EDITORIAL: Law enforcement deserves respect for protection, investigation

The sun was beating down on Denmark and the western part of Madison County Monday morning.

The temperature and the humidity were both somewhere in the 90s.

Any work that was going to be done in the cornfields, ballfields, woods or farms in that weather was going to be difficult.

The same could be said for the work that was happening at Savannah Williamson Park on Neeley Station Road.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Office didn’t give any definitive numbers of shell casings they had to work with while doing their investigation after the mass shooting at the park on Sunday night other than to say “a high volume.”

Some social media posts related to the incident estimated more than 100 casings to go through.

But with two dead bodies, a high number of witnesses and a fast-moving caravan of vehicles going to the hospital to transport others who were wounded, there was a lot going on to deal with from the law enforcement/first responder perspective.

Then add to the situation that because of the timing of the shooting - between 10:30 and 11 p.m. - the investigation was happening all night for about 13 hours from 11 p.m. on Sunday until about noon on Monday.

That means many of the investigators were doing their jobs on little sleep if they got any sleep at all.

It’s in times like this that we acknowledge the importance of law enforcement.

When an accused murderer of four people was on the loose nearly a year ago, law enforcement were the ones who signed up to be the hunter part of the word “manhunt” and not rest until the suspect was in custody.

When a mentally ill person is off his or her meds and is having a crisis, they are the ones expected to be able to handle that crisis and always end it with a positive outcome.

When shots are fired at a county park on the edge of the county in one of the more rural parts of the area and many cars are driving away from that park, law enforcement are the ones driving in, assessing injuries and connecting those in need of help with that help.

And then after the injured are cared for, they’re the ones who stick around to figure out what happened, who did it and how they should be charged.

Crime scenes don’t care about how hot it is or how much sleep investigators got the night before.

It’s on the investigators to go out every day, do their job, keep the rest of us safe and also give us a sense of security to believe they’re being effective in their work.

We appreciate law enforcement for the work you do.

Madison County Sheriff’s Office, Jackson Police, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Marshals - we appreciate what you do for us citizens in keeping us safe.

Thank you for signing up to do the job, and thanks to your families for seeing you off to work each day and welcoming you home and giving you a place to get away from what you’ve dealt with during your day at the office.

You deal with things the rest of us will never know about, and we appreciate it.

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