I come from a law enforcement family. I do not work in law-enforcement personally, but my father, sister and three uncles all do/have.

As you can imagine, this is very personal issue for my family.

Also, as you can imagine when people start talking about defunding the police and all this other craziness, my family members become very defensive and angry. They feel like all of their hard work on the community’s behalf is for naught.

The answer is definitely not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That would be the dumbest possible solution.

However, because they are reasonable people, they will also acknowledge that there are a lot of knuckleheads out there who need to be reeled in. They may not say that publicly, but privately they have said things to me like, “Most of the people I work with are really good cops. However, like every other industry, we do have some goofballs and they make the rest of us look bad.’”

My sister told me last summer that she has not undergone any sort of formal training in 17 years — 17 years! I don’t think the people who fill the ice cream at Dairy Queen go 17 years without some sort of training.

So, I definitely think we need to retrain much of our police force around this country so as to avoid so many of the circumstances that I’ve made the news in recent years. I think training would have resulted in a different outcome in a lot of these cases. I think more training would have caused that woman last week, for example, to not mistake her gun for a taser.

That’s a really dumb mistake with tragic consequences and it’s a consequence of poor training.

And really, she would want the extra training. Now, because she was not properly trained, multiple people’s lives have been ruined – including hers!

My uncle, one of the policeman I referenced earlier, has the best idea for this. He said last year that the solution would be to tie settlements to the pension fund and all this bull**** would end immediately.

That’s coming from a police officer! He did work in internal affairs so his perspective may be skewed a bit. Still, it’s an absolutely fabulous idea.