Big Mouse Strikes Again

Police Funerals - a moving experience

Police funerals are moving affairs, particularly where an officer dies on duty.  Colleagues in uniform coming together to mourn a loss.  Often attendees do not know the deceased officer well or even at all, but they do feel a common bond with their colleague.  This arrises through an understanding of and participation in a shared role which is always challenging an often dangerous.  America was the scene of one police funeral this week.

Following the murder of the two NYPD cops last week the funeral of one of the officers, Rafael Ramos, was held on Saturday.  This was a massive affair.  Jet Blue, which is a bit of an American up-market Easyjet, offered free flights to officers attending the funeral from across America.  This was an offer which was taken up by many.  Officers came from across the States to show support for their dead colleague as did cops from Canada and  several other nations.  What is, of course, significant about this funeral is the political background it is reflected in.  The issues around the deaths in Ferguson and in New York have not gone away.  It seems to me that the gulf between officer and citizens is set at a strange distance just now.  One of the speakers at Ramos’s funeral was the New York Mayor, Bill de Blasio.  He has made comments, in the wake of the death of Eric Garner, which some felt were anti police.  At the funeral, the officers who were outside the church watching the service on huge screens, turned their backs on the mayor during his address.    

This has caused a mixed reaction.  The NYPD Commissioner, Bill Bratton, described it as inappropriate, whilst some communities have held pro-police demonstrations. NYPD officers have been engaged in exercising their ‘discretion’ and have elected not to issue summonses within the precinct the cops were killed in.

Politics and police derive from the same word.  It strikes me that there is a bit of a dangerous mix of components between the two going on here with one flavouring the other a bit too much.  I’m not a cop here and I don’t pretend to know the rights and wrongs of it all, I do however fear for the police in the major US cities.  They have, since the 1970s, worked really hard to build community relations and do the rights things in relation to crime fighting - the current events pose, in my view, a very real risk to that progress.

There are two things any of us who have attended police funerals always wish for.  The first is that that we will never have to attend another, sound in the heavy knowledge that we will.  The second is that it is not our funeral which our colleagues will be attending next.  This wish is, always, less certain.  

I truly hope policing in the States emerges from this crisis and that there will be no further funerals for cops to go to.  I know however, even in the last week, this wish is forlorn.

Guns and tragedy…again

Guns, again came to the fore here today.  In a terrible accident, a two year old found a hand gun in his mum’s handbag.  He took it out and accidentally shot and killed his mother with it.  I remember in police training being told ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’.  I always thought that was a strange line, and probably written by a gun enthusiast.  I thought then, and today added to that view that people with guns kill people.  In this case, a mother has been lost and a family has been forever altered as a result of a constitution that has not been changed, in this regard, pretty much since America became independent.  I really can't think why having onto the right to carry concealed weapons is a good thing. I’d be surprised if the members of todays devastated family felt differently.  I discussed this with an American friend recently who told me, I had to look at the bigger picture…I think events like those suffered today are the bigger picture.

The Big Mouse 

Well, with the family, I left America this week and travelled to a strange and colourful land nearby - Disney!  Wow!  It has never been an ambition of mine to come to the Land of the Big Mouse but a 7 and 8 year old strongly advised it was theirs, so here we are.

It’s an interesting place.  This is the second Disney resort.  Walt, apparently, got a wee bit hacked off that non Disney people were opening hotels near to his resort in California and, shame on them (!) making money on the back of his good ideas.  So, to beat the profiteers, he travelled to Florida and bought up a piece of land of massive proportions and got permission to manage and govern the municipality it sits on.  It’s got its own fire service, security and police service - mind you, who would want to work for a Mickey Mouse Police Department!  It strikes me the only thing it’s not got is its own money…that said the resort manages to bring in whacks of that anyway. 

When we arrived in Magic Kingdom, we spotted a few other families, nothing strange there as Disney gets around 70,000 visitors a day.  It cost $17 to park so even if there are are 15,000 cars there Walt does okay just out of the parking.  Anyway, lots of other families got out their cars, walked to the buses that take you to the park, walked into the park, then they walked to the security search, through reception and then straight over to the mobility scooter hire place!  And, suddenly, the power of movement left their limbs and they were all on disability scooters!  Now, on one level, this struck me as being a bit like golfing.  In Scotland, we routinely walk round the 18 holes, whilst in the States it is routine to take a golf buggy.  Even if one takes a fairly liberal view in that regard, I still found this a bit tasteless, particularly as these same people were able to park their disability scooters outside the restaurants whilst they walked in to grab lunch.  I also discovered that those who rode in disability scooters got to go straight to the front of the not insubstantial queues for rides.  

