Today, in our politically correct world, it's not in the last bit easy being a police officer.
In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020, leftist politicians began a nationwide movement to defund police departments. This initiative led to a massive decline in police departments as officers either resigned or retired.
Sadly, the result was very predictable.
Violent crime rates soared nationally. Not only are average citizens increasingly victimized, law enforcement officers now find themselves targeted in greater numbers.
According to Michael Letts of In-Vest USA, police officers are facing "On average . . . more than 60,000 assaults . . . each year, resulting in 17,500 injuries and an average of one death every 55 hours or 158 per year."
Even more sobering is the realization that our police officers don't possess adequate protection. As Letts explains, "close to 400,000 of the 900,000 officers in the U.S. have no protective vest which means they run 14 times higher risk of dying from gunfire than an officer who does wear one."
This means more and more officers are outgunned and undermanned.
They face constant threats on the streets of violent cities but are often blamed for the high crime rate. With too few police officers, it's impossible to quickly respond to emergency calls or adequately investigate ongoing cases.
Additionally, police officers must deal with the prospect of civil rights lawsuits, media scrutiny, monitors who supervise and criticize their work, and a Department of Justice (DOJ) that oversees departments with "consent decrees."
In many cases, this federal oversight prevents officers from the type of initiative-taking, aggressive police work that prevents and solves crimes.
Officers must assume that every member of the public has a cellphone and is recording (visually and audually) every action they take.
In many departments, officers wear a "body cam" to eliminate questions over their responses. This means, in today’s policing, there are plenty of "body cams," but not sufficient body armor for officers.
All of these factors result in more dangerous communities and less effective police work. In
In Uvalde, Texas, the inaction of the school police chief is now under federal investigation.
On Tuesday of last week, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, the shooter at the Robb Elementary School, was there for 90 minutes. He killed 19 students and two teachers before elite officers from the U.S. Border Patrol finally were able to kill him.
Following criticism from parents of the victims and community members, the mayor of Uvalde requested the DOJ conduct a critical incident review of law enforcement's response to this mass murder.
The goal of this review will be "to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events."
Some of the major lessons that should be learned from this tragedy are that police officers need to respond quickly to save lives; there should be no delays in setting up a perimeter.
Nor hould there be any indecision over gauging how the shooter will respond.
One of the troubling aspects of the Uvalde crime is that police provided inaccurate and contradictory accounts of what happened on that day.
This incident highlights how our police officers have been regulated into inaction.
Too many police officers today work as bureaucrats, managing paperwork or show up at a crime scene to place yellow cones on the street and take photos.
What they wind up accomlishing is just that, filling out forms, placing yellow cones and putting up "caution tape."
While part of the job, these procedures don't catch criminals or make cities any more safe.
Their work does not lead to enough murders being solved. Of course, if there is no arrest, there are no criminals going to prison.
To be fair, the lack of arrests is not simply due to hamstringing the activities of an inadequate number of police officers. No one can be arrested if witnesses are too scared to testify.
Without witnesses, arrests, or convictions, exactly what is our criminal justice system?
It's a jobs program providing paychecks to public servants, who, due to the constraints of the system, are not able to accomplish much of anything. This results in a criminal justice system which is now a mess, and one that's wasting untold amounts of public money.
We must radically change this jobs program, so that it begins to actually accomplish something. At a minimum, we must allow our police officers to do their jobs, that is, be crime fighters again.
Give our officers the resources, equipment, and support they need to perform to "serve and protect" once again.
Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs nationally on Real America's Voice Network, AmericasVoice.News weekdays at 7 a.m. CT and from 7-11 a.m. weekdays on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America's Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at jeff@ringsidepolitics.com. Read Reports by Jeff Crouere — More Here.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.