So when does somebody speak up for the police?
Believe me,
I have no interest in being that person. It’s a lose-lose proposition.
The public—in
one long howl of outrage, based on two fatal encounters between young black men
and police officers, in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City—won’t appreciate
having the perspective of the bad guys of the moment defended, even a little.
The cops — a
closed-rank echo chamber if ever there were—sure don’t want the support of
the media, whom they universally despise, and particularly not from me.
And, to
complete the circle—making it, then, a lose-lose-lose situation — I don’t want to do it. Not to say the issue
is unimportant — it is
important, particularly if you are one of the African-Americans killed by
excessive police force. But if I were to start listing the huge, festering
issues facing black America: lack of capital, lack of jobs, bad schools, bad
health care — it would be a while before we even got to the legal system skewed
against them, incarcerating black men unfairly en masse, and we’d have to list
a few more pressing judicial wrongs before we even got around to cops killing
folk.
But hey, I
understand, public attention is not parceled out coolly by the Jedi Council
based on objective analysis of our most pressing problems. Debate flashes and
strobes, echoing off rare emotional episodes, and one video is worth a thousand
studies.
Back to the
cops.
When I set out to write today's column, I figured it was high time I joined in the clamor. You can only blather on so long about obits and Santa letters while the nation is going through Racial Catharsis No. 342 without feeling a little superfluous.
Not that I was eager to swan dive into Ferguson, with my white-guy naivete. Pundit comments on the situation have tended toward the painfully obvious (one New York Times star began a column "We Americans are a nation divided," and ended, "There are no easy solutions. But let's talk.") Well, duh.
But I thought I had an interesting twist. I'd begin the column, "You don't need me to tell you that cops are angry and racist; they'll tell you so themselves," then hopped onto that mighty online river of anonymous police anger and bile, Second City Cop. I figured I would pluck out a few of the more bitter blasts of thin blue line contempt, vastly familiar to anyone who has ever visited the site, probably the most public face of the Chicago Police Department, given the reactive, we'll-be-under-this-rock-if-you-can-find-us stance that the administration takes.
I started reading Friday' post, headlined, "Protests Over What Exactly?"
He quotes a reader:
". . . we actually pay them [the police] to use force when a law-breaking suspect (even one breaking a trivial law) resists arrest. That is the job we've given them."
That also makes sense.
"To say this guy is guilty of murder or manslaughter seems to me to be a case of scapegoating the people we've tasked with implementing a policy that we have imposed ourselves . . . If trivial laws should not provide grounds for arrest, We should change the laws to say so."
To which Second City Cop says: "The bottom line—if you don't want cops enforcing the law, then stop passing laws and telling the police to enforce them. When arrested, you don't get to resist arrest. Period. The law says so. You resist, there are rules in place to overcome your resistance. You are not a 'jury of one' deciding what laws apply to you. Cops are authorized by the duly elected authority to overcome resistance."
You can debate whether that is true, but it struck me as an opinion worth airing. We are a nation of laws, and we call on police to enforce those laws. They don't always do it in a pretty fashion, but to judge all police by these public incidents is to make the same mistake as those cops who treat every black person as a thug who hasn't yet reached for his weapon. So to echo my betters at The New York Times, yes, we need a dialogue about all this. But you can't have a conversation if only one side is doing all the talking.
When I set out to write today's column, I figured it was high time I joined in the clamor. You can only blather on so long about obits and Santa letters while the nation is going through Racial Catharsis No. 342 without feeling a little superfluous.
Not that I was eager to swan dive into Ferguson, with my white-guy naivete. Pundit comments on the situation have tended toward the painfully obvious (one New York Times star began a column "We Americans are a nation divided," and ended, "There are no easy solutions. But let's talk.") Well, duh.
But I thought I had an interesting twist. I'd begin the column, "You don't need me to tell you that cops are angry and racist; they'll tell you so themselves," then hopped onto that mighty online river of anonymous police anger and bile, Second City Cop. I figured I would pluck out a few of the more bitter blasts of thin blue line contempt, vastly familiar to anyone who has ever visited the site, probably the most public face of the Chicago Police Department, given the reactive, we'll-be-under-this-rock-if-you-can-find-us stance that the administration takes.
I started reading Friday' post, headlined, "Protests Over What Exactly?"
"Then there's the fact of the deceased weighing 350 pounds, his extensive heart disease, his asthma, the fact that he was able to yell not once, not twice, but TEN times that he couldn't breathe - if you can yell, you can breathe, you're just wasting the breath fighting. Oh, and he didn't die of 'choking,' he died of a heart attack an hour later. But those facts don't get reported on in the mainstream media."Hmm. I paused. SSC is correct, sort of. The cops sitting on Eric Garner's chest didn't help, but it isn't as if he was strangled.
He quotes a reader:
". . . we actually pay them [the police] to use force when a law-breaking suspect (even one breaking a trivial law) resists arrest. That is the job we've given them."
That also makes sense.
"To say this guy is guilty of murder or manslaughter seems to me to be a case of scapegoating the people we've tasked with implementing a policy that we have imposed ourselves . . . If trivial laws should not provide grounds for arrest, We should change the laws to say so."
To which Second City Cop says: "The bottom line—if you don't want cops enforcing the law, then stop passing laws and telling the police to enforce them. When arrested, you don't get to resist arrest. Period. The law says so. You resist, there are rules in place to overcome your resistance. You are not a 'jury of one' deciding what laws apply to you. Cops are authorized by the duly elected authority to overcome resistance."
You can debate whether that is true, but it struck me as an opinion worth airing. We are a nation of laws, and we call on police to enforce those laws. They don't always do it in a pretty fashion, but to judge all police by these public incidents is to make the same mistake as those cops who treat every black person as a thug who hasn't yet reached for his weapon. So to echo my betters at The New York Times, yes, we need a dialogue about all this. But you can't have a conversation if only one side is doing all the talking.