Petition Seeks To Keep Pro-Police Blue Line In Holmdel

HOLMDEL, NJ – The blue line along Crawfords Corner Road has stirred up controversy in recent weeks, prompting a Change.org petition for the removal of the pro-law enforcement symbol as well as a counter-petition in support of keeping the blue line. The second petition, created on July 1 by area resident Laurie Tietjen, has garnered over 1,600 signatures in one day.

“Good cops across the country have unjustly been under attack, and Holmdel is no exception,” the online petition reads. “There is a group in town demanding that the Blue Line on the road outside of our town complex be removed. Please sign the petition to make it clear that we want the Blue Line to stay and that we support our local police!”

Tietjen also started a petition to support keeping the blue line in Middletown, which has amassed more than 2,700 signatures in 2 days. The Middletown resident told Patch that she was inspired to start the petition after attending a unity rally at Middletown High School North in which “ACAB” and “All Cops Are Murderers” posters were present.

“This was done on school property with the sanction of the Board of Education president. That’s not okay, and they refused to denounce it,” said Tietjen, who runs the Kenneth F. Tietjen Memorial Foundation. Kenneth was a police officer who died in the line of duty on Sept. 11, 2001. “I, like all the police officers I know, am fully disgusted with what happened to George Floyd. I have been a part of marches, I have been very supportive of that movement, but I’m also very supportive of our police officers, and those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can be supportive of good cops and also Black lives.”

The blue line has been at Crawfords Corner Road since 2016, when the Monmouth County Board of Freeholders passed a resolution to paint the quarter-mile blue strip between Holmdel High School and Holmdel Municipal Court. The painted stripe is a symbol used in several communities to show support for local law enforcement, although its meaning has been interpreted in different ways. While the line is considered by some to be a metaphor for the ability for police officers to separate good from bad, critics of the symbol have said that the line represents an "us vs. them" dynamic that furthers tensions between police and citizens.

The organizer of the petition to eradicate the line in Holmdel has called the symbol “a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement that minimizes the harm attempted to erase the reality of police brutality against communities of color.”

To Tietjen, the blue line is simply a gesture in support of local law enforcement.

“It has never and will never be a symbol of racism,” Tietjen said. “That’s one of the main things that is important to me: just because a small and vocal group of people all of a sudden out of nowhere say that it’s a racist symbol doesn’t mean that it’s true.”