Hug a thug doesn’t work.
Via WBUR:
The incoming head of an organization representing police officers across Massachusetts has been placed on paid administrative leave in Arlington after he called for officers to meet “violence with violence” and forget about restraint in a series of columns that targeted elected leaders, criminal justice reform and former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.
“I am sick and tired of the social justice warriors telling us how to do our jobs,” Arlington police Lt. Rick Pedrini wrote in one column for the Massachusetts Police Association (MPA) newsletter The Sentinel. “It’s time we forget about ‘restraint’, ‘measured responses’, ‘procedural justice’, ‘de-escalation’, ‘stigma-reduction’, and other feel-good BS that is getting our officers killed. Let’s stop lipsynching, please! Let’s meet violence with violence and get the job done.”
In a statement, Arlington Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine said he was “deeply disturbed” by the contents in the MPA newsletter and said the town and police department would “thoroughly investigate.”
The columns by Pedrini, first reported by MassLive, were published in a 2018 issue of The Sentinel. The issue’s cover featured Yarmouth Sgt. Sean Gannon and Weymouth Sgt. Michael Chesna, two officers killed in the line of duty this year.
The three columns, published back-to-back in the issue, give updates on legislation such as the newly signed criminal justice bill, which Pedrini called “100 plus pages of blather and feel‐good initiatives that will do nothing to put maggot criminals behind bars.” His writing also veers into criticisms of immigration, local leaders and the Black Lives Matter movement. Pedrini calls Chesna’s killer an “animal (that) needs to be put down, but unfortunately this is Massachusetts.”
In an interview Tuesday morning, before the announcement that Pedrini would be placed on leave, Pedrini defended his writing as “a tongue-in-cheek political satire for the membership” of MPA that was never intended for wider consumption.
“It’s an association newsletter,” he said. “It’s not meant to be taken word for word.”