Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
New York Police Department officers stand during a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York to honor colleagues who died due to COVID-19, October 5, 2020.
Real men, apparently, don’t get shots. Well, OK, I’ll concede that before they’re sent into harm’s way, the Marines and Special Forces become human dartboards, shot full of multiple serums to ward off the viruses and infections that could befall them in distant climes. But the cops? The firefighters? The EMTs? For tough guys like them, that’s sissy stuff. Elitist stuff. Democratic Party stuff. PC stuff. No friggin’ way.
As local governments struggle to protect their frontline workers and the public those workers routinely encounter, it’s the public-safety employees who’ve been most resistant to public safety. In New York, for instance, 74 percent of city residents have been fully vaccinated, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post, while only 62 percent of police department workers have braved the needles.
It’s not as if cops are magically immune to COVID. On the contrary: According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 182 police officers succumbed to the virus last year, which is more than the combined total of those who died by gun violence or vehicle crashes. So far this year, the total is 133.
Cops, firefighters, and EMTs are mainly working-class men, prey to the same distempers that are disproportionately pushing that cohort into an enraged right-wing fantasyland. Some of that can be ascribed to bigotry, some to a sense of displacement in a new economy where manual labor matters less and less, some to the partial overthrow of traditional hierarchies in which their place on the social totem pole was higher than it is now. Some can also be ascribed to the wraparound world of far-right media, both traditional and social, which tells them that they’re under assault from liberal overlords and uppity underlings—a sense of assault that police departments warn their cops they’re prey to every waking moment.
There’s always been a number, apparently irreducible, of cops who like to think of themselves as dangerous guys. Today, some of them are just by breathing near you.
