Columnists

About three weeks ago a group of us were having a Friday dinner when we heard police car sirens passing by over and over again. A little while later we start hearing the chirps and buzzes of messages being delivered to our faithful little electronic tethers to reality. C’mon, on a Friday night?Seems that something was happening at the Britton Middle School carnival right around the corner. Details were kind of sketchy at the time, but apparently someone had a knife and then half the world’s police showed up and things got ugly. Or something like that.More information arrived in the news the next morning—on the radio. Police officers were injured by several minors, eight arrested, one youth tazed, carnival cancelled and $20,000 in fundraising to support classroom related projects lost.Once again, something bad happened in Morgan Hill and the entire Bay Area gets to dwell on it with us. Can’t we get a break?So, we had a student with a knife at a carnival where police intervened, a mob got ugly, some police were assaulted, some young hoodlums went to jail, and the carnival was shut down.Can you find the good in all of this? One of my friends pointed out some things that we, in Morgan Hill, should appreciate. So here I go.First, someone noticed a knife being exchanged between two young males and they called the police, two of which were already on site patrolling the carnival. When approached, the young male with the knife handed it over without incident. No problem.So then the guy who first supplied the knife is approached and wants to tango with the MHPD and a crowd joins in.This is the smart part of dealing with the stupid part.Instead of possibly escalating the issue with the few MHPD officers on site with any number of defensive and offensive weapons at their disposal they reach for their—radios.This is the part I needed made clear to me.The MHPD brought in neighboring law enforcement agencies not to overwhelm the riotous crowd with lethal force, to but to be in large enough numbers to use the least amount of force possible for the situation.But until all of those other agencies showed up, things were getting pretty dicey. This is about the time some other police departments haven’t done so well. You see it on the news with shootings and complete riots.Apparently our officers were very cool in the face of all of this. Whether it’s training or hiring the right personnel, this discipline and cool headedness is now, to me, the face of our police department: cool and level-headed enough to think of calling in greater numbers to avoid violence and then remaining cool until they show up. They were surrounded by a mob and some officers were actually assaulted.With the possibility of someone greatly harming an officer or grabbing a service weapon, there are some who might say that deadly force is appropriate here. I can only imagine that if you’re afraid and freaking out you might turn to the last resort, deadly force, and the courts have in some cases said that it was appropriate. Not in Morgan Hill.Some are hungry for headlines like “Carnival at Middle School Ends with Officers Hurt”.I like “MHPD Diffuses Escalating Situation with Professionalism”.

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Here at the height of the Christmas season, we’ve kicked it into overdrive. Since Thanksgiving, we’ve been decorating and organizing, gift-finding and wrapping, crafting and baking. House lights are up, stockings are hung, Christmas trees sparkle with magic, as if delivered by Santa himself. In the background we envision an appropriate accompaniment to our colossal efforts: the Boston Pops Orchestra’s playing of the “Hallelujah Chorus.”