Special Privileges for a Special Job

SAN DIEGO -- Dallas Police Chief David Brown spoke volumes when he said recently that Americans expect police officers to do too much, provide too many services and serve too many functions.

Yet the problem is bigger than that. Many people also have unrealistic expectations about what is required for police officers to do their jobs.

Take, for instance, the fact that -- in the aftermath of a series of police shootings of African-American men by police officers -- some Americans seem bothered that police are armed at all.

At a recent protest in Baton Rouge, a young woman screamed at the officers standing in front of her in riot gear: "You're the only ones here with guns. Put your guns down, and then we can talk."

Oh please. Where do they find these people? A gun is a tool police officers need to do their job -- just like a doctor needs a scalpel, a firefighter needs a hose, a banker needs a spreadsheet.

It's been said that police often encounter people at their worst. And even at their best, human beings don't always act rationally. So police learn to expect the unexpected.

For example, one of the most dangerous calls that any cop can get is a report of domestic violence, where a female victim might, one minute, shout expletives at her husband and, the next minute, fight officers who try to arrest him.

But there is another way to look at what that protester in Baton Rouge said about how police should lay down their firearms. It's about the larger notion of equality. Some people mistakenly assume that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal," he meant that we should all be given the same privileges.

The way the activist saw it, there was an inherent unfairness in the fact that police were armed and the protesters weren't. It didn't matter to her that police officers go through special training on how to properly handle weapons, or that they swear an oath to protect the public and might need a firearm to uphold it, or that a gun could come in handy if they had to defend their lives or those of others.

As Americans, what are we supposed to do when our need for public safety conflicts with our assumptions about equality?

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