National Police Association embarrasses itself while going after Furries

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NPA 2020 Year in Review: Attacked by Malicious Media. Twitter Account Infested with Costumed Cop Haters. https://t.co/ZG2gyjRCwL pic.twitter.com/zgtfiyZvvU

— National Police Association (@NatPoliceAssoc) December 29, 2020

In a strange send off to 2020, furries started to bring attention to the fact that a Twitter account dealing with law enforcement fundraising, the National Police Association, were blocking furry accounts. Unlike when Tony the Tiger did the same, there was some confusion as to why. Perhaps they learned about where the song of horse-dongs being played at a Southwestern protest came from?

It wasn’t too long after that the National Police Association, not understanding that they did have the right to remain silent, responded with an article on their site that is quite embarrassing. Within it they made their statement as to their blocking methods, and why they were blocking naughty furries, insinuating the furry fandom are composed of “costumed cop haters”.

It must be noted that this tweet has been locked to comment. This leads one to wonder which nation the National Police Association represents, because it certainly isn’t an American value to lock the ability for the public to speak. Luckily, on the internet, there are other avenues for words to be spoken, thanks to the furries that allegedly run it, of course.

So here we are, hold onto your butts.

A fear fetish fundraising fiasco?

Before they were known for blocking fuzzies, the National Police Association made news when those in law enforcement had to indicate that the Association was not actually associated with law enforcement and were instead an independent body that raised funding of their own fruition. One police chief went so far as to believe that it was a scam according to the Indianapolis Star. An article that the Association would later accuse of being defamatory in their furry article.

According the the piece, the messaging that the National Police Association sent to its recipients was so laced with fear mongering that it appeared to the actual police that it was an organization taking advantage of the vulnerable within their own communities. In turn, the mailers they used to try and acquire money for cops ended up causing cops to expend time and resources investigating the mailers. I guess this would make one ask: with fundraising like this, who needs expenditures?

In their haste to defend themselves from those accusations of being called a scam organization, the furry article by the Nation Police Association shares multiple redaction letters from several law enforcement institutions. However, what it failed to understand is that the final sentences in each of these letters and statements where the police organization confirms that the National Police Association is recognized by the IRS as a non-profit, they also damningly indicate that their law enforcement organizations, who are insinuated to be the beneficiaries of the NPA's fundraising efforts, never see a dime of that money:

The Belle Isle Police Department has confirmed that the National Police Association is an official organization. However, the Belle Isle Police Department is not affiliated with the National Police Association and has not received any money from the National Police Association.

The Trenton Police Department does not receive money from [The National Police Association]. Please do your own homework when donating to any charitable cause or organization

Neither Germantown nor its Police Department is affiliated with the National Police Association; and neither Germantown nor its Police Department has ever received any financial support from the National Police Association

The message is quite clear from the above quotes for those that can read subtext: If you do actually want to support the boys in blue, you may want to look elsewhere. The irony is that the National Police Association takes these statements and displays them as some sort of victory on their behalf. Congratulations! The cops are saying you don’t provide monetary support to them while looking as if you collect money for their benefit.

The Association may be upset that in some law enforcement officers’ opinions that they consider the Association quite scummy and scammy, but that opinion is based upon the facts and evidence that the Association themselves have provided in their article targeting the furries. That they don’t offer financial support to the practice of law enforcement in at least three of areas they attempted to raise funds in.

I mean if furries such as myself really hated cops, why would we inform our readership and the world at large of this vulturism behavior in the guise of altruism? We’d tell cop supporters to go ahead and blow their wad on an organization that cheerleads for cops but, according to these statements from the cops themselves, doesn’t offer any funding back to them with the money they suck out of their denizens.

Associative Properties

So the truth is that the Association isn’t even directly tied with law enforcement. Or in a way, they are not even ‘associated’ with the police.

At this point you have to wonder if any part of their name is indicative of what they are and that it isn’t one guy running this from his mother’s basement and calling it an ‘association’. I mean, going around the internet and finding articles written by journalists about law enforcement dealing with the conflicts in their line of work and reposting them to Twitter doesn’t necessarily take a team. It would explain why their own article targeted at furries ended with an obvious typo at the very end during its jab at the press.

Yet Gannett, the parent company of the Indianapolis Star, has yet to honor our request to delete the false and defamatory article.

Makes on [sic] wonder why Gannett stock has lost most of its value.

I guess it requires having more than one person to make sure that things are copyedited properly. Especially in the concluding sentence that is supposed to be the article's mic-drop moment.

