Schmitz and Schott did their job 8.17.01

Well it has been one infuriating week in Council Bluffs, my hometown. I know how frustrating it can be for the good people of Council Bluffs to see and hear news reports that deal with them, talk about them, sit in judgment of them and insult their integrity and intelligence. It is especially frustrating because we really have no way to answer charges except through the very same Omaha media that insult us so unless we have a very newsworthy press conference to offer, we can forget about voicing a response.
I grew up on a steady diet of this nonsense, news reports from the other side of the river casting stones and aspersions the size of houses over here as if they were no more hurtful than stray bullets from the Omaha Police Department firing range.
We have suffered year and after year of insults from Hal Daub, cracks from co-workers about "the blue plate special," Iowa jokes that are about as funny and original as the "Polack" jokes they were stolen from.
We have had to put up with newspaper stories written with bile, bitterness and bias that would kill a donkey. Stories describing our hamlet as "a gritty city," insinuating that we are somehow people of a lesser quality than our brethren across the river.
We have suffered the slings and arrows of low brow humorists, ignorant comedians, pitiful Omaha mayors and perhaps the the lowest of all media life forms - morning zoo DJs, people who have as little talent as they do awareness that being number in this market is about as impressive as being voted most likely to succeed by all the other guys on cell block C.
And then we have the Santos shooting. An unfortunate event for which we must all say up front so no one thinks us cruel, hateful, bigoted or disrespectful, "Our sympathy to the family. Lo ciento mucho. We are sorry for your loss." And I am.
While I was sitting in that press conference at El Alamo restaurant watching the family have their misery paraded in front of all those reporters, I had a hard time maintaining my composure let alone my professionalism. I do not apologize for that. I have a great deal of sympathy and compassion for anyone who loses someone they love. So with that in mind, I would encourage any and all members of the Santos family to not read this column. Because while it might deal with this situation, it is in no way meant to add to your pain, but sometimes we must discuss these painful issues loudly and publicly and we cannot afford to hold back out of respect for the dead or out of pity for their families. Such is public discourse.
Losing someone you love to violence must be confusing. You are angry and you don't know what to do with your anger. You look for answers, "why did this happen?"
Finding someone to blame is the next best thing and if we all had a man like Ben Salazar of Nuestro Mundo, Omaha's Latino activist newspaper, behind us when tragedy struck, I am sure we would all have found someone in Council Bluffs to blame.
One easily gets the sense that Salazar is doing his best to help the Santos family or at least help them see things his way. Most of them don't speak English, so someone has to convince them the Council Bluffs police are racists in spite of notions to the contrary.
Alberto Gonzalez, a South Omaha Latino who works with gangs to try and stop the violence in that section of the city, became a kind of hero to me during that news conference when he spoke up and asked Salazar when members of the Latino community were going to start taking responsibility for their actions.
He struck me as a wise man who knows that often in these situations, it is the difficult middle ground where truth can be found. Only hatred and division lie in the extreme allegations that have been flying at the CBPD. Accusations that fly at all of us, fellow citizens, make no mistake of that.
The CBPD cannot be a bunch of uneducated, undertrained, frightened bigots without all of us joining them up on that cross. And it is a cross. Schmitz and Schott are being hung up to be crucified to die for our imagined sins by the Omaha media whose first questions in these situations always sound more like accusations than queries. "Did this happen because the Council Bluffs police are poorly trained or because they are bigots?"
It would no more occur to our friends in Omaha that we are every bit their equals than it would dawn on them that in most significant ways, our state is superior to theirs in terms of wealth, population and education. The fact that Omaha is bigger than Council Bluffs changes nothing. We have twice the people, a longer history and enough farm power to feed the world and we don't have to answer to those people.
Council Bluffs business men made Omaha so they could continue to operate in a lawless territory and not that much has changed. These are the same people who brought the world Charles Starkweather after all.
