This was actually a pretty ballsy thing for this Gateway City police officer (not the one pictured above) to do, given the political and media-driven circumstances. Then you step back and remember that it shouldn't have to be ballsy - much less a punishable "offense" - at all:
A St. Louis police officer will face disciplinary action for wearing a nametag that read “Darren Wilson” while he was on the job. Wilson is at the center of the controversial shooting death of Michael Brown back in August.
St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he “couldn’t be more disappointed” and that he thinks the officer will get “some days off for his actions.”
The officer’s name has not been released. He wore the nametag in a show of solidarity with Wilson last Friday at City Hall where he was stationed.
This is one of those instances where, though I definitely come down on one side, I can also understand the other side's point of view even though I don't agree with it. Chief Dotson (pictured above) is thinking entirely pragmatically, defensively, and in the short term: Ferguson is finally, after nearly a month, starting to calm down, the violence abating (back to the normal level of mayhem), the fires put out, and his major, gonzo, career-threatening, politically nightmarish professional migraine may finally begin to slowly fade. Kind of like the immediate aftermath of a hurricane: the sun is back out, the immediate crisis is past, and the recovery can now commence. And then this rank & file officer makes an unauthorized and all-too high-profile show of support for ex-Officer Wilson and runs the risk of dropping a bomber-load of napalm on the glowing embers just as the Black Klan insurrectionists are overplaying their national hand and wheezing their last gasp, at least for this chapter of The Never Ending Race Story. Reminiscent of when your newborn is colicky in the middle of the night, you spend two hours trying to sooth and coo and rock the kid back to sleep, and s/he finally drifts off - the last thing in the quadrant you want at the moment is to stand up, tip-toe back to your baby's crib, and then have the floor loudly creak.
There may also be the matter of whether St. Louis officers were barred from making any shows of support by the city. Whatever the wisdom and honor (or lack of same) of such a rule, the StLPD would, as the employer, have the authority to impose it, and an officer insubordinately disobeying that rule would be subject to disciplinary action. I'm assuming - hoping - that that is the context of Chief Dotson's a little-too-strident "disappointment".
Because if it isn't, then the insurrectionists have already won and are, for all intents and purposes, now running the Greater St. Louis area, and to a greater or lesser degree, pretty much every other major metropolitan area in the U.S.
It utterly and absolutely bears eternally vigilant remembering: Darren Wilson was justly and evidentiarily cleared of all wrongdoing in the Michal Brown incident, and yet his career and ability to make a living at anything (unless he {ghost-}writes a book about this experience, which I imagine he'll have to and that it will do very, very well, as this sort of politicized fracas always ensures) has been destroyed - along with his and his family's personal safety and piece of mind. Donning a "Darren Wilson" name-tag was a small gesture of support for REAL justice and of defiance against the Left's insipient, corrupt, racist power madness. It speaks to the spinelessness of the time that even such a tiny symbolic stand gets so reflexively and cravenly swatted down.
What's disappointing to me isn't Chief Dotson's fearful overreaction but the fact that only one St. Louis cop made this show of solidarity with a fellow officer who did what any of them would have done in Darren Wilson's tragic position. If all of them had done so, it would have made a huge counterstatement to the "protestors" nationwide that no, law enforcement isn't going to stand by and let thugs, revolutionaries, and other rabble run wild, blanketly protected by politically correct threats and extortion, no matter what their cowardly, political hack leaders tell them. But one man? Forget about it. He'll be fortunate to keep his job - and not have his name and home address published by the New York Times.
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