A Police Story | Matt Thornton

Episode 1 of "Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM, & Antifa"

On Tuesday, we introduced a new series by Matt Thornton titled Wokeness, Public Safety, BLM & Antifa. Today we bring you the first episode: A Police Story. You will find the transcription below the video.

Matt Thornton has taught functional martial arts for more than 30 years. He holds a 5th-degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and is the founder of Straight Blast Gym International, training champion MMA fighters and world-class law enforcement instructors. His book, The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World, is hot off the presses.

Episode 1: A Police Story. I had a friend of mine who was just here last weekend who's a retired police officer that worked in various capacities in some of the rougher areas of Chicago, as well as an undercover officer in the motorcycle gangs, and different things throughout the years. He was involved in an undercover operation one time downtown Chicago not that long ago and they were waiting for their informant to show up at this particular location. And they heard gunshots just a block away, multiple gunshots.

So there's a gun battle going on. My friend looked at the other officers he was with and he's like, "Hey, if you guys want to run and jump on that, you know, I can wait here for the guy and you guys can go take care of that." They looked at him and said, "Why? If we go there and we catch him and we shoot him, and we wind up in a conflict, we're going to wind up on CNN and we're going to wind up prosecuted. And if we go there and we don't catch him in the act, but we arrest him, the district attorney is going to let them go. They'll be out on the street no matter what, before we even finished doing our paperwork."

There's the reality of police officers, day after day, going into the worst, most violent areas any city has, putting their life on the line, literally, to arrest people who are hurting innocent people, and then watching those people walk completely free because the district attorney refuses to press charges—not because there's not evidence, but because they're pursuing some form of social justice.

How many times does an officer have to do that before he just says, “There's no point. He's going to be back on the street before I even finish doing my paperwork. He's going to be back out there."

For the justice system to work, everybody has to be involved. The district attorney has to be willing to prosecute. The police officers have to know that the city council and the mayor have their back and will protect them if they're actually doing their job well in the way they should be, if they're doing it correctly. And they have to know that the district attorney is going to press charges and prosecute these people. When that happens, you can very quickly clean up a city and make it safer. We have evidence of this. You can see what happened in New York.

New York in the seventies looked a lot like New York is starting to look now. They did a complete turnaround. And for a while, New York was one of the safest big cities on planet Earth. And I was there during that time. I was walking around at 3 a.m. with my wife and I felt perfectly safe. It's not like that anymore. And for it to be like that again, we'll have to do what they did, which is prosecute, put lots more officers on the street, stop the bad guys, prosecute the bad guys, get them locked away because it's the same violent people committing the same crimes over and over again. And that's what has to happen. That's not happening now. Everybody has to be involved. The police officers can't do that part by themselves.