GREG HARTON: It's not easy being blue these days

It's been a little more than two months since I stood on Dickson Street struggling to keep a candle lit on a breezy and cool December evening.

More than a thousand folks were also there, huddled close to the steps of the Walton Arts Center doing their best to pay their respects to Stephen Carr, a 27-year-old Texan who'd become a Fayetteville police officer two years before.

Three nights before this vigil, a 35-year-old man who police would later learn had a history of expressing anti-police "ideologies" through social media did what, to most of us, is inconceivable. He walked up to Carr, who sat unsuspecting inside a police cruiser behind the Fayetteville Police Department, and fired repeatedly. Police Chief Mike Reynolds later described Carr's killing as an execution.

Other officers killed the fleeing assailant moments later.

The sobering events of those days have remained vivid, maybe because we've recently had so many reminders that the badged men and women dispatched into our communities every day apparently have targets on their backs.

Last weekend's attacks on New York police officers revived the shock of Officer Carr's murder. There, a 45-year-old Bronx resident shot at officers in two separate incidents, one of them inside a police precinct building. Two officers were hit by bullets but, thankfully, survived.

The man had a long criminal history and, according to prosecutors, promised to shoot more officers even as he lay in a hospital bed on Sunday.

In the Carr shooting, Chief Reynolds told me last week the shooter's family members have described a man who had displayed violence against family members for years, having become aggressive and angry after the onset of some seizures as a young teen. Some family, Reynolds said, described him as having become an "evil" person.

He had joined some online "cop watch" groups that monitor police behaviors for misconduct, but his anti-police views proved too extreme and they distanced themselves from him, Reynolds said.

Even so, Reynolds said, nothing in the investigation so far would have given a direct clue that the man planned to show up at the police department and slay a police officer.

Police organizations across the country say ambushes on officers are a growing threat. Reynolds, who became an officer in 1993, said the threat has become more serious since he was a young officer. "I didn't have to worry about someone attacking and ambushing me just because I'm in a uniform and took an oath to uphold the law," Reynolds said.

Have there been some bad cops? Undoubtedly. But just as people of any profession or ethnic group or societal classification or gender or sexual orientation are poorly served when viewed as being all the same, so it also applies to police. Indeed, the nature of police work, I'd suggest, tends to attract people more likely to care about the community, to protect residents from people who would do harm and willing to put themselves in harms way for the good of all.

"Stephen Carr was a good young man," Reynolds said. "He had a big heart. Ultimately, he lost his life because someone painted him with a broad brush."

Some critics loudly disparage law enforcement and the rhetoric is quite fierce. But why should anyone view it as right to expect law enforcement officer not to enforce the law? The answer, rather, is to change laws one disagrees with.

How bad is it? Reynolds said his agency is investigating 360-degree technology to warn officers if someone is approaching their police cruiser from any direction. Officers have to team up more to watch each other's backs.

Officers continue to want to be out among their neighbors and involved in community policing, but Reynolds said the examples of antagonism and violence against officers have an impact. "My head has been on a swivel over the last couple of months more than it has before," he said.

Commentary on 02/16/2020

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