The first time I heard my father say it, I was trailing along behind him, licking an ice cream on a warm summer night in a Glengarry County town not far from our farm.
"Good evening, officer," he said, as we passed a uniformed patrolman. "Lovely evening tonight."
The cop smiled back and said something kind and reassuring, and the lesson was complete.
The rule in our house was clear: the police protect us and deserve our respect.
The heavens would fall on any of us overheard calling them "pigs," the word the hippies were using where the counterculture was flourishing, in places far from Glengarry.
Another popular phrase back then was "police brutality," words my father also regarded with suspicion and hostility. (Remember, there were no iPhone videos back then, just he-said, she-said newspaper stories.)
Just recently, I was walking from the White House to the CBC bureau a few blocks away, and as I passed a uniformed Secret Service officer, the old reflex kicked in: "Good afternoon, officer."
This cop, though, stared straight ahead through his sunglasses, wordless, barely acknowledging the greeting.
Clearly, if he was going to speak, it would be to issue some sort of order. Everything in his stance said I am authority. Move along.
Baltimore's turn
Or at least that's how it seemed to me. I don't mind saying it: America's police now frighten me.
Their power and their impunity frighten me. And I'm a white, 58-year-old middle-class man. I can't imagine what I'd be feeling if I were a black or Latino kid in Baltimore.
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