Millard writes,"So what do you do to make sure there is no more intimidation? Call the police? You've got to be kidding."Then he writes," you are not suing the rank-and-file cops, because you know that police departments are mostly made up of good cops with just a few bad ones."
So which one is it?

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Ah, Ms. Ahlf, in my opinion, it's both.

They are not mutually exclusive notions. Now, I don't really know what is going on in the mind of the mayor.  I've only said about a dozen words to him over the years and those were mostly just the usual pleasantries between an ordinary voter (me) and an elected official.

But in my column, in which I ask readers to step into the mayor's shoes to see what they might do under similar circumstances, my imaginary person in those shoes can't know which cops he can trust and which ones he can't.  

This imaginary person also knows that most cops are good and professional and don't play politics in cities where they don't live and can't vote, and just do what professionals always do--put personal feelings aside and focus on their mission.

Good cops don't play politics.  Bad cops, on the other hand, might not, among other things, and just to give another example of the underlying problem, respond timely to a call for service, if the person making the call has different political views. That's not something we want in Costa Mesa. The police should be apolitical and professional.

So, to repeat, while this person in the mayor's shoes likes cops and while he respects law enforcement as a general proposition, in this specific case he's not sure who to trust.  

And, this person comes to his fears about this, not out of irrational paranoia, but from actual events.

He has seen the sign dragged around the city by some cops that attacked him even before he was elected.  He has seen the PI on his street in front of his house after the DUI call.  He has read the early characterizations leaked by anonymous cops to the newspaper that claimed that at the Harbor/405 off ramp DUI checkpoint he was supposedly throwing his weight around--a characterization that was later disproved by the actual audio tape of that event.  He has heard about the stinkeye incident.  He has these and other events in his mind.  So, while he likes cops generally, he has no real choice but to file a lawsuit to put a stop to what he believes may be attempts by a few who want to influence his votes.

That is what my opinion column was about, and that's why there was no internal contradiction.
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