The Vice President said it standing under the Capitol dome with grieving families in front of him.
At the 45th Annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service this Friday, Vice President JD Vance delivered the keynote address honoring 363 fallen officers — 109 of them killed in the line of duty in 2025 alone. The line that everyone is repeating came near the middle of his speech. He told the families and uniformed officers in attendance that the administration “stopped handcuffing the police and started handcuffing more violent criminals,” pointing to what he called a cultural shift in how the country treats law enforcement.
He named the dead. Officer Phillip Wagner of Lorain, Ohio, a Marine Corps veteran ambushed in his patrol car last July. Officer Suzanne O of Maui County, who had been awarded the Certificate of Merit for her work during the 2023 Hawaii wildfires before being killed responding to an armed suspect. Three Pennsylvania detectives — Mark Baker, Isaiah Emenheiser, and Cody Becker — ambushed while serving an arrest warrant for a man stalking an innocent woman. Vance cited the murder rate falling to its lowest level in 125 years and line-of-duty deaths reaching the lowest in 80 years, attributing both to a tougher stance on violent crime and the border.
Behind the policy debate is a quieter truth. Every name read at that ceremony belonged to someone who put on a uniform knowing exactly what could happen. A husband. A mother. A friend. People who ran toward what most run from.
Scripture honors that posture directly. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” — John 15:13
The families seated in those folding chairs already know what the country is slowly remembering. Honor costs something. So does protection. And the men and women who carry the badge deserve both.
What does the way a nation treats its police officers say about what that nation actually values?
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