More than 100 people gathered at a Back the Blue Rally in Carlisle Saturday at the same time a smaller Black Lives Matters protest gathered across town.
Both events started at noon and remained peaceful, even after four BLM protesters walked over to the rally at the Carlisle Events parking lot in the 100 block of Clay Street.
The Back the Blue Rally, designed to show public support for police, consisted of a series of speeches by local politicians who formerly served in law enforcement or who were married to police officers. They shared personal stories of why they appreciate the work of police officers, why they think officers are unfairly getting a bad rap and how much officers sacrifice for their jobs.
The crowd was nearly all-white, mostly older citizens with only a few wearing masks. They brought chairs and blankets and sat socially-distanced across a grassy lot to listen to the scheduled program.
Rep. Barbara Gleim, R-Carlisle, was among the first speakers and said her father was murdered and police did everything they could to identify his killer. They discovered the killer had killed someone else as well, she said.
“There are millions of victims of crime, like myself, who support a vibrant, trained police department in their midst,” she said. “They keeps drugs off the street, help us at traffic crashes. If you love your hometown, eliminate injustices in a peaceful way while supporting the police department.”
The Rev. Chuck Kish, said as a Carlisle police chaplain, he had participated in hundreds of police ride-alongs over 20 years and had never seen a gross violation because of a person’s color.
“I haven’t seen it,” he said.
Rep. Sheryl Delozier, R-Camp Hill, said her husband worked for the Harrisburg Police Department for 23 years and said she worried about him every day, but not as much as families must worry today, amid the polarized political climate.
“Family members are worried about officers being hurt just for doing their job,” she said. “They have stood for us. It’s our time to stand for them.”
Jim French, a retired Baltimore County police officer, said the work that officers perform would be hard for most people to fathom. He said they go places where they are not wanted, they must sometimes pick up human body parts and they can basically be “on-call” for 25 years.
The average resident may see one or two critical incidents over their lifetime. But the average officer witnesses 800, he said, and that can have an impact on them.
Many of the rally speakers bashed “the media” while at the same time asking people not to paint all police officers as bad when a small percentage make mistakes or commit abuse. The speakers rejected any notions of “systemic racism” within police departments and decried the many “false narratives” that they said now surround the profession.
Across town at noon, roughly a dozen people gathered at the Carlisle town square for the Black Lives Still Matter rally, organized by Carlisle for Justice Transparency. By 12:30, the number had grown to about 50, all of them masked and with individual groups spread out to keep a safe distance from one another.
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Mary Smith, one of the event organizers for the Black Lives Still Matter rally, said that Carlisle community members have been holding similar gatherings every Saturday for the past few months. This one, though, was scheduled specifically as a counter-protest in response to the Back the Blue rally.
“We wanted to talk about the fact that police in the community have often been supported,” Smith said, citing large budgets for the local police force, and despite claims of corruption or criminal charges among area law enforcement.
A flyer from protesters cited two specific examples of area law enforcement officers who had been charged with crimes, including Christopher Collare. Collare, a former member of the Carlisle Police Force and Cumberland County Drug Task Force, was charged with dealing heroin and using his position to get sex from two women in exchange for favors related to prosecutions.
One protester, Ben Smith, was born and raised in Carlisle. A Black man and former U.S. Marine, he said “it was always a little tough living here,” due to racism.
“We knew that we were different, and would be treated differently,” Smith said. “And have been treated differently than others.”
Smith said that while he now lives in Harrisburg, he still thinks of Carlisle as home. He continued to say that race-based discrimination is “unfortunately never over,” and that people first need to acknowledge the past persecutions if any progress is to be made in the present.
“If you have no acknowledgement of what was done to certain people in the past, then you have no acceptance of what was done to certain people in the past,” he said. “And you might never acknowledge that there’s a problem now. But when you live in that culture and know the past from your history, being passed on from generation to generation? That’s why I’m out here and do things like this. I talk to people as long as they listen, so that they know the history, too.”
Protesters knelt in silence for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the length of time that officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd while taking him into custody. Some drivers passing by made angry gestures or shouted things like “back the blue” or “all lives matter,” but far more drove past honking or shouting their support.
Four members of the BLM protest walked over to the Back the Blue Rally about 1 p.m. with large posters, but they stood mostly quietly across the street.
As the Back the Blue rally wrapped up, a bugler played Taps and the crowd joined in a moment of silence. The protesters remained silent too, something which impressed R.J. Harris, a WHP 580 morning personality, who helped to promote the police rally.
Harris said he was glad they could share that moment of respect together, even though the groups have opposing views.
Kirk Wilson, the former mayor of Carlisle, put together the pro-police rally because he thought it would be a good opportunity for the community.
“Too many people say negative things about the police department and don’t understand what a police officer’s role is,” he said.
A woman named Kathy, who declined to provide her last name, said she always has had good interactions with Carlisle police, including after bullets damaged her house and after some of her mail was stolen.
She was apprehensive about attending the rally at first, worried that it could devolve into something unruly because of what she’s seen on national news programs and some negative comments she had read on the Carlisle community Facebook page. But she said she was glad she attended and that it remained safe.
“I appreciated the personal stories shared by the speakers,” she said. “My son is a Marine and I worry about him. I can’t imagine how it would be for a police officer’s family, with them being out there every day on the line.”
READ: Suspected killer shows up at Harrisburg police chief’s front door and other tales of surrenders
READ: Meet 3 protesters from Harrisburg’s ‘Truth to Power’ rally
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