A police major in the US state of Kentucky has paid the ultimate professional price to online outrage that spilled over into the real world, because of her attitude toward rioters, expressed in an internal email.
Major Bridget Hallahan has been revealed of her command and will be forced to retire on October 1.
The “incriminating” email sent in August to officers shows Hallahan attempting to put across the message that the police, essentially, should not “feed the trolls.” Her argument was not to stoop to the level of those wholesale vilifying the police, and avoid responding or reacting to those accusations publicly, to avoid validating them.
Hallahan was relieved of duties.
No doubt in order to pep talk and rally her colleagues at a time they found themselves besieged and disparaged with blanket accusations of racism and unchecked violence, and even threats of eventually “canceling” them as a service through various campaigns aimed at “defunding” the police – in the email, more than anything, Hallahan sought to reassure them of their own worth.
And that’s where she got in trouble with activists and their supporters, because the officer tried to elevate the value of the work of the police by comparing and contrasting it to the woke activists, like those of Antifa and BLM, particularly those who had just “jumped on the bandwagon,” as she put it.
While the police are being publicly criticized by those who don’t even bother to learn the facts, Hallahan suggested, they actually have much more character and ethics than the “punks” protesting against them.
Further in the vein of advising her fellow officers not to engage and therefore “feed the trolls,” she wrote – “Don’t make them important, because they are not. They will be the ones washing our cars, cashing us out at the Walmart, or living in their parents’ basement playing COD for their entire life.”
It’s interesting that the verdict of the local police department has been to end the career of the major over this email sent internally, rather than as a post published publicly on a social network, or statements made in an interview.
Though the email is clearly not referring to the protesters in very flattering terms, it was not suggesting any type of violence or retribution against them, either – the goal seems to have been to instruct officers not to take the bait, respond, and escalate when faced with anti-police provocations.
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