I watched the bodycam footage.
The Durango Police Department posted it on Facebook (see https://tinyurl.com/48jz8nwk) after Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center accused one of their officers of colluding with ICE – something the department insists isn’t true. By Friday morning, the video had over 31,000 views.
I can totally see how that slap on the shoulder seemed chummy. A little too chummy. But I can also see how it was merely common professional comradery among law enforcement officers, a bond shared by those in a similar trade. (And no, the irony of referring to ICE as law enforcement when so much of what they do is unconstitutional is not lost on me.)
Chief Current was willing to take my call on Thursday – and I’m no more than a concerned citizen. Here in Durango, we are fortunate to have that level of access to the officers we entrust with public safety. That’s the system working.
But that doesn’t erase the larger reality: Across the country, the federal government is depriving people of their constitutional rights and losing them in what are effectively domestic gulags – when they’re not shipping them off to foreign ones.
It doesn’t change the fact that there are masked men in our streets, lurking around our schools, bashing in car windows with sledgehammers.
I can only hope that if things escalate even further, if the brownshirts start coming for the brown people, that we can rely on our boys in blue to stand in their way.
Chris Cottrell
Durango
