It’s late, so be warned — earnest posting ahead.

I got into an online conversation about The Moats Incident overnight with some cops on a police discussion forum. Some members were defending Officer Robert Powell while a few condemned him. (Note: not all members are cops, and it’s not an official DPD web site.)

This is what I ended up saying, with a few line edits here since the original I wrote from my iPhone.

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Officer Douchebag

I don’t think Officer Robert Powell would want to be treated like he treated Ryan Moats.

I don’t think anyone here would want a family member treated like that. Imagine you’re critically injured on duty, and a family member is rushing to your side, distraught enough not to think to tell the officer who stops him that the relative he’s rushing to see is a dying cop.

By the way, in this hypothetical, if the relative did have the presence of mind to tell the officer his brother is a mortally wounded cop, most here would put him in their unit and break land speed records to get that relative to a dying fellow cop’s hospital bed. Or in this case rush him into the hospital, sparing him lectures about attitude and red lights at empty intersections in the middle of the night. Tell me otherwise. I dare you.

Now remember that not everyone’s relative is a cop, but they love them just as much as any cop’s relative, and they deserve the same treatment and consideration as any other human being. Citizen or cop, that’s what we all are.

Moats didn’t endanger any lives, didn’t drive like a maniac, and he didn’t do anything more than act like anyone else here would with a dying relative. He’s not in this for a payday, and he didn’t even file a complaint. All he did was get in the sights of a greenhorn on a power trip, whose piss poor judgment now has people blaming all of DPD for his own actions. That public perception — unfair though it is — isn’t helped by the knee jerk closing of ranks among some officers here sticking up for him, bad mouthing the Plano officer, griping about dash cams (which exonerate officers far more often than they condemn them) and making up [expletive] about Moats’ actions that night.

Kudos to those officers here brave enough to call Powell out for what he is, by the way.

“My tribe first” has its place, but not when it violates basic decency and justice. You remember justice, right? And the second part of “protect and serve” right? Service, not mastery. Mutual respect, not demands for obedience.

You can blame command, the media, and anything else the victim’s mentality conjures up as a rationalization. But Powell put his own head in the noose that night by acting not like a committed, responsible peace officer, but like a punk control freak out to prove he had a bigger nightstick. Powell screwed himself with his own choices. The public Powell serves — that pays his salary and entrusts him with the most serious and honorable charge of upholding both the law and justice — that public has every right to judge him.

Or are you going to tell me that officers, too, have rejected personal responsibility as a virtue? I don’t believe officers have, and I don’t want to believe it. The kind of men it takes to do that job aren’t cut from that shabby, blame-everyone-else, poor-little-victim-me cloth.

You really want a guy with Powell’s judgment and temperament representing DPD? You really want to reinforce that unfair meme that all cops are louts, brutes, and petty little ticket writers?

Those who stand up for Powell, by cowardly silence endorse him, or by tribal instinct close ranks with him do more disservice to the badge than all the media reports and command press conferences combined.

You lie down with dogs, you’re gonna get up with fleas.

Props to every officer, here and offline, man enough to break ranks and show they know justice and decency, and that expecting slave-like submission from the people they serve is not proper for free men in a just society.

Starting with the Plano officer who refused to let this incident get swept under the rug. That’s the kind of officer who gives police a good name.