Flag Salute Police Department Presentations: Fill & Download for Free

The widow was given three highly polished empty brass rifle cartridge cases. Expended. Empty of life, but symbolizing Duty, Honor, Country and the honorable service rendered the Nation by the deceased.The blank cartridges actually fired by the firing party during the salute will be policed up after the ceremony has ended and the family has departed.

I'm going to venture a guess that the answer to this question is "probably across the board." Understanding why takes a bit of background.First, every police department is, by definition, a paramilitary organization. It has rank structure, internal specialty assignments, tactical engagement protocols, training structures, and weapons deployment much the same as the military. It's, in many ways, the Armed Forces, turned inside out and sporting starchier uniforms. It's only natural that some of our cues are cribbed from the military.Second, in a police academy, you're going to have a much more diverse entering group than, say, a Marine Corps boot camp. In my academy we had a former jailer from a county jail, a former Marine MP, a philosophy major, an Army CBRN specialist, a college admissions counselor, a Spanish language major, a mechanic, and then myself, then an itinerant preacher - and most things in between. You might have a 21 year old with minimal college and no 'real world' experience; you might have a guy in his late forties or early fifties in the midst of a career change.Out of this dizzying array of people, you must form a cohesive group that instinctively puts the idea of 'us' well before the idea of 'me.' This was accomplished in a number of ways:We formed into squads early on and chose squad leaders; most tasks were assigned by squad, with the squad leader responsible for making delegation decisions within his or her squad.We had a class guidon, much like a military unit might have, that was to be attended to and protected at all costs. If we went anywhere - from touring an administrative building to running during PT - the guidon went with us. If it was ever left unattended, it was most likely going to disappear, only to be returned after traversing the grim plains of Hell. There was a (possibly apocryphal, not that we wanted to test it) story about a recruit who spaced out and slammed the guidon staff into a street sign during a run, incurring an insane number of pushups for the class (the most cited number was a thousand).Military-style attention and salute protocols were enforced. When an instructor entered the classroom, the first person who noticed was to loudly bark, "Class!" At that, all conversation was to stop immediately, and every recruit was to come to crisp attention with their arms at their sides and fingers curled at the beltline. We were to remain in this posture until given an "At ease." Outdoors, we were to stop and salute any sworn officer in uniform - even those driving on duty. Early on in my academy, a recruit failed to notice a lieutenant happening by (a grievous offense in our department, where only majors and the Chief of Police outranked them) while talking on their cell phone. This resulted in considerable arm fatigue.Strict adherence to uniform regulations. We didn't have micrometers and compasses taken to us, but the instructors knew what they were looking for, and you by God had better have it. This included brass spacing, even shirt tuck, brass polish, and especially boot polish. Our sergeant told us he wanted to be able to pick his teeth in the reflection off of our toes.Third, this philosophy of oneness is of crucial importance when you get on the street. Once you graduate from the academy, pass field training, and get comfortable in your own skin as an officer, your stress level about protocol goes down considerably - but if you've gotten mutual respect and cooperation between officers ingrained to the point of it being a practical brother- and sisterhood dynamic, this won't be detrimental. An unchecked ego will get you killed on the street. If you don't learn early on that you need the people around you and that they need you, you'll likely get stupid and start putting yourself and your fellow officers in harm's way. Officers with inflated egos make arrests and initiate searches without calling for backup, get in ground fights when they should have used a tool as leverage in the situation, and get lazy on the basics (handcuffing and arrest, building searches, car stops, and so on). They'll get away with it - until they don't. Then they or a comrade will find themselves in an ambulance or will wake up dead.That's the bulk of the point for these training methods. The point of the guidon wasn't the flag - the flag's just fabric. It was honor for shared identity. The point of coming to attention wasn't to give the instructors another power play - it was to instill deference for brass and senior officers. The point of the strength exercise punishments wasn't to wallow in failure, but to provide needed strengthening in the midst of aversion conditioning.I don't think the primary goal was conformance - our individual backgrounds and skill sets were leveraged and celebrated in small ways, even during our academy training. I think the primary goal was rather unity; the idea that I cannot, should not, and need not rely on my strengths alone in order to accomplish a task, and that I can contribute to something much larger than myself without becoming conflated with it. That lesson has served me well, both in my career in law enforcement and in my present capacity as a pastor.

I think Trump is keenly aware of the political agitation and instigation largely manufactured by Social Justice Warriors and from scores of different Community Activist groups from urban centers across the country. To listen these groups of highly radicalized activists you would think it was March 1965 in Selma, Alabama replete with the fire hoses and police dogs being released against a truly oppressed black people. Those days are behind us. That does not mean you’ll not be able to find a collection of racist white people who still hold on to that level of hate, but by the same token the same can be said on the flip side of the coin as-it-were.SJWs and/or Community Activist groups and participants know that only in an environment like Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama 1965 can they have the sort of voice they want to have with the authority they feel they deserve and need to implement the sorts of radical demands they have made and wish to continue making whilst using heavy handed tactics ranging from extortion to literal violence to achieve their goals, letting the ends justify the means.I guess first and foremost is this absurd notion that all the major urban police departments across the country, many of which (if not most) are run by and administered by African American sheriffs and African American locally elected officials are all somehow singing from the same sheet of music in how they can brutalize and terrorize black citizens for shits and giggles. We’ve had several high profile cases where nervous police have overacted to the situation at hand and the behavior of usually young black males that are on the streets were let’s face it folks, nothing good usually happens. I trace the current heightened state of racial disharmony to political activism born out of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida by neighborhood watch George Zimmerman sometime in 2012 (note that the police were not involved in Trayvon’s death). Since then there’s been Tamir Rice (Cleveland), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), Ezell Ford (Los Angeles), Antonio Martin (Berkeley, Missouri), Gil Collar (University of South Alabama) and a couple more I’m sure I’m forgetting all of which are regrettable occurrences that unfortunately can happen in the line of duty.Now just to give all this some perspective here in the United States we’re a country of 323,000,000 people. I named 6 separate incidences the aftermath of which have each caused much controversy and social upheaval. Hell, let’s just add another 14 more episodes. Doing some math that’s .0000000619195 of the population. I’m not “dismissing” these tragic deaths through statistics but will absolutely suggest that the very idea the nation’s police departments are waging some sort of orchestrated police brutality policy against the African American community, knowing the consequences of all the shit that will go down as a result of accidental overuse of force or any myriad of mistakes that can occur in the line of duty while maintaining the peace, law, and order is complete fabrication and a willful distortion of the domestic realities that are mostly present across the nation which bear no resemblance to what the SJWs are shouting people down about.That’s my 2–1/2 cents worth. Thanks for reading it.