I have recently been involved in a rather lengthy email debate -- running over several months -- about the perceptions by the public of the police in this country in light of several incidents, including the one I blogged about back in July (http://randommusings-jamie.blogspot.com/2011/07/abuse-of-power-canton-ohio.html ) This is only the most recent exchange, but in contains some of the most reasoned response, devoid of some of the hysterical trappings of other exchanges.
Here is a response to an email of mine, which is quoted at the beginning. My response follows R****'s: (I have disguised the names of my correspondents for their privacy)
"While you and some like you may consider the police universally to be
jack-booted thugs akin to the Nazi SS or Gestapo, for the most part they are not."
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R***** writes:
Jamie your comment illustrates the problem. As long as a nontrivial number of citizens view the cops as Gestapo like thugs there is a problem...even if the cops are not thugs. In many cases the 'perception' is the problem not the facts.
To begin to find a solution the cops must first find out why they are viewed in such a manner. Then being painfully honest with themselves they must decide if the perception is based on observable fact. If it is then the cops need to change those observable behaviors for the better. If it can honestly be shown that the perception is not justified by police behavior then a campaign of information to convince the public of the error of their perceptions is needed. It has taken a long time for people to form their negative perceptions and it won't be changed over night.
Today much of the problem springs from the fact that cops for the most part refuse to believe that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Typical cop think is that as long as citizens give unquestioning and immediate obedience to any cop's order everything will be just fine. Anything else is unacceptable.
I personally believe that the problem will never be solved satisfactorily and that a continued and ever more rapid deterioration in the citizen/cop relationship is inevitable. As a result every cop, even the few good ones, are in danger of being offed for trivial reasons just because they represent the strong arm of the government. Perhaps it's a sad thing but lacking any reasonable efforts to solve the problem it just isn't going to go away.
This is my response:
Given that there is a criminal underclass in this country, it is next to impossible to eradicate some of the ill will that exists toward the police. There is an axiom in the profession that if you are being proactive -- not just responding to calls for service, but paying attention to situations that might develop, quickly, into crimes; being concerned with quality-of-life issues -- the Broken Window approach -- you will cause some percentage of people to dislike cops no matter how professional, polite and helpful you are.
I have told the story before, but it illustrates, I think, quite well the situation cops find themselves in. When I worked in the public housing area of San Francisco's Hunter's Point/Bayview district HP/Bayview is a location that has a lot going for it -- views across the Bay toward the Contra Costa hills, a view of the Bay itself, hill-top locations and the like -- but is located above the former Naval Shipyard at Hunter's Point, a toxic Superfund area that is very slowly being brought back and under the City's control. When they decided to build public housing -- almost all of them town-home-style units rather than high-rises (SF no longer has any high-rise public housing. Around the country, this type of accommodation has proven nearly impossible to control and keep safe for the residents, the majority of whom are economically disadvantaged but perfectly decent folks).
So, town-homes. Even with some degree of pride in ownership -- although they are rented, they do seem like single-family dwellings not all that different from non-public housing around the area -- there is a feeling of decay, of too much trash overflowing dumpsters, many of which show signs of one of the local hobbies, dumpster burning. There are often used condoms and crack pipes broken on the ground in common areas, including areas where kids play. Crack whores ply their trade in utility cabinets, wedged up against electric meters and only partially hidden from view by kids and their moms passing by. At times, the drug-dealing gang violence hits a peak and the trash trucks only come in with a police or Housing Security Police escort. The buses that serve the area have not entered on several occasions until the drivers were promised protection from the rock and bottle throwing hordes of teens. When I first worked there, we were driving rented vehicles and found it hard to explain to the folks at National why there was graffiti on the car, why there was broken glass and, especially why there were bullet holes in the sheet metal.
As a supervisor, I went to all the neighborhood meetings. We tried to address concerns and often acted as ombudsmen taking the problems of the people to other City or Federal agencies to try and get positive resolution. Sometimes we prevailed; often, we did not. The Federal units were the hardest, because we had to go through a maze of middle-men, none of whom could make decisions, passing the buck upward in an endless attempt to reach a decision maker. (Getting paid was almost as hard and the folks at HUD were always at least 90 to 180 days in arrears in paying on the contract. This eventually bankrupted the contract security company, who had an outstanding balance of a couple of million dollars owed by HUD, but was so deeply in the red that they threw in the towel. This is not an uncommon story, I am told.)