Now before they start accusing me of being a grammar-Nazi, even if they didn’t typo this, it isn’t really all that intelligent of a dig at the press. They insulate that a newspaper’s stock is going down because the Star dared to question their fundraising practices instead of, you know, the actual reason. That being the internet and its impact on the very foundation of the published press’s subscription based business model.

To note I’m being facetious here, according to that Indianapolis Star article, the organization does have multiple people and is headed by an attorney from Indiana. One hopes, should the article be true in this, that said attorney's words in the courtroom are a bit more poignant than they are on his organization's webpage. At the very least the 'admin' who authored this should have probably left the writing to their columnists who do work for lifezette.com, a conservative news website where most of the NBA article writers come from.

And by the way, since this article about the furries is supposed to be the "2020 review" article, maybe a review of some of the items your organization tackled this year would be nice. Maybe thanking those columnist for their time contributing original works to the site? Need I remind people that this furry thing happened last week? Why is this the highlight of their year?

It's no wonder that the IndyStar is questioning where the funds are going. Their year's highlight is apparently rustling the furries jimmies and defending themselves (poorly) from an article published in May 2019. Did they do anything of actual note this year?

Maybe they should resolve to actually do some advocacy for law enforcement in 2021 that is more that just writing articles on the internet and sassing the furries. I'm sure the cops would appreciate it.

In Speaking of “Defamatory”

Don’t you find it strange that an organization that is for the enforcement of the letter of the law would accuse a news organization such as the Indianapolis Star of defamation, yet not take the actions to enforce that belief to the court of law? Given how often this happens in the Internet Age we ought to have a name for it. I’ll put my idea down here, but I’m sure the internet can come up with better

Obtrectatio Ego Opinio -(n.) An accusation of defamation that is not brought forth to a court system and holds no legal basis. The alleged defamation is merely an opinion of the person speaking, usually the target of the report or investigation they note as defamatory, and not based on the legal definition.(Slang shorthand: ‘O-e-O’; pronounced like those chanting monkeys from Oz.)

Given that the Indianapolis Star’s article did not claim that the National Police Association was a fraudulent organization and only reported on a police chief’s belief that it was at the time they were interviewed, this accusation of defamation would probably not hold up in court. But I'm not a lawyer. Since the person who leads the Association is noted to be an attorney they may be well aware of this, but they keep accusing the Indianapolis Star of defamation regardless.

Now to be fair, most people claiming defamation in this manner, and not putting teeth behind it, may not trust the court system to see it the way they do. However, if the National Police Association sees it that way and doesn’t want to take their chances taking Gannett to court over their accusation, I would ask them to pull back and see if they can find an ounce of irony that they don’t trust the courts to see the law as they do while they run a group that (allegedly) supports the police. Whose very job is to toss others before those very courts they do not trust.

And as stated before, the person who heads the organization is (allegedly) an attorney. I mean, you would think they would believe in the courts of all people. If not, then I look forward to the noir story where they are the lead protagonist. Who knows, the story may be of a fraud attorney so upset that law enforcement doesn’t take fraud seriously that he turns to a life of defrauding law enforcement through a non-profit they created to look like they are supporting law enforcement. Now that would (allegedly) be a bestseller!

It is this baseless accusation at the work of the press to ensure that fundraising dollars are going where their donners believe they are going, and the tone of their wording in their article about furries that makes me wonder if they actually fear law enforcement rather than endear it. When they make their own defamatory claim that furries want to see police officers dead, it smells of a person who sees police officers as bloodthirsty dogs that need to be given meat to target so that they ignore others they would attack otherwise. That if they kiss up to those with a badge that they may get away with unlawful activity that they may do. What I’m saying is that they’re being very try-hard in their (alleged) support, and when one brown noses that hard you have to wonder if they expect something in return from those they see as having power.

But only God knows what is in their heart, the above is just an opinion. Hopefully it this isn't their operating philosophy of fundraising for societies enforcers, because then fundraising for law enforcement would be no different then ‘fundraising’ for ‘protection’ from an ‘extrajudicial organization’. I’m a kangaroo, or at least play one on the internet, don’t make me get together with other kangaroos and spell it out for you what I’m talking about.

When support is not supportive

If a person sees someone as critical of their positions and stances as equivalent to someone who hates them and wishes to see them dead, that person who makes such a logical leap should have a psychological evaluation. They should not be trusted with a firearm, nor should they maintain the foundations of society in any way shape or form.

