the balance of the equilibrium between personal Liberty and communal or societal order is delicate at best uh the only way this thing our country our democracy our system of of of uh our society works is if I'm willing to surrender a degree of my personal Liberty for the sake of yours and everyone else's or for the sake of the greater good as an American I enjoy rights and privileges and immunities that a lot of folks around the world don't and it's tough to come to terms with the reality that my rights privileges and immunities are not infinite and that they must end where the next fellow or woman's begins but in fact that is the case and interestingly you know when we as we add to the list of things that law enforcement officers have to do maintaining that balance between personal Liberty and societal good if you will is is yet another Duty that falls to police officers order and Liberty are important Concepts in our democratic tradition police officers have a very difficult job in that they have to strike the appropriate balance between order and Liberty we live in a free and open society and sometimes people act disorderly and it is their right to the job of the police officer is to understand the law and understand the areas in the law that constrain the rights of individuals to behave in a disorderly manner the Constitution does several things first and foremost it creates a government that's what it means to constitute something to put it together and it gives the government lots and lots of power power but then of course when you give that much power you've got to be careful you've got to regulate it and so primarily through a series of amendments primarily the first 10 that we call the Bill of Rights and even more specifically the fourth the fifth and the sixth amendments we place some limits on the ability of law enforcement people to use Force to exercise their power and that's how we've struck struck a balance between government power and individual rights there's no one single institution that's responsible for enforcing ing the balance of power in our government that's why it's a balance really what happens is different institutions in government assert power and combat the power of other institutions that's what the framers understood as the necessity of separation of powers with checks and balances the idea is that the president really can't do anything without permission from Congress Congress can't do anything that's beyond the frame of the Constitution and the courts are supposed to follow the law uh as laid down in terms of their interpretation of the Constitution and we get down more to street level of course the police officers aren't uh they don't have free reign to decide what they think is right and wrong they're supposed to be enforcing the laws as made by the uh federal or local legislatures and they're also required to respect the bounds of the Constitution as established by the courts so it's a dynamic ongoing uh process of establishing that balance and there in certain periods it seems like executive power is ascendant in other periods it seems like the legislative power is ascendant and it goes on and there's the the uncertainty of the boundaries is one of the virtues of the system because the uh that allows for the assertion of Power by different bodies which blocks assertion of other P other uh institutions power when police officers act in a way that serves to deter crime or act in a way that serves to take the people who committed crimes off of the street they're protecting the Liberty and the Order of those of us who depend on a well-ordered community for the security of our everyday lives you know you'd like to think that even without the threat of being arrested people would do the right thing but there are some people in the community who are not going to be good team members if you will and having police out on the street protects all of us because it helps make the community safer for those of us who might be potential victim law enforcement upholds the liberty of the people primarily by making sure that our Liberty is ordered Liberty there's always a tension in any governmental system between complete freedom on the one hand and keeping Society under control keeping it safe for people on the other and to the extent that we strike the right balance through people like you then we are going to preserve our liberties if we don't strike the right balance think about what happens we either get extreme police Behavior such as perhaps we've seen in a of these shooting incidents in the last couple of years uh or on the other hand if we don't do enough then we get riots then we get chaos in the streets that's why law enforcement is so very important and it goes to the very essence the very idea of of self-government that is of course set out in the Preamble of the Constitution