LA VALLE DE PUERCA, CALIFORNIA — The United National Fraternity of Law Enforcement, one of the country’s oldest and largest police unions, recently held a luncheon and roundtable discussion on police brutality. In the wake of now multiple weeks of civil unrest and protests all over America after a Minneapolis cop killed an unarmed black suspect in a nearly nine-minute long video, the UNFLE management and executive team thought it was a good opportunity to engage with the public, and perhaps offer some helpful suggestions in how to curb or even end police brutality once and for all.
“One bad cop can ruin the reputation of all cops,” UNFLE President Sgt. Mark Urder said in his prepared remarks. “Which is why we try so hard to keep every incident of bad policing hidden away from the public. You see, it’s really in your best interests for us to cover-up for our thuggish, violent, easily triggered police brothers and sisters, because if you don’t trust us, we can’t be the best cops we can be.”
But covering up acts of police brutality aren’t enough anymore, Sgt. Urder insisted. In the modern era, Urder wondered, if “police officers protecting the thin blue line with the same old tactics” is enough. For decades, police have relied on something very specific to help them keep public confidence in their job performance high.
“We just lied our asses off. We’d make up evidence. We’d rely on police reports written hours or even days after an incident to frame everything in ways that paint us in a good light,” Urder said. “Now, though? I’m afraid that as soon as we’ve told one lie, there’s some asshole with a video that shows not only how badly we lied, but how terribly our officers behaved!”
And that, Urder said, “reveals the essential action” that must be taken to “permanently end brutality and excessive force.”
“We’ve done some studies and the unavoidable conclusion they all bring us to is quite simple,” Urder announced. “Simply put, if we were to ban camera phones, our studies indicate that would eliminate police brutality and put an end to the use of excessive force.”
Urder explained that the UNFLE’s studies indicate that if people aren’t made aware of when a police officer kills an unarmed suspect, or beats them bloody, or sodomizes them with a plunger handle, that they won’t ever get upset by them.
“After all, the saying is ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for a reason,” Urder explained. “If it’s out of the public’s minds, it won’t actually exist, basically. It’s kind of like that tree that falls in the woods. Even if it does make a sound, you’ll never know, and so you have to ask yourself if it even matters, know what I mean?”
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Writer/comedian James Schlarmann is the founder of The Political Garbage Chute and his work has been featured on The Huffington Post. You can follow James on Facebook, Spotify, and Instagram, but not Twitter because Twitter is a cesspool.