My Response To Craig Bean’s Hate Mail Addressed “To All You Cop Blockers”

The following piece of hate mail was sent to us from Craig Bean via the
CopBlock.org Submissions Page.

Although we receive plenty of these negative correspondences, most of them are the same 2-3 sentences repeated over and over. While Craig does indeed touch on all of these cliches, he also took a little more time to do so than the usual syCOPhant. Since he took the time to do so, I have obliged to respond.

I will not edit Craig’s hate letter in any way. I will print his words to the letter in italics and respond below each paragraph in bullet points.

You guys are a freaking joke. You disrespect police and then wonder why you get treated the way you do. I agree with some of the things you post. Badges do not grant extra rights, I completely agree. But there is a fine line between standing up for your rights and being disrespectful to law enforcement officials. Yes there are bad cops out there. But most police officers just want to be able to go home and see their wife and tuck their kids into bed at the end of the day. When people like you refuse police orders whether they are lawful or not, all you are doing is instigating them.

• I do not wonder why people get treated the way they do by police. It is because police are jack-booted thugs with special privileges, fragile egos and a disturbingly violent culture. Mystery solved, chief.  That is why I do not claim that we should try to fix the police, but rather abolish them.
• If you agree that badges do not grant extra rights, then why do you believe that people should comply to cops unlawful orders? Isn’t asking people to mindlessly comply with unlawful orders a special right that only police have? I doubt your sincerity, sir.
• Claiming that refusing to obey unlawful commands is an act of instigation is akin to saying that rape victims shouldn’t have been looking so good; or like an abused child blaming a sibling for the abuse their father commits against them. Google: Stockholm Syndrome
• The line you made up does not exist. The other side of a right is not respect for authority. The other side of a right is oppression. When rights are forced to concede to authoritarian oppressors, we are little more than slaves.
• Everybody just wants to, “blah blah blah at the end of the day.” I am not sure why you think this is unique to police. I assume that it is because you erroneously believe that police are more likely to die on the job than the average civilian. In actuality, there are almost twenty more careers more deadly than policing. And most police deaths occur as a consequence of their own driving or something other than being killed by a civilian. Cops are actually safer than most people, yet still commit more violence.

Yes police have shot some innocent people. And those cops should be held accountable for their actions. But when a video comes out of some punk kid who has broken the law and a cop orders him to the ground, and you can hear him order the kid to the ground 20+ times in the video, and the cop picks him up and throws him on the ground you guys scream police brutality.

• One criminal act does not excuse another. You cannot abuse people simply because they make your job more difficult. Imagine the kind of world it would be if all of us could brutalize people who made our jobs more difficult? If a cop comes across a criminal suspect who is difficult to peacefully detain – Well suck it up, cowboy, that’s your job and only psychopaths use violence as a shortcut.

I deal with the police on a daily basis with my line of work. You know how many times i’ve been beaten up by the police? Zero. You know how many times I’ve been shot? Zero. I had a sheriff pull a gun on me once because of mistaken identity and he said to get on the ground. Bet you can’t guess what I did. I got on the ground. He asked what I was doing there. I told him a construction worker on this site doing landscaping. He called my boss and verified that i was permitted to be there. He helped me to my feet. Explained to me that someone had broken into one of the buildings on the site and stolen about $300,000 in computer equipment and copper wiring. He even gave me an old shirt out of the trunk of his car because i had laid down in a mud puddle and my shirt was wet and muddy. Point of this story is I had a run in with a police officer who didn’t beat me up or shoot me because I FOLLOWED HIS DEMANDS. Whether I thought his demands were lawful or not I didn’t question him. I said yes sir to everything he told me to do. It is a little word that died out in the 90’s called respect.

• I understand that you are trying to brag when you tell this story, but to me it just seems really sad. A man in a magic costume issued you an unreasonable demand and you just flopped right down into the mud? That is sad, man. Get a spine. You sound like a bullied kid who never fights back then brags about how obediently he took the punches.
• You know what killed respect? When it no longer had to be earned. When you respect something or someone automatically because they belong in a category or a group, and not based on their actions as an individual, you make respect meaningless. The sort of mindless respect given to authority is what has undermined respect, and you are one of the people contributing to that.

