Nobody Likes a Critic

The Wando High School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, like many schools, published a summer reading list for its students. However, this schools' reading list contained two books that deal with police brutality so the snowflakes in the local police union are throwing a fit:

(CNN) -- Police in South Carolina are protesting the inclusion of two novels on a school's summer reading list that describe police violence against unarmed black people, saying they could stoke anti-police sentiment.

Members of the Fraternal Order of Police Tri-County Lodge #3 have complained about the books, featured on the summer reading list for a freshman English class at Wando High School in Mount Pleasant, near Charleston.

"Everybody is trying to make the law enforcement out to be a bad guy," said John Blackmon, president of the local police union. "We're not the bad guys. We're trying to help."

There's a reason that people are making law enforcement out to be a bad guy, members of the law enforcement community continue being caught doing bad things. When this is pointed out, it's not unusual for a law enforcement supporter to say that the bad things are being perpetrated by a handful of bad apples and that the vast majority of law enforcers are good people. To that I like to point out that the percentage of law enforcers performing bad behavior is only part of the puzzle. The other part of the puzzle people see is that the other law enforcers do nothing to punish or even rein in those bad apples. While those officers may not have performed the dirty deeds themselves, they appear complicit to observers because they just go along with it. It makes the entire community look corrupt and that, unsurprisingly, lends itself well to writers who like to deal with real world issues through fiction.

Another piece of the puzzle is the doth protest too much principle. Whenever material is released that color law enforcers in a bad light, at least one law enforcer union makes a big stink about it. When somebody accuses you of something, denying the accusation loudly and constantly makes you look insecure and that can create the perception that you're guilty as hell and trying to cover it up. A better response from the police union to these two books being placed on a school's recommended reading list would be to say nothing at all. The books are being placed on a summer reading list published by a school, which means that almost none of the students would have normally read them (because what kids read books recommend by their school). But now that there's controversy surrounding those books, they'll probably be read by a decent number of people, which will boost sales and therefore encourage more fiction writers to include the topic of police brutality in their stories.