Over the weekend, Amy Klobuchar announced that a Senate resolution had passed making this week “National Police Week” in honor of the 576 police officers who died last year. In a tweet, Klobuchar says this is “one small way to recognize their courage” for choosing to “put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities.”
Except what Klobuchar fails to mention is that more than 3/4 of those deaths were due to COVID-19. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, which keeps a record of officers’ deaths, there were 623 line-of-duty deaths in 2021, and 444 of those were from COVID.
Fortunately, a few thousand Twitter users were there to let her know.
The missing context is that 444 of these were covid deaths. pic.twitter.com/Jgiz3Wuuql
— Read Wobblies and Zapatistas (@JoshuaPotash) May 22, 2022
I had to look it up. 444 of these were Covid https://t.co/EcxVcmUldQ
— Alex Peter (@LolOverruled) May 22, 2022
when you posted this did you know that almost all of them died from covid cuz they didn’t get vaxxed or wear masks or are you just learning that now
— occupy alternative rock (@Eve6) May 22, 2022
Surely some of these are people who took proper precautions and respected public health mandates and guidelines and still contracted the virus—as happened to so many people over the last two-plus years—and those deaths are tragic.
However, as NPR wrote recently, “police departments and unions in cities across the country — including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix — have pushed back against mandates requiring vaccines for public employees, filing lawsuits and threatening resignation.”
“Leaders of some states and localities have even used the lack of a vaccine mandate as an incentive to recruit law enforcement officers from other parts of the country,” that report continues. Ron DeSantis, remember, even offered unvaccinated officers a $500 bonus to relocate to Florida.
Yes, let us honor this man https://t.co/JMcIL7Dpqt
— Andrew Kimmel (@andrewkimmel) May 22, 2022
The Senate resolution specifically praises “the law enforcement community for continual unseen acts of sacrifice and heroism, especially in the midst of the COVID–19 pandemic crisis faced by the United States.” Because of the heavily public-facing nature of their job, police officers have been at high risk of contracting COVID-19. But as a community, by fighting mandates and discouraging others from even wearing masks in their presence, they put a lot of people in danger.
At this point, we’ve all read stories and seen videos of police officers getting angry and even violent with people asking them to wear masks. Does that deserve a whole week of official commemoration?
Of course, there’s another bit of context glaringly absent from Klobuchar’s tweet, and that’s that the number of people shot and killed by police last year is nearly double that of the number of officers who died.
— Katalin Pota ☮️☮️☮️ (@katalin_pota) May 22, 2022
Also, the timing of this commemoration literally could not be worse.
Let's not move on from this.@amyklobuchar really looked at the calendar & thought the week of the anniversary of George Floyd's murder would be the perfect one to honor police.
— 🖤✨❄️ Human Hummingbird ❄️✨🖤 (@riotousmuse) May 22, 2022
Amy said, "Surely Black people won't mind. This is appropriate & respectful & I am not racist." https://t.co/uKGi40TClv pic.twitter.com/DL8m1UiUu2
After years of mounting demands for police accountability, the Senate is making it 100% clear they couldn’t care less.
(image: Tom Williams-Pool/Getty Images)
