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Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I flew back to Washington, DC, from the glorious State of Oklahoma on Monday. It was a normal flight for me to be able to fly in on a Monday morning.

As I landed at DCA airport and squeezed out of my coach seat, where I had been for the last 4 hours, and walked off the plane and into the terminal, there was a line of police officers on both sides of the gate. They were honor guards from all over the country. As I walked off the plane, I realized there was a family member of the fallen on my same plane, and I didn't know it.

Many Americans may not know that this is Police Week. It is a week when the Nation stops to be able to pause to thank all those police officers who served around the country and who literally put their lives on the line every single week for our country--every week.

My colleague Ashley Moody is helping to cohost this time as we have a conversation about Police Week and what it means to be in law enforcement in America now. She is not only a great Senator from Florida, but she is also the wife of the deputy police chief of the Plant City Police Department in Florida. She knows what it means to be able to hug a loved one, look them in the eye, and say: Stay safe out there. She knows exactly what that means.

As I stepped off the plane on Monday and walked through the middle of that honor guard, as they were looking for a family member to step off somewhere on that plane, what they were looking for this week was the family of a fallen police officer to step off that same plane, whom they were going to escort into Washington, DC, because, this week, their loved one's name is being added to the list of law enforcement who have died in the line of duty.

It is a painful reminder of the reality of what it means to be in law enforcement. You get up every day, and you take care of your neighbors. Some days, you are pulling over a reckless driver and trying to be able to protect the rest of the community from someone who has had too much alcohol, smoked too much marijuana. By the way, I think any is too much, but that is a different conversation for a different day. For that person, they are going to try to protect the rest of society from their dangerous acts.

It is that moment when we are in traffic, we are driving down the road, and a car whips around us at 90 miles an hour. We are used to traffic, and we think: I wish there was a police officer here to take care of that.

They are out there. Some of them are going to get up this morning very early and do a warrant service on someone who has violated the law, whom they are going to be able to actually get to their house maybe at 3 in the morning and to try to be able to arrest them before there is an incident.

There are some of them who, actually, when there is a shot being fired in an apartment complex somewhere, and as everybody else scatters, they turn on their lights and drive toward the sound.

They are law enforcement. That is what they do. They get up every day, and they put on a vest to be able to protect the center of their body because they know, at any point during the course of the day, they could be facing danger coming right at them. They serve their community.

It is always interesting to me when I often ask people their thoughts and beliefs about law enforcement. I say: The real test of what you think about police is when you are driving down the highway, you look in your rearview mirror, and you see an officer right behind you. That is always the test of what you actually think about police. It is that first emotion. Is that first emotion, ``Oh, no''? Or is that first emotion, ``I feel safer; there is a police officer right behind me''?

You see, those law enforcement officers literally spend every day protecting total strangers who live in their community. They work very long hours, a lot of times in isolation. They go into dangerous places--often, first by themselves--because they care about their community.

In the past decade, there seems to have been a shift in attitudes about law enforcement. For some reason, it has become trendy to be able to attack law enforcement, to belittle them, to demand we defund police departments entirely, to be able to criticize them for every sort of thing.

I will tell you, every police officer I talk to will say: Hey, we are all humans too. We make mistakes, as well, just like everyone else.

But for some reason, law enforcement doesn't seem to get the same grace everybody else gets.

When somebody gets pulled over and gets a warning, they are grateful for the grace. But when the news hits of a police officer doing something, it seems the community doesn't want to give them a warning. It wants them to always get consequences.

What I hear from most law enforcement whom I know is: Hey, we are just one of everybody else, but the difference is we have dedicated our lives to protecting people who will cuss us out and will literally lie to us all day long. But we are still committed to protect them.

That is what they do. They literally get into a dangerous situation, as has happened recently in Oklahoma. There could have been shots coming at them or an attack coming at them, but, instead, that person turned the weapon on themselves. And law enforcement immediately moved from trying to protect the community and protecting themselves to jumping in immediately and trying to save the life of the person who just started attacking them.

How many people would do that? Law enforcement does it every day-- every day.

There is an old adage in tax policy: If you tax something more, you get less of it. Raise the taxes on it enough, and people just stop buying it.

You know, it works exactly the same with criticism. If you criticize something more and more and more, you get less and less and less of it.

I remember a day, when I was growing up, that everybody wanted to be a police officer because everyone had respect for police officers. Now there is a generation growing up that all they have heard is criticism of law enforcement. And do you know what? It is hurting recruiting.

Why don't we look people in the eye and see them for who they are? They are folks who get up every day, defend their neighbors, do what they can to bring calm to a crazy, chaotic situation, and serve total strangers.

I have had the benefit of my dad being a smalltown cop for decades. I know what it is like to be in a family and to be able to think about: How is your family member doing today?

So when I talk about law enforcement, maybe, it is a little different for me. But I think it should be a little different for our whole community, actually, and I think it should be different for our Nation.

So on this Police Week, I have two things to say: Thank you to those who are serving all over the country right now, some right here in this Capitol. Thank you to those folks who are serving our Nation today. We are exceptionally grateful for you.

And for those of you who, this year, have lost a loved one in the line of duty, I want you to know that our Nation is grateful. We see their sacrifice, and we are of the tribe to be able to say: We want this to be different.

In 2020, Sergeant Johnson--Craig Johnson--I am going to say his whole name. Sergeant Craig Johnson in 2020 was shot during a traffic stop in Tulsa. He was 45 years old. He had a wife, Kristi, and two sons, Connor and Clinton.

When Sergeant Johnson's killer was sentenced in 2022, his wife Kristi just had one clear thing to say. She said:

My request at this time is that the silent majority that I have seen and heard from starts speaking up and changing the anti-police culture being created.

Kristi, we still hear you, 3 years later, and we are still grateful for the sacrifice you and your family have made and for other families like yours. We are not silent. We are grateful.

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