Cooper: Wallen, police stand in the gap

They'll be sculpting a new name on the Law Enforcement Memorial on Market Street this year and will be honoring the officer behind that name at the annual Law Enforcement Memorial Ceremony on Tuesday.

He died last year and not in a hail of bullets, from a domestic dispute he was investigating, or by a desperate felon on the run.

But James Marvin "Jimmy" Wallen Jr. was no less a hero than any of the other names on the memorial created so lovingly by sculptor Cessna Decosimo.

The Hamilton County Parks ranger died last October, but he may have suffered for his profession longer and more cruelly than those who are killed instantly.

Wallen and his partner were pulling onto Amnicola Highway from the Tennessee Riverpark in 1989 when their patrol car was hit by another vehicle. Emergency personnel resuscitated Wallen at the scene, but he suffered from a traumatic brain injury and remained in nursing care for 26 years until dying from complications of his original injury.

He had resided at The Health Center at Standifer Place for 21 years before his death.

Wallen, who was 54 when he passed away, was a graduate of the Chattanooga Police Academy and was the son of a firefighter and emergency medical technician, James Marvin Wallen Sr., who preceded him in death.

A love of public service evidently ran in the family.

Instead of praise, though, police across the country have shamefully received undue criticism in the last year and a half-plus since a white officer afraid for his life killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.

Since then, police as a whole have been spat upon, falsely accused and even blamed for the woes of pockets of communities unable to rein in their own irresponsible behavior.

Local Nation of Islam leader Kevin Muhammad, in his "People's State of the City" harangue to the Chattanooga City Council earlier this week, said police are to the city's black community what "the occupying armies of America are to the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya."

However, the Islamic State forces - not America - are the occupiers in Iraq, the Taliban occupiers in parts of Afghanistan and the Islamic State occupiers in parts of Libya. Indeed, the U.S. has very little presence in Iraq, a diminishing presence in Afghanistan and almost no presence in Libya, but the speaker was not afraid to let facts get in the way of colorful rhetoric.

Yet, every day, members of police departments leave their homes never knowing if they will see their wives, children or family members again. In a shattering home, in a dark foot chase or in a speeding car, their lives are on the line.

Since the country's first recorded police death in 1791, more than 20,000 law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund website. In the last 10 years, 1,439 have fallen, equaling one every 61 hours.

Locally, Donald Bond, Julie Jacks and Tim Chapin - before Wallen - were the most recent to perish while doing their jobs. In all, 32 officers in Chattanooga and Hamilton County, according to the Tennessee Officer Down Memorial Page, have died in the line of duty.

Of course, as in every profession, some members of law enforcement make mistakes and some commit crimes themselves. But it makes no sense to continually indict the profession itself over the actions of a few or to suggest, as has been done recently, that the solution is to eliminate police.

Police as a whole only want to make the city safer and, as Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond said on a WGOW radio interview Friday, increasingly have more and better tools with which to do so.

A ballistics research package approved by the City Council this week and making policing and crime data more transparent, as a spokesman for Chattanooga's force said it was preparing to do this week, are just two of those tools.

Tuesday at the memorial on Market Street, then, should be seen as an occasion not only to honor Wallen for his service - as an officer and then as a 26-year "wound" survivor - but also to thank all police for the service they provide, for the lives they sacrifice and for the countless ways in which they protect, stand in the gap and make a community safer - sometimes in spite of itself.