My grandfather figure and I were discussing how refreshing it would be to hear a pastor or minister use the F word from the pulpit.

Like as in F the…

Child molesters.

Abusers of power.

The ones who misrepresent God.

So on and so forth.

That would be a powerful statement and probably be heresy at the same time.  

It would be nice though.

There was this one time that a 14 year old kid from church wanted to walk home by himself at night from a birthday party to his home in an urban setting.  It would have taken him at least 2 hours to do so.

I was in college at that time and helped out in the youth group, so I knew that this was inappropriate.  When my brother and I tried to stop him, he started to go into the middle of the road daring cars to hit him.

We kept trying to talk him off the road.  At one point, I told him to get the f____ out of the road before he killed himself or someone else.  When he refused and still continued to resist, my brother and I dragged him off the road.

You can guess where this is going.  I got in trouble for using the F word and force.  Didn’t do this for gratitude but that would have been nice.

This incident would come into play decades later when I dealt with disciplinary issues for police officers.  Yes, no doubt there are bad ones – thugs and liars, but the majority are good.  Police discipline is often the ultimate Monday Morning Armchair Quarterback Show – things go south rapidly.  There is no training – classroom or simulation that fully captures this all.  A good portion of the cases I saw were questionable.  The main oversight body for a good chunk of these wasn’t IA but the CCRB – the civilian oversight board.  The general consensus is that it would be better to be judged by IA than the CCRB.  At least the former was a true jury of peers.  I intimately knew how the CCRB investigations were conducted and I can tell you that my daughter could have done a more effective and ethical job than many of their investigators.  The number of leading questions, verbal traps, mischaracterized evidence, etc.  was appalling.  The nickname for the CCRB was the KGB on the Hudson.  One of the top brass called the executive director the C word.  Yes – that one.

My own agency was also an oversight body. Our commissioner who was fired for abusing his authority spent a ton of money on questionable purchases, even a “spy” boat.

I used to joke that I was ready to live on a farm and feed lambs by hand after seeing all this play out.

And maybe a pastor will call them on all this.