I watched your video about how we pay the police to protect and serve us and you guys state that they do not have a legal obligation to do so. In a sense you are right. Police are not there to make sure that I feel safe. And I do not feel that it is their job. I have guns that make me feel that my family and I are safe. Cops main job description is to protect, serve, and enforce the law. But by protecting, serving, and enforcing the law they are protecting and serving me and the community. They arrest drug users and dealers. They arrest murderers, rapists, child molesters, and many more on a daily basis. So tell me how that is not protecting and serving the community. How is that not keeping you or your kids safe. If someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night and kidnaps your kids, who are you going to call. Are you going to call your pals at cop block because you don’t trust your local authorities? No you are going to call the police and ask them to help you get your kids back safe and sound. And within a matter of minutes your house will be filled with every available state, county, and local police officer who will make it their #1 mission to get your kids back home to you safe. And many of them would not eat or sleep until they did so. How is that not protecting and serving the community?

• Your reasoning here has more awkward dead ends than a drunk bee in a jar. You are claiming things, but you give no reasoning on how or why those claims are credible. You make generalized statements that sound like instructions from the How to Love Your Oppressors Manual without any qualifications to back them up. On top of that, most of your statements are outright false.
• You and your community are not The Law. Both cannot be served simultaneously. A law is a binding rigid dictate, while human beings are free, unpredictable and evolving. You cannot serve the interests of human beings with laws that do not recognize the complexity of human behavior.
• Arresting drug users and dealers does not make you safe. But forcing drugs into the black market does put you in a great amount of danger from those black market forces. It also helps to erode and destroys individuals, which puts new pressures on communities while creating criminals out of the desperation they now face thanks to drug laws.
• When it comes to arresting violent criminals like rapists and murderers, I hate to break it to you, but police actually do not do that very well or very often. Violent crimes that are solved can take up to decades, which means the perpetrators roam free for years. But in most cases, unless the person who violated you was a friend, family member or known associate, chances are the cops will never catch them.
• When bad shit happens to me I have this crazy habit of dealing with it. For some reason I never stop and wonder who I should call to fix my problems. And if I ever had to, it would be because police have a monopoly on violence and it is illegal to protect yourself or look after your interests in most cases, but certainly so when they are not invited to participate. I highly suggest you stop looking to your phone as a magical savior, and develop the sort of skills necessary to be responsible and self-reliant.

If you want to target police officers for being corrupt, then target the corrupt officers. To say that all police officers are corrupt is no different then saying all Muslims are terrorists, all Hispanics are drug dealers and murderers, or that all African Americans are thieves and rapists. You say you don’t want the police to profile you. But what are you doing to the police?

• I am not targeting officers for being corrupt. I merely point out their crimes to illustrate what policing truly means. It means that if you have a magic badge, you can be the most scandalously violent criminal in local history and likely receive rewards and honors for doing it. Not all officers are that way. Some of them are good people who act fairly, except when it comes to bringing the criminals in their departments to justice. So there are two kinds of bad cops. The kind who engage in corruption, oppression and brutality; and then there are the cowardly hypocrites who are responsible for letting them get away with it.

I would pay to see any of you yahoos at copblock.org to trade jobs with a cop and see all the bullshit they have to deal with on a daily basis and see if that changes your perspective on cops. So many people are so quick to jump on the bandwagon against cops without truly understanding exactly what they have to go through. If you had to deal with all the low life scumbags that they have to deal with, you might be a little on edge when you make first contact with people as well.

• Everybody’s job sucks, pal. If ya can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
• I have never been a baker, but if I saw one adding super glue to his dough, it would not require baking experience or expertise to know that something wasn’t right about that. Likewise I do not have to be a police officer in order to know that they are failing at being moral, ethical, intelligent, compassionate and responsible human beings far more often than any other segment of the population. But that isn’t what makes them bad at their jobs, that’s what makes them good at them.

Treat others with respect and you will get respect in return.

Okay, Craig, thanks for all the respect you have treated us with in your letter. Hypocrite much?

Craig could have saved himself a whole heap of trouble if he had bothered to read the posts at the
Welcome Copsuckers Page
where his accusations and claims have all been repeatedly addressed.

We would also recommend he update his syCOPhant apps.