For police PR flacks, quack lives matter

Police seem to be heroically rescuing baby ducks . . . pretty much everywhere

(Photo by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance via Getty Images)

The San Francisco activist and attorney John Hamasaki tweeted out this amusing thread today:

John Hamasaki @HamasakiLaw

Watch for "cops save baby ducks" stories in the next few months. Media collaborates with police to produce these puff pieces after every police brutality incident. Literally every dept does these after police killings, it's amazing. Thread

kron4.comSF officers ‘quack the case,’ save baby ducklingsSAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – When a mother duck’s babies fell through a grate into a drain in Oracle Park Sunday morning, San Francisco police officers quickly quacked the case. Averting a fla…

The entire thread includes six stories about cops rescuing baby ducks. Which is a lot!

I’ve written quite a bit over the years about how local media cover police, but until today I was unaware of this particular trope. So I did a quick Google search of my own. And, my goodness. I had no idea!

I found 30 — yes 30 — separate stories from just the last two years before I decided I’d spent enough time on this post. I’m sure a more thorough search would have turned up a lot more.

What’s incredible is not just that so many baby ducks keep wandering into storm drains, but also that there are so often police officers nearby to save them, and that word of these rescues keeps finding its way to a local news reporter. It’s quite the fortuitous string of coincidences.

In any case, please enjoy these 30 stories about police saving baby ducks.

This post is not paywalled, so you won’t be billed.

(Sorry.)

• Eureka, California

• Montgomery County, Maryland

• Sevierville, Tennessee

• Hudson, Wisconsin

• Jacksonville, Florida

• Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania

• Andover, Massachusetts

• Bartlett, Tennessee

• South Salt Lake City, Utah

• Bellevue, Washington

• Topeka, Kansas

• Manlius, New York

• Jamestown, New York

• Caldwell, Idaho

• North Mankato, Minnesota

• Marlborough, Massachusetts

• Manchester, New Hampshire

• Rome, New York

• Cape May, New Jersey

• Blue Ash, Ohio

• Harlingen, Texas

• Heyward, California

• Evansville, Indiana

• Anne Arundel County, Maryland

• Poughkeepsie, New York

• Punta Gorda, Florida

• Overland Park, Kansas

• Somewhere in Arizona

• Edmond, Oklahoma

• Calabash, North Carolina

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