Chuck Canterbury, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, says his group agrees with President Obama that police officers who misbehave should be disciplined, “but officers deserve due process if they’ve made a mistake. Then the system of criminal justice will work, but the officers should receive the same due process as anybody else.” Speaking of protests against police in cities like Baltimore, Canterbury tells NPR, “The police department cannot and is not alone in trying to fix the problems of those neighborhoods. There’s over 60,000 police officers assaulted every year. The vast majority of those occur in the same areas that these tensions are felt in.”
Canterbury adds that, “Police officers don’t like bad cops. We don’t want to work beside a bad cop, and any time we see an incident that we feel is inappropriate, it causes all of law enforcement to be sad that that’s occurring. But we believe that there needs to be collaborative efforts and not mandated consent decrees that are hard to enforce.” He cites the collaborative agreement that was entered into in Cincinnati on policing as “one that the Obama administration points to all the time, and they still meet biweekly with every group that was involved in that collaborative. And it’s been going on for over 10 years now, and it’s worked.”