I once interviewed a criminology professor, who, for 30 years in his previous career had been a cop and a police chief. I asked him how many times he personally, or any of his fellow officers or the officers he supervised, had arrived at the scene of a violent crime in time to stop the crime and to protect the victim. His answer: "Not once in my entire career."
If asked the same question, I'd bet that Chief Franklin would give a similar answer. As a result, he does not understand what "protecting citizens from violent crime" means, because he has very little experience doing this.
He believes that arriving after the event is over, putting up barricade tape, initiating an investigation, collecting evidence, interviewing participants, and creating reports is "protecting citizens from violent crime". That chasing down perpetrators once they've been identified, and sometimes extracting perpetrators from holes they have crawled into are "protecting citizens from violent crime". That operating jails and building legally convincing cases against the perps are "protecting citizens from violent crime".
Actually, NONE of these activities protects me when a perp points a gun at me and demands my phone, wallet, and car keys. Stopping this threat, in the moment, before the perp can shoot me, is what "protecting citizens from violent crime" REALLY means.
Citizens are their own first responders to violent crime. Cops simply can't do this. It is pitiful that Chief Franklin doesn't understand this fact.
