I’m just thankful that Fred McGriff was unharmed, apparently.

Not much to add to this: (HT: Wonkette and DCist)

McGruff, a.k.a. D.C. police officer Tyrone Hardy, was passing out flyers to children at the corner of
14th Street and Spring Road in Northwest Washington around 2:30 p.m. Saturday when a Metro bus pulled up to the curb.

The bus driver, 38-year-old Shawn Brim, climbed out of the bus, adjusted both sideview mirrors and then slugged McGruff in the face with his closed fist, according to a police report. Because the huge McGruff head offered little visibility, Hardy didn’t see the punch coming, one officer said.

McGruff staggered, children screamed and the crime dog’s attacker jumped back into the bus and drove off, police said. A call of an assault on a police officer went out over the police radio while passengers on the bus yelled at Brim.

Well, there is this:

Brim has a history of arrests in the District of Columbia, including for prostitution in Oct. 30, 2006, possession of PCP in 1994 and possession of a gun in 1990, according to court records. In each case, prosecutors declined to file the charges in court.

And this:

Brim, 38, later told a supervisor that he was trying “to be funny,” Metro spokeswoman Candace Smith told The Examiner on Monday.

“But nobody here finds it funny, believe me,” Smith said. “That kind of behavior is not tolerated.”

I am going to go ahead and confess that I find it funny.

Also, while we are on the subject, can we update McGruff a little? I am not sure that a tan trenchcoat-wearing, Karl Malden-sounding detective archetype really resonates with the kids today. My suggestion would be to use the following as inspiration:

Bullshit, boy. No victim? I just came from Tosha’s people, remember? All this death, you don’t think it ripples out? You don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about. I was a few years ahead of you at Edmondson, but I know you remember the neighborhood, how it was. We had some bad boys, for real. Wasn’t about guns so much as knowing what to do with your hands. Those boys could really rack. My father had me on the straight, but like any young man, I wanted to be hard too, so I’d turn up at all the house parties where the tough boys hung. Shit, they knew I wasn’t one of them. Them hard cases would come up to me and say, “Go home, schoolboy, you don’t belong here.” Didn’t realize at the time what they were doing for me. As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Nobody, no victim, who didn’t matter. And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar, calling you by name, glorifying your ass. Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.