‘No police officer expects to get shot or to shoot somebody’

King County Sheriff John Urquhart says conversations in the wake of this week’s shootings need to happen, but people need to approach them with balance.

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“I think it’s very important that people with a soap box, or a podium – perhaps our elected officials — need to tamp down this anti-police rhetoric,” Urquhart said. “There are almost 900,000 police officers in this country — the vast, vast majority do a fantastic job day in and day out. There are millions of contacts between citizens and police officers that happen each year, and the majority of them turn out just fine and we never hear about them.”

“I want people that want to trash police, call us racist, or whatever they are going to do, to keep that in mind,” he said.

Urquhart stressed that elected officials need to “step up to the plate” and note that police officers perform good work and help people, despite bad cops getting bad press.

“Policing has a long way to go – there’s no question about that,” he said. “We need the trust of the community to do our job. Anybody who wants to divide the community or say things that are divisive, needs to step back and think about what they are doing.”

“No police officer puts on that uniform and expects to either get shot or to shoot somebody – that’s not what we do when we go to work … keep that in mind,” Urquhart. “Let’s have some balance to what is being said.”

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