I have several friends who need to use either wheel chairs or require these scooters as a necessity of life.  I didn’t like watching the many, many users of these scooters in Disney and genuinely felt offended by them as they were, as I saw it, taking advantage of the disabilities of others.

Another park we visited was Animal Kingdom.  This is a bit of a posh zoo.  Its got some great animals and offers great ways to see them in a fairly authentic looking setting.  Now I know there are many arguments around zoos and I’m not getting into that; I’m just accepting that they exist and, as I saw it, Disney did it well and presumably look after the animals to a high standard.  They theme some of this around African settings.  Now here’s the bit I’m less sure of.  These settings are also pretty authentic.  I was in Malawi in January and I really did recognise the streets Disney made as being reflective of what I saw there.  To be clear, what I saw in Malawi was poverty, and crumbling buildings.  Disney recreated that.  That may very well be a good thing.  People may look at these sets and think about African or Asian poverty, as that end of the park also showed a poor Asia, and think about injustice in the developing world, or they may look at this simply as a backdrop to the singers who were smiling, the beer and pretzel sellers who were selling their wares in authentic dress and the dancers who spontaneously did native dances on set.  They even employ people from Africa and Asia on one year contracts.  They are paid fairly and receive training and education whilst in the States that will benefit both themselves and their communities on return, so I guess there is something going back.

I don’t know if I’m being a bit of a killjoy or not, but something about it all just made me feel bit uneasy, all that money being made by showing how people in poverty live.

All that said, it was a great experience, particularly looking at the smiles of wonder on my children's faces as they got soaked on Splash Mountain, appeared on screen on the Monsters Inc Laughter Floor or watched many of the parades go by.  This place is a hermetically sealed oasis of colour, saccharine sweet images and uplifting song and its all under the warmth of the Floridian sun, and that, quite frankly, is not a bad old package…even if it does leave the average family completely knackered at the end of the day!!

Florida - land of the free?

On leaving the Big Mouse one returns to Florida and with it the realisation that one is in the deep south.  Virginia, where I’m living, is often described as the South, but its a great deal more of a northerly experience than Florida.  

For example, here there is an ongoing curfew.  If you are a minor, that being under 18, so at 16 and 17 old enough to work and be married etc, you are not allowed out on the streets, between 2300 and 0500 or midnight and 0600 at the weekend.  That strikes me as a bit restrictive.

I remember being in Grenada a number of years ago.  Around 6:00 each night there was a 15 minute program on where every death on the island that had happened that day was announced.  It was a respectful obituary programme that ended with somber music and a bit of silence.  Florida have kind of taken that idea and developed it for the IT savvy, crime-aware generation.  The have the daily mug shots on the web!  Everyone who had been in police custody throughout the day gets the picture and what they have done on the World Wide Web!  Take a look here!  You will find lots of different offenders who have committed a range of offences from domestic violence to theft to failing to appear at court.  This makes for fairly voyeuristic viewing…but is it a good idea?  I don’t think so.

Still there was an interesting story on TV here this week each element of it I found hard to work out from a Scots perspective, I will leave you to do you own fathoming of it…A Christian law firm, were instructed by an atheist organisation to sue the County for giving money to support a prayer vigil following a drive by shooting!  Is it just me or…!

New Year

About this time of year thoughts turn to Jackie Bird, Only an Excuse and Phil and Ali.  This year, in particular, I’ll be thinking about my friends and colleagues across Scotland and the USA who will be keeping us all safe as we ‘bring in the bells’.  There are a number of US Fulbrighters who are going to Scotland for New Year simply because they know we do it best!  I am sure they will see a great spectacular and enjoy the cold, the rain and the smiles that will be on Princes Street tomorrow night.  All brought to them and others, not by any entertainment company but by the Police Scotland cops who will be leaving their own families and friends in the house or at the party or at the pub so they can keep those who visit our great nation safe.  

So, if you see cop take a minute and go and wish them a Happy New Year, they will appreciate it.

What I've learned this week...

Police funerals are moving affairs, wherever they are.
There are politics in policing, wherever there are cops and politicians.
People kill people, but its much easier to do if the people have guns.
Disney can demonstrate poverty whilst making a fortune.
New Year in the heat is better than New Year in the cold
Seeing the look on my kids faces, loving Disney makes me cry!

Stay safe Amigos.

Until next year, all the best

Richie