A different kind of police union.
 | By Lucy King Senior Video Journalist, Opinion |
Last week, during the trial of Derek Chauvin, who is accused of murdering George Floyd, the country had to process two more deaths of young men of color at the hands of the police. |
Daunte Wright, 20, was shot and killed by the police during a traffic stop on April 11 in Brooklyn Center, Minn., just north of Minneapolis, where Chauvin's trial is taking place. And the Chicago police released a body camera video showing the fatal shooting last month by a police officer of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old Latino boy. |
The aftermath of a police shooting now follows a familiar pattern: Many in the Black community take to the streets to protest, while police officers hold a union-led news conference to defend their brothers and sisters in blue. |
And sometimes, when you scan the rows of white officers at the news conference, you'll spot a Black face. What's it like to be them, to be both Black and blue? |
It was that kernel of curiosity that led my colleagues Andrew Blackwell, Alex Stockton and me to produce this video Op-Ed, in which Cheryl E. Orange, a 30-year veteran of the St. Louis Police Department, lays out a manifesto for a new kind of police union — one that holds fast to what's right, not what's loyal. |
As a Black police officer working in a city where mistrust of the police department runs deep, Orange lives uncomfortably between the two sides. |
She appreciates the value of good police officers and the support of a union to back them up. Yet she also feels the pain of every citizen who dies at the hands of a police officer. She has seen first hand the long-term damage that a lack of accountability does to community trust of the force. In St. Louis, Orange's hometown, police officers have been under assault: 11 have been shot in the line of duty in the last year. |
The main problem, Orange thinks, is that blind loyalty breeds hate. |
Nationwide, police unions often offer a loyal defense of a colleague even before the facts are known. But for Orange and her colleagues at the Ethical Society of Police, it is possible to support fellow officers and also acknowledge when and if the evidence shows that a shooting was a murder. |
Their guiding light is simple: The higher loyalty must be to the truth. |
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