Exceptional Valor a Common Virtue

Please welcome my friend Jared to Bikecopblog. We worked together when he was an exceptional Victim Advocate for our department. Both of his parents are police employees. Several years ago he began his own police career. I was going to write this blog, but read his words this morning and felt they were far better than any I could manage. Used with permission.

Title a variation of the statement "Uncommon valor was a common virtue," Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, USN, Iwo Jima, 1945. 

I have been watching coverage of last night’s massacre, in which multiple media outlets that routinely condemn police officers as a whole have deemed the actions of Las Vegas law enforcement as “exceptional.”

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Last night, Las Vegas police officers prepared for another “day at the office.” Then a man started shooting into a crowd. Their impulses to help others and stop the shooter overrode their impulses to protect themselves. As everyone else fled, they advanced—toward an unknown amount of shooters in unknown positions, to defend the lives and safety of people they had never even met. Most confronted automatic rifles with semi-automatic handguns. Most approached rifle rounds wearing ballistic vests that are unable to stop those rounds. The threat was more than thirty floors up, and they approached from the street. When they located the shooter in his room, the first officers in knew there was a very good chance it was the last room they’d enter alive. And they entered anyway.
This is not exceptional. This is the norm. This is what cops do because it is who we are. The exceptional ones are the ones who will dominate the news and the discourse long after the heroism of these officers fades from our collective memory.
Last night was tragic. But it would have been much more tragic if the men and women in police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances hadn’t done what the vast majority in their professions do all the time: run toward threats, stop them, and address the aftermath with selflessness and professionalism. And tonight they will get ready for “another day at the office” knowing full well it could be a repeat of the last...and that it could be their last as well.
I am devastated by the senseless loss of life last night, but I am proud of the men and women who proved yesterday, as they do every day, that such heroism and courage are decidedly unexceptional among our ranks. They do not require the recognition, but they certainly deserve it.