is far more likely to shoot innocents than criminals.

As I noted back in January in Druggie, Drunk, Lazy, Fat, Unemployed, Stupid?  The FBI Wants You! the FBI has gone terminally woke and is hiring almost entirely on DEI criteria, in one case, hiring, and retaining a functionally illiterate woman:

And oh yes, they’re hiring people with dependency problems, and even the mentally ill.  This will be no surprise to regular readers, and extends to pretty much every governmental agency under the Mummified Meat Puppet Administration, including the FAA, where they’re hiring people who are completely paralyzed and certifiably insane to be air traffic controllers.

Final Thoughts:  Absent a major change in government at all levels, which might at least be started under Donald Trump, we’re in for a wild ride and a hard fall.  Americans are beginning to understand how important essential institutions like the police are.  If they’re corrupt, inept, focused on woke lunacy rather than professional competence, we’re left with few options, none of them good.

When police agencies are, because they’ve chased away the competent, or by choice, hiring dangerous incompetents, citizens find themselves in the position of having to take matters into their own hands, and in extreme cases, employing the three Ss: shoot, shovel and shut up.   This method has much to recommend it in terms of reducing recidivism, but tends to be the hallmark of a failed society.

The next few months will go a long way to determining just how far we’ve failed, and how far we have left to go before losing centuries of civilization.