Another Police Cartoon, Another Editor

There haven't been any new developments in the dispute between editorial cartoonist Ted Rall and the Los Angeles Times-Police Newsletter, but meanwhile, there has been a police union protest against a syndicated cartoon by Milt Priggee in the Florida Times-Union.

And a very different response from the editors of the paper.

A spokesperson for the Jacksonville chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police has criticized the Florida Times-Union for an editorial cartoon that he said is offensive and puts local police officers in danger.
The cartoon by nationally renowned cartoonist Milt Priggee was published last Wednesday, and it compares the arrest of Dylann Roof, who shot nine black church members in a Charleston, South Carolina, sanctuary, to the shooting of a black man who was pulled over for a minor traffic infraction.

The first panel of the cartoon, captioned "To Serve and Protect," portrays a police officer asking Roof if he "would like fries with that'; the second shows two smiling officers, one with a smoking gun, behind a car with a bullet hole in the rear window as the officer with the gun explains, "Mr. Blackie tried to get away, so I had to shoot him."

FOP president Steve Amos is quoted as saying, “It infuriates me. It offends me. There is no truth in the nature of the cartoon at all.” That police officers did indeed bring fast food to Dylann Roof, and other officers did indeed shoot a black man who was driving without a license plate must be a truth invisible to the Jacksonville Fraternal Order of Police.

Without getting into any of the other merits of anybody's arguments, what I appreciate most is the final paragraph of the News4Jax.com article:

[Times Union editor Frank] Denton said editors at the paper would not be issuing an apology to the FOP, because if they did so, they would be apologizing to someone every time they publish an editorial cartoon.