The danger of police work

The case of Cincinnati Police Sgt. Bryce Bezdek illustrates the everyday danger of police work.

Bezdek is a traffic officer. He doesn’t do undercover narcotics work or hunt down homicide suspects. His job is generally to keep the highways safe – go after speeders and drunk drivers, enforce the myriad traffic rules, investigate accidents.

But today he lies in critical condition at University Hospital with a head injury suffered Sunday afternoon when a car being pursued by other officers plowed through a blockade he was helping to set up.

One instant he’s out on the interstate doing his job, the next he’s near death.
He probably never saw the faces of the suspects in the speeding car that led police on a seven-mile, high speed chase. They were drug suspects, accused of shooting up heroin in a suburban parking lot. The car fled when officers tried to pull it over in Colerain Township. As it approached Downtown Cincinnati Bezdek and another officer were in the median, deploying “stop sticks” to flatten its tires. Police said the suspect driver, Carmella Duley, smashed into a pickup truck and sent it careening toward the officers. It hit Bezdek with such force that one of his uniform buttons was embedded in the truck’s door frame.

No TV-style glamour, no special effects or headline grabbing crime spree. Just people fleeing the law and a traffic sergeant doing his job to stop them. Our thoughts and prayers are with Sgt. Bezdek and his family.