Which brings me to the man of the hour or should I say buck-passing soccer organizer who obviously does not see his responsibility for this mess, Maurice Alvarez. Maurice is the vice-president of the soccer league that came over to our pastoral city with a couple thousand fans in tow and did nothing to organize security for the event. He admitted having foreknowledge of the potential for great violence when he was trying to shift blame to Lyle Chase, recreation superintendent of Council Bluffs Parks and Recreation Department.
This kid has the unmitigated gall to stand up in front of God and everyone at this press conference, right next to the family of Mr. Santos and point the finger at everyone but himself.
He claims he told Chase there could be violence and asked if they could get a couple cops out there. For the benefit of the media, it was made to sound like full disclosure followed by a blatant disregard for life based on an obvious, if completely unprovable, bigotry against Latinos.
Even if Alvarez had disclosed everything he suspected to Chase, it isn't Lyle Chase's job to stop Omaha gang violence at soccer games, though I suspect he would have done so by canceling the game, an outcome I doubt Alvarez would have tempted with full disclosure of fact.
Alvarez, you should have called the cops ahead of time yourself, instead of waiting to call the cops at the last minute once the violence imminent. You should have hired off-duty officers to work your game. Why would you come over here and expect the cops to be able to handle a crowd that large with any notice?
We have eight cops on duty at any given time for the entire city. That is not a bad thing, far from it. That is plenty of cops to handle day-to-day operations in Council Bluffs. They are not required by the citizens they serve and protect, Council Bluffs residents, to handle Omaha gang problems.
The Latino population of Council Bluffs has no problem with THEIR police, I know because I've asked them. I didn't ASSUME racism and neither should the Omaha Latino community or the Omaha media.
Every blurry detail Alvarez told and/or retold, involved him telling somebody else that he was not going to be responsible for what he suspected might happen. He knew people had weapons. He saw a man with a gun at halftime. He told the coaches at halftime if they continued with the game even though he thought a major brouhaha was about to unfold that he would not be responsible.
Well, I've got news for you, Mr. Alvarez, you don't get to choose not to be responsible any more than Dana Schott or Dale Schmitz got to choose.
While I'm going on about the police, I want to be clear about something. I am not a great fan of the police. I've had one or two mess with me when I was in high school because they thought they could get away with it, a story I will tell at another time.
I do not support everything they do unconditionally. I do not worship them from afar. I am not a hard-core advocate of total, clamp-down-style law and order.
I find most cops arrogant, standoffish and prone to at least casual fascism. Too many cops for my liking tend to don crew cuts, black gloves, jack boots and mirror shades. Most of them prefer to emulate Judge Dredd than Officer Friendly and I think that is a great shame.
I don't apologize for my impressions of their profession any more than they apologize for disliking my profession. It isn't personal and we both find individuals of merit on both sides.
So do not mistake my support of the police in this issue as unconditional love because it isn't and if I thought they were wrong, I would rail about that.
All the facts are not in just yet, but one thing is clear to me, Officer Schmitz and Officer Schott were doing their jobs under difficult circumstances. Santos could have been a saint in his daily life, but he fired a gun in a public place, he left them with no choice but to shoot him. Speculation about warning him to drop the gun or just shooting him in the shoulder after he fired his revolver is the kind of ludicrous theorizing that falls under the weight of its own ridiculousness.
Firing weapons in crowds is no more acceptable in Council Bluffs than it is in Omaha or the rest of the United States. Our officers are well-trained at the state academy, they aren't farmers who strap on squirrel guns part-time for kicks and they deserve our support in this issue.
They did what was required under the law. They were put in a situation they shouldn't have had to face if it had not been for the completely irresponsible actions of Maurice Alvarez.
We need to stop taking shots from across the river and start firing back. We need to stop rolling over and playing the beat dog and start biting the hand that insults every time an Omaha reporter, TV news anchor or FoxSports "personality" decides to take their shots at "Counciltucky."
The days of our taking it lying down are over and the days or our standing up like great, proud Iowans we are descended from are just beginning.