WHISTLEBLOWER

The whistleblower protection act was pushed through Congress by Republicans and signed into law on April 10, 1989 by George H.W. Bush. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley has been a Senator since 1981 and one thread throughout all of these 39 years is his steadfast commitment to protecting whistleblowers.

My point. The concept of whistleblowing and its importance to USA society was a conservative idea led by conservatives of conscience. Well, that version of the Republican party is long dead.

But, this post is not about going back to the day that Rand Paul read the name of the CIA whistleblower aloud on the Senate floor. No, I have something else on my mind.

There are a lot of good cops out there but it is hard to tell because if a good cop is not a whistleblower against bad cops, is he a good cop?

The individual cops who want to do the right thing are stuck in an upside down world. Think about what the Mafia does to its people when they become whistleblowers and guess what, the police unions and the police culture do the same thing. In fact, both organized crime and the police use the same word for a whistleblower – RAT. Think about that.

Derek Chauvin is the ultimate bad cop. What he did to George Floyd was so horrific that the whole world is going to change. I can’t even try to understand a man as broken as Derek Chauvin but I have asked a lot of people who know cops intimately what was going through the minds of the other 3 cops who were there on the scene. I mean it seems impossible that all four cops just happened to be as psychopathically fucked up as Chauvin, right?

To innocent, cloistered people like myself, I am thinking to myself that these other 3 cops know that all kinds of video footage is being created and, naive me, that would make me think that they would feel a lot of pressure to intervene.

But, it turns out that the opposite is true. People who are experts on cop culture tell me that good cops are scared to get caught on video stopping another cop from doing something horrific “in the line of duty” because their careers will be ruined. A good cop caught on video while interfering with a bad cop doing a very bad thing is going to lose his job at best. At worst, he is going to be put into very dangerous situations only to find out that his peers do not have his back.

Not only do the police unions discourage whistleblowers from coming forward, they make sure that the whistleblower is the one to lose his job so that the bad cops can continue on paying their dues to the unions and brutalizing the community.

The same conservative Republican politicians who have been stalwarts in the development of whistleblower protections are now defending a police culture where whistleblowers are called rats.

Black Lives Matter