We
ask an awful lot from police officers. By its nature, their job is to respond.
That means when they are called to a scene, violence has already started or the
threat is imminent. We expect them to resolve the situation peacefully and then
continue to respond to many more calls just like them during the duration of
their shift. Despite all this stress and strain, we make it clear we will not
tolerate any mistakes. When was the last time you were perfect at your job? As
if their work was not difficult enough, anti-cop hate crimes are on the rise.
Every fifty-three hours, a peace officer is fatally killed in this country,
increasingly because they were deliberately targeted.
Mindful
of the statistics, Soledad police officer Thomas Marchese set out to make a
documentary on his off-hours that would tell the human stories of murdered
police officers, but he became part of his film in a way he always feared.
Fortunately, Marchese lived to tell his story as well as that of fellow
officers in Fallen (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in Los Angeles.
In
2009, four Lakewood, WA police officers were ambushed and executed while
filling out paperwork in a coffee shop across the street from the station. One
of the largest man-hunts in law enforcement history was mobilized to capture
the killer, whose friends and family were actively helping him elude capture.
Two years later, three officers were murdered in the Augusta metro area, on
both sides of the Georgia-South Carolina border, in just a few months’ time. These
incidents sound extreme, but they are increasingly commonplace. At the time,
the Lakeland murders was the most lethal attack on law enforcement carried out
by a single killer, but it has since been eclipsed by the 2016 Dallas shooting.
Marchese
chronicles the incidents themselves, as well as the lingering pain shared by
the fallen officers’ loved ones and fellow officers. He makes it clear how much
damage their murders have done to their families, police units, and wider
communities. Yet, MTV News insists Blue Lives don’t matter.
Watching
Fallen will make you very angry that
so many cops make the ultimate sacrifice so frequently, but the media and
popular culture just does not care. However, Marchese wisely manages to minimize
hot button political issues, but for many extremists, the mere act of
humanizing police officers is sinister political act in itself.