Instead of focusing on writing articles that are helpful to law enforcement for their 2020 finale, the National Police Association has instead chosen to make disingenuous assertions about a group of people based upon the actions of a few within it that they interacted with on the internet. In a world like that, is it any wonder where the phrase "cops are bastards” has been catching steam? If law enforcement or the organizations that are (allegedly) assisting them use a binary thought process on groups and organizations, should it be any wonder that those organizations or people that are accused of being unlawful or evil for simply existing come back with a damnation of the entirety of those organizations in return based on the action of a few within it? Maybe ask them to be defunded or have their power in some other way curtailed for the safety of others who may be unwarrantedly targeted by them?

I don’t expect the Nation Police Association to see the hypocrisy in themselves and to back down on it. I don’t expect them to commit themselves to acting better than the organizations they attack. I don’t expect them to walk back the defamation of furries as being costumed cop haters, while out the other side of their tongue lash out at those decrying that cops are bastards. I don’t expect them to apologize to the press for accusing them for being defamatory within an article that commits a far more egregious example of defamation just a few paragraphs prior and in its headline.

Because this is why we have something called a court system. No one organization or person should be the omnibus of the law. Not the President, not the Mayor, not the police, not the judges, and not some fraud attorney from Indiana, but all of those pieces together. Because if we narrow law enforcement down to the few or the one, then that organization or person will end up coloring the law based on their biases. They will decree that someone is a criminal just because they wear an animal costume, practice a particular religion, have consensual intercourse with those of the same sex, or because they were born with a skin pigmentation the lawkeepers don’t like.

So I think the best thing furries can do is to support the judicial process that these people who run these kinds of sites seem to fear so much. The job of the court is to ensure those who are corrupted by believing they are the law are reset in their assumptions. That they will be held to account for criminal actions they commit, as their peers would be. And if not, I guess we’ll just have to hope that there is a God who will sort them out in the end and make up for the flaws of our human institutions.

Not all furries “hate cops”. Some may, but there are those that are just critical of them and want them to do better. Heck there are even furs that believe the police can do no wrong to such a degree that may even make those in the National Police Association blush. The real world is more complex than trying to place whole groups of people into the blessed or damned. There are furries within the law enforcement community, I mean, have you ever watched Pottersville?

A dereliction of duty

Once again, if you’re not capable of seeing those complexities and want to use your platform to put people into a binary of citizen or criminal based on your feelings towards other people of those communities, then perhaps it is for the best that you do not support law enforcement. They are already having enough trouble trying to shake their reputation for systemic biases without your type of ‘assistance’, which only proves all those ‘haters’ correct.

If men like this are the ones raising funding for our law enforcement officials, then all good police officers should ask: “With friends like this, who needs enemies”? Trying to make enemies with furries is against the stated interests and goals of the National Police Association, which is supposed to be building public support of law enforcement, not encouraging distrust as your article does to furs who support our men and women in law enforcement. By pretending you speak for the police when you call furs cop haters.

You don’t speak for the cops, the cops are grown men and women that are capable of speaking for themselves. The actions of good cops speak for themselves and don’t belong to you. How dare you (allegedly) exploit their bravery for your own gain.

In creating that distrust, and acting against the mission statement of the Nation Police Association, the only moral thing that the one who wrote this article can do is resign. You needed to focus on advocacy of the men and women who do their jobs well, not create enemies by making broad and defamatory statements on people who wear animal costumes. Your job was to build bridges, not create walls with your block button, thus resigning your duty of changing the hearts and minds of those who are critical of the very concept of law enforcement and leaving that to another.

Need I remind you that reaching out to the skeptical is what your donors pay you for (allegedly)? Do it and stop wasting their money creating a safe space for yourself. Because the cops who go out on the beat don’t get paid to have one, not by our government and, per their own statements you provided us, certainly not by the National Police Association.

The article you wrote and the blocks you made on Twitter have done irreparable harm to the reputation of those men and women who put their lives on the line every day that you claim to represent. It makes them seem like they are sensitive and scared of people who wear fluffy dog heads.

It’s an embarrassment. And until there is a public resignation of the author, and letter of apology from the NPA with a reaffirmation on what their organization’s purpose is, that embarrassment belongs to the entirety of the National Police Association. For if the National Police Association can’t enforce their own organization’s mission statement, then how can we expect them to be of any help to those that are supposed to enforce the laws of our entire country?