California Conservative

Americans have been fed a steady diet of negative comments by the liberal-left establishment regarding Iraq’s military and police forces. Every day someone in congress or in the media makes a comment that denigrates the Iraqi police. I suspect the motive is to turn Americans against the Iraqis as part of the liberal-left’s antiwar strategy.

I’ll be the first to tell you that the Iraqi police officers, with a few exceptions, aren’t ready to go it alone. But that doesn’t mean they deserve to be ridiculed or used by some hack politician in congress to score political points with the antiwar left or the news media (forgive the redundancy). Listening to these critics making their condescending remarks about Iraqi cops leads me to believe that they are ignorant at best, stupid at worst.

The US police advisors who’ve been working to build police forces from scratch have had nothing but praise for these Iraqi cops. Some of those US law enforcement experts who’ve trained Iraqi officers tell me that, considering the rush to train and deploy these cops, they are performing well.

Does any US major city police department — who do not have to fight well-armed insurgents and terrorists on a daily basis — put cops on the street by themselves in a matter of a few months of training? Of course not. In fact, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities require a minimum of six months academy training followed by one year of close supervision when the new probationary officers hit the streets. Not only are these probies supervised by their sergeants and lieutenants, but they are partnered with veteran training officers for their first year on the job.

In addition, for the most part, these newly appointed officers are required to attend specialized training classes at the academy during the course of their early careers. The training may include bombs and explosives, hostage and barricade incidents, unarmed combat techniques, special weapons and tactics, etc. For their first few years on the job, police officers in urban areas of the US live and breathe policing and public safety on a daily basis. (more…)