I’ve always gotten a kick out of the term: The Riot Police. News anchors appear to love to employ this reference in their broadcasts. Ever since I was one time a kid I thought it would be chilled to be a “riot cop.” I’d see them in their helmets & shields wielding batons & charging at some unruly mob. Chilled. I’d document for duty everyday, train to impeccable standards, & then standby in my barracks prepared for the next rare, but inevitable riot to start. Yeah, I was one time wrong.
I have also wondered if there’s some folks who think the riot cops are kept in some secret warehouse until needed. Or perhaps stored in some dehydrated form-just add water. The officers sit & wait to be summoned to suppress an insurgency by some political malcontents who are not satisfied with a right to express their free speech peacefully.
When I became a cop, I no longer thought much about the riot police way or another. That is until the day the world came to town, & I became. That day was in 1999 when the WTO summit hit Seattle (& I do mean HIT). Then for a week I revealed who exactly the riot police are. They are me. Well, my fellow patrol officers & me. Not to mention, non-patrol officers & detectives, SWAT, sheriff's deputies & state troopers, officers from other agencies &, if things get bad-as they did-the National Guard.
In point of fact, you see riot police every day. They are the cops you see driving through your neighborhoods, jogging beats, riding bicycles, & answering your 911 calls. The necessity for giant numbers of police officers in the work of mass demonstrations & riots means it is impossible to maintain a special detachment of cops for this particular duty. They must come from already deployed resources. Whenever there is a riot downtown, you can bet your neighborhood is probably suffering as your officers are diverted from defending your wellbeing to dealing with violent, property-damaging criminals.
So, the next time you watch the riot police shield on the TV news, & you see protesters throwing rocks, bricks, & bottles of urine, keep in mind this: They are not committing those acts against anonymous, faceless, emotionless blue robots sent out to suppress the riot & to restore peace to a community. They are attacking the officers who sit next to you at the coffee shop, or who monitor traffic near the crosswalk as your children get out of school, or who inquired in to that suspicious character prowling around your grandmother's yard last night.