Another Reason to Pity the Police: Mundanes Don't Get Their Jokes

by Will Grigg
Jul. 14, 2013

In Denver, prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the local police union distributed T-shirts depicting a fearsome, nightstick-wielding police figure arising from the skyline surrounded by a caption reading: “We get up early to BEAT the crowds.” In New York, police unions have distributed shirts showing a young boy behind bars, with a caption reading “U raise ‘em, we cage ‘em.”

Another popular t-shirt inscription for New York police is a quote from Ernest Hemmingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Yet another police union t-shirt declares: “Police – My job is to protect your a**, not kiss it.”

Doug Wyllie, Editor in Chief of PoliceOne magazine, criticized officers who wear such shirts - -not because of the attitude they convey, but because they give “people who dislike police officers additional fodder for their anti-cop rhetoric.” The problem, according to Wyllie, is that the lesser beings who constitute the public at large “simply won’t understand police humor.”

No, Mr. Wyllie. We understand it perfectly.