Page 41 - February 2017

Book It
Sheriff David Clarke is coming to FOP 7 to sign his new book that will inspire all Chicago Police Officers
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
Back in the 1970s, age-appropriate behavior in and around the American ghetto included flashing the Black Power salute at passing law enforcement. Back in the 1970s, before really thinking about the road that led him to become Sheriff David Clarke Jr., teenager David Clarke thrust his fist skyward as a patrol car passed him and a group of friends standing in front of his house.
Many of the contemporaries in his Milwaukee neigh- borhood might have asserted the same fist pump. But with his ex-military father in the house, Clarke started sweating when what he called his “dumb-kid gesture” caused the officers to stop.
“I thought I was in big trouble and not just with the police,” Clarke confides on the eve of the release of his new book, Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race, Crime & Politics for a Better America.
“My dad had that high military discipline, and he ex- pected that of me. He always told me, ‘If the police ever bring you home, you are going to wish they brought you to jail instead. But my dad used this occasion as a learn- ing experience.’”
Cop Under Fire can be the same type of learning expe- rience for those who have forgotten–or never learned– how respect for law and order and law enforcement of- ficers can be the ticket to a better America. From the
41 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ FEBRUARY 2017
TV studios of FOX News, the stages of the Republican National Convention and hundreds of public address- es and presentations, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke brings a guidebook for police officers to think about how they can better reinforce and re-establish the law- fulness they are charged with promoting and protecting and that their communities so much need...and want.
“The fact that I give people my views unvarnished – here’s what I experienced; here’s what worked for me; here’s what might work for America – is part of why I wanted to write this book,” Sheriff Clarke explains. “I wanted to spark conversation. I don’t want people to be reading it and be nodding their heads. When you start conversation, you can get people to think, and that’s what I believe books should do. That way effective di-