Recently I met a really big guy and we got to talking. He had been a police officer. One day he stood by his motorcycle doing paperwork. Suddenly a car accelerated and deliberately ran him over. The driver reversed and tried to run him over again, but the car got hung up on the motorcycle and stalled. The driver was distraught – his house was foreclosed and his wife left him, so he was looking for someone on whom to vent his anger. The cop suffered a fractured skull, a concussion, broken ribs, and a broken back, leaving him in a wheelchair for months. The driver is doing two life sentences, which is as close to justice as we get in this world, but does nothing to help his victim.

Eventually the cop recovered, not fully but enough to get around almost normally. He was given a pension, not a generous one because he had served only a few years, so he works to support himself and his family. I told him that I am a survivor of a head-on collision at 50 mph, and we talked about whether this meant we were lucky or unlucky.

But as we talked, I thought about the skewed, not to say perverted, picture the media gives us of the police. This man, with his story of gratuitous pain incurred in the line of duty, will never see the TV screen or newspaper pages. The USA is the third most populous nation on earth with 330 million inhabitants. We have instantaneous, nationwide news coverage. Almost every day there is another police shooting, another questionable arrest, another spouting lawyer backed by a grieving family.

But where is my new friend the ex-cop, and all the injured cops like him? Where are the police funerals? Yes, there are a few on local TV, but none on the national news. Where are the Medal of Valor ceremonies? Where are the weeping mothers, thanking an officer for rescuing their child?

What would the average individual think of Jews, if all the media showed us were people like Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein, but never Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin, of all those who made important contributions to our wellbeing? Inevitably, anti-Semitism would increase. It’s the same with police. A continual barrage of negative propaganda must have an effect. Consider that the next time you switch on TV news. Consider what motives lie behind that continual barrage.

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