Sow The Wind…

Two Iowa police officers were found fatally shot in their squad vehicles at separate intersections near Des Moines early Wednesday, and police are urgently hunting for whoever killed them.

“There is a clear and present danger to police officers right now,” an emotional Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek told reporters.

Police began discovering the killings around 1:05 a.m., when someone reported shots being fired. Responding officers found the body of an Urbandale police officer, still seated in his squad car, at an Urbandale intersection just northwest of Des Moines, Parizek said.

Twenty minutes later, as officers were responding to the Urbandale shooting, an officer found a Des Moines police officer shot at an intersection in Des Moines, about 2 miles southeast of the first scene.

That wounded officer — who, like the Urbandale officer, was seated in his vehicle — later died at a hospital, Parizek said.

“On the surface right now … it doesn’t look like there was any interaction between these officers and whoever the coward is that shot them while they sat in their cars,” Parizek said, holding back tears.

“In all appearances it looks … that these officers were ambushed,”

No suspects have been named.

“There is clearly danger if you’re a police officer. These guys were gunned down sitting in their car, doing nothing wrong. So, there’s definitely some danger out there. There’s somebody out there shooting police officers. We hope we find him before anybody else gets hurt.”

The officers’ names weren’t released.

No one who has any humanity condones harming any human being who hasn’t attacked them first.

But that’s the problem that we dare not discuss.

We have a law enforcement problem.

Armed men (and women) who are not keeping the peace but instead enforcing laws. That is, using violence to compel obedience to the government’s authoritarian dictates.

Few reasonable people have any issue with keeping the peace. But many people – reasonable people – have had it with buzzcut, mirrored-sunglass heavily armed government workers hassling them – threatening them – when they have done nothing whatsoever to breach the peace, much less harm anyone by their actions.

Who have merely committed some arbitrary “violation” – of which there are entirely too many.

The situation is explosive – and tragic because entirely unnecessary. Return to keeping the peace – that is to say, leaving people innocent of having hurt anyone in peace – and we will have peace again.

Go after those who hurt other people: Murderers, thieves, thugs. But stop being thugs.

Do that – and this manufactured problem of their own creation dissipates like the morning fog.