Metropolitan Police Department: Chief Ramsey Welcomes 22 New Officers to the MPDC

First, let me wish the members of Class 2000-4 and their families and loved ones a very happy holiday season. This is a time of year when most of us take a moment to stop and count our blessings—the blessings of family and friends and the love and support they provide us, the blessings of happiness and good health, the blessings of work—in your cases, the blessing of not just a new job, but a new, exciting and rewarding career. But this year, as we think about our blessings, let us not forget one other blessing that all of us enjoy. And that is the blessing of democracy.

As you well know, our nation has just been through one of the closest, most hotly contested Presidential elections in our history. And whether you happened to support the winning candidate or not, all of us are the beneficiaries of one important victory: the victory of democracy and the rule of law. In many countries around the globe, an election this close and this controversial easily could have resulted in mass protests and unilateral government intervention. That our nation worked through this election contest peacefully, according to the rule of law, is truly a testament to the strength of our people and our democracy.

No one works harder—day in and day out—to protect our democratic rights and freedoms than our police officers. And nowhere is this unique role of the police more obvious, more public and more critical than right here, in our Nation’s Capital.

As a member of this profession and this Department, each of you has taken an oath to "serve and protect the public. But just what are we sworn to protect as police officers? Our oath certainly requires that we work to protect individuals’ lives and property. That is clearly a core part of our mission. But our oath demands much more of us. Our oath as police officers also compels us to do everything in our power to protect the very freedoms that all of us enjoy as Americans—freedoms which we remember and celebrate this holiday season, the freedoms of speech, of religion, of assembly, of petitioning our government, of being secure in our homes and our beliefs.

In many ways, it is these bedrock freedoms that define us as Americans—that set us apart from so many other people on this planet. And now, beginning today, each of you takes on the unique and truly awesome role of protecting and safeguarding those freedoms for the people of this, our Nation’s Capital.

During your training, each of you spent a day at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This is a one-day course that I began requiring for all new recruits in our Department—and now, for veteran officers as well, as part of their in-service training. The purpose of this course is to remind you—to remind all of us—hat, in a free and democratic society, the police do indeed play a critical role in safeguarding individual rights and liberties.

In Nazi Germany, we saw the terrible atrocities that took place when not only the police, but also doctors, lawyers and other service professionals, abandoned their traditional roles as defenders of freedom and protectors of individual rights. The vast majority of the police officers in the Weimar Republic that preceded Hitler’s Germany probably took an oath—a pledge—similar to the one you will take in a few moments, when I swear you in. But between the time they took that oath and the height of the Nazi atrocities in the early 1940s, something went terribly, terribly wrong. And not just individual police officers, but the policing profession as a whole in Germany, turned its back on the very ideals and principles and values that define all police officers, serving the public, and protecting their lives, property and human rights.