So this happened

and I'm not quite sure what to make of it

On Tuesday, November 22nd I dropped off a deer for processing at the butcher. Just another day. Of course the deer must be tagged, or the processor will not accept delivery. Twelve days later, on a Sunday, at noon, I’m visited by 2 of the 219 Conservation Officers in the state. Of course each shows up in a truck that I could not have afforded even in my highest earning years. The DNR’s Law Enforcement budget is $44,784,100, or $204,493 per Officer in the field, so I suppose that stands to reason; our tax dollars at work. These 219 officers (as of 2019) cover 83 counties, or 2.64 officers per county, on average. As of 2021 Van Buren county was home to 0.75% of Michigan’s population, so if Conservation Officers are distributed by population (which I’m not saying they are), Van Buren county would be home to 1.64 Conservation Officers, which I’ll round up to 2. And they’re both on my doorstep.

Fully kitted-up in body armor with sidearms, I’m guessing each of these guys is wearing a couple thousand dollars worth of gear. Ready to stroll through Ramadi, Iraq, with the addition of long guns and night vision, equipment which you can be reasonably certain is in those trucks.

A brief aside if you will. You think I might be overstating the extent to which law enforcement officers are equipped for battle? Well, According to the ACLU:

The federal government arms local police forces in the United States with weapons of war. A program called “1033,” for the section of the act that created it, allows the Department of Defense to give state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies military hardware. Since its inception in 1996, nearly 10,000 jurisdictions have received more than $7 billion of equipment. This includes combat vehicles, rifles, military helmets, and misleadingly named “non-” or less-lethal weapons…

Just sayin’. Meanwhile the powers that be want to disarm We the People. And in a prisoner exchange we are trading a basketball player for an arms dealer. You can’t make this stuff up, seriously. But I digressed.

Stated intention of the unannounced Sunday visit: to educate me on the need to complete Michigan’s “mandatory deer harvest reporting.” Ya think somebody could have picked up a phone, sent an email, put a reminder in the snail-mail, or even sent up a smoke signal? Nah, that’d be too easy. Cost effectiveness is not a part of the calculus when it comes to government. And what was I taught about the “need” for mandatory deer harvest reporting? Nothing; zip, zilch, nada. Maybe it was all of those nastygrams I sent our governor during Covid. Hmmmm.

So there we are, I in my bathrobe, they in their battle gear, for my “education.” There’s something to a learning environment that doesn’t include teachers in battle gear and students in pajamas; the dynamic is just “off,” it seems to me. Maybe it’s just me, but my take on it, for a number of reasons, is that it had nothing to do with “education.” Please pardon my skepticism.

Having said all that, the officers were nice guys, who I’m sure would have rather been anywhere but my front porch, doing anything but “educating” me on the need to complete a mandatory deer harvest report. The conversation was as pleasant as could have been expected under the circumstances. But as you might imagine, I would also rather they had been anywhere else, doing anything else. I am very pro LEO, these guys and gals put their lives on the line daily and I appreciate that; it's the politicians and bureaucrats giving direction to Law Enforcement that I have a problem with.

Have a nice day. And welcome to Michigan.