Police unions are the fucking worst. Any request for cops to do their job even slightly more responsibly is met with what can only be described as pouting and temper tantrums. Take, for instance, the Kentucky Fraternal Order of Police, who are big mad over perfectly reasonable legislation to ban the use of no-knock warrants statewide.
Courier-Journal reports that on Sunday, state Rep. Attica Scott (D-Louisville), announced “Breonna’s Law,” a bill named for Breonna Taylor, that would ban no-knock warrants statewide, require officers to go through drug and alcohol testing after being involved in a shooting and for body cameras to be on whenever a warrant is being executed. The proposal follows a similar bill passed and signed into law in Louisville, where Taylor was shot and killed by police serving a no-knock warrant. These are perfectly reasonable demands, right?
Well, not according to the FOP. The organization wasted no time taking to social media to blast Scott’s bill, calling it “an attack and slap in the face to the great cops all across this Commonwealth.”
“Yet again, emotion takes the day, not fact based evidence. The unintended consequences will be so severe, likely a mass exodus of great cops all across this Commonwealth. Yet again, cops have been made out to be the enemy of the people and used as no more than #PoliticalPawns,” The FOP wrote on Facebook. Of course, the Fraternal Order of Police are the kind of people who use hashtags on Facebook.
Scott called their reply “predictable,” on Twitter and asked how exactly her bill is predicated on emotion. “Your demands predicated on something other than #Facts are, in fact, demands based on emotion,” the FOP replied. The bill was named for Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who, factually speaking, was asleep in her bed when a group of officers arrived to serve a no-knock warrant and shot and killed her in the hallway of her home. For being so pressed about facts, the FOP has yet to provide any showing why a bill preventing further deaths from no-knock warrants would be a bad thing or somehow harmful to their officers.
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Why, it almost seems like the FOP is in its feelings over a decision based on, you know, facts.
So far, Scott’s bill has nine co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats. In July, the state Senate’s Republican president, Robert Stivers, proposed a ban on standalone no-knock warrants. The bill, which has yet to be filed, would provide exceptions for hostage situations and no-knock warrants being used in conjunction with arrest warrants.
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