At one of these meetings, an older woman, I'd say in her sixties, with steel-grey hair and a strong, bright personality spoke up. She asked us, speaking as the representative of one block of homes, if we could do something to clear out the drug gang that was infesting the area. They had made the place unsafe, scary and unpleasant to live in, she told us. She was passionate and sincere and we took her request to our chain of command. Part of the dynamic in these housing projects -- and I understand that it is not limited to SF but is a national problem, or was -- is that many of the gang members live with older relatives, typically an aunt or grandmother. (Some do live outside the projects in better neighborhoods and come to HP/B to transact business, arriving in their blinged-out Lexus or MB or BMW or Hummer.) The ones who live with granny or auntie often maintain control through a combination of blood-loyalty and fear. Family members are fearful of not only the potential violence from gang members but also of being evicted. In an attempt to deal with the problem, HUD and other public housing agencies at the City level have instituted tough policies of evicting residents if criminal activity takes place in their unit, even if they are powerless to stop it. (Another example of a zero-tolerance policy that is often grossly unfair.)
So, with the grey-haired woman's concerns in mind, we began to put together a task-force of city cops, sheriff's deputies, HUD Inspectors with LE powers, the contract security teams with limited police powers and people from the City's Department of Social Services. We met several times trying to decide on a course of action. We investigated several gang members, all of whom had criminal records, some of them extensive. We got warrants, both to search and to arrest. After a month of meeting and planning,we set a date for a raid.
Long story shortened, the raid was successful. We arrested a number of bad guys, turned up a lot of dope -- all kinds from pot to meth, heroin, ecstasy and prescription drugs in unlabeled containers -- guns and money. As I was walking one of the miscreants we'd arrested to a van for transport, the grey-haired woman approached. I expected a quiet thank-you, since we were doing what she wanted. I was wrong. "What you doin' with LeRoy?" she asked. "Ma'am, LeRoy is on his way to jail," I replied. "No, no, you wrong. LeRoy a good boy. He a nephew of mine on my sister's side. LeRoy, he ain't no criminal." She was getting as passionate as she had been at the meeting. "Ma'am, we had a warrant for LeRoy from a previous case. He was wanted before this. And he's been in jail several times on felony charges. Now, we found LeRoy in, I think, you sister's place. She looked pretty scared of him. We found a gun and some drugs and a lot of money, mostly tens and twenties, drug money, we think. He can't have a gun, ma'am, since he's a convicted felon." She was shaking her head, not buying it. "And, there was a young woman in his room. I assume it was his room, with the posters of LeBron and Tu'Pac and all. She was naked in his bed, and if she's eighteen, I'm Captain Kangaroo. So, our definitions of a good boy are pretty different." I put a hand on LeRoy's head and helped him into the van for his ride to 850 Bryant Street and booking into City Prison, to await his hearing. And, in her eyes -- I could see it, the anger rising, the steely determination -- we were the bad guys. Her nephew, LeRoy, was a good boy.
In that manner are the police seen in some places as the enemies of the people, even when you are doing exactly what the people want. When it comes to family -- close or extended seems to make little difference and some of these families are multi-generational and have trees with so many branches it is hard to count them -- they are right and outsiders are wrong. This woman was influential in her community. She would talk about the wrongful arrest of LeRoy, her nephew on her sister's side and how the po-lice made a mistake and arrested this good boy just because he was Black and had posters up in his room.
So, while I agree that cops should clean up their act -- and in some cases, clean house; some departments are so riddled with corruption that nothing short of starting over would work; NOPD is a classic example -- as long as cops arrest people, other people are going to see the police as the problem. If the police, as a profession, did all the things that reasonable people want done -- and that, IMO, need to be done -- and the militarization of the police at all levels is stopped and politicians quite declaring "war" on various problems and find new language to describe what they are doing and having the police do, there will be a number -- a non-trivial number -- of people who will hold the views we have been discussing. I know people who resent, deeply, being stopped and ticketed for traffic violations that they rightly earned who now hate cops. Most won't act on that feeling, but under the right circumstances, given the right opportunity and with nothing to lose they care about, some will act on that anger and hatred. And some of them have long memories and won't let go of those feelings, ever.
Jamie
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There are days when I grow weary trying to defend a profession I respect. I know it has flaws, serious ones, but there are so many people who for one reason or another, personal or political, seem to hate cops, all cops, good cops and worse cops and bad cops and they don't seem interested in making much distinction among the three.
There was another part to the response, fro the list-boss. He has a near-life-long dislike for cops and glories in finding any instance where a cop has done wrong, pouncing on it like a hungry weasel on a vole. This is what he said, and below that, my response.
Well said, and a perfect analysis of the problem. To address Jamie's statement again, I guess I need to word this carefully, so as not to be misunderstood, but:
Neither was the problem of the Nazi SS or Gestapo, likely the problem of the MAJORITY of SS or Gestapo -- who I'm sure were mostly family men, bounced babies on their knees, and were kind to puppies and kittens. (In fact I seem to remember seeing historical footage of SS or Gestapo notables cuddling a litter of puppies.) The problem was that the majority of SS and Gestapo supported or turned a blind eye to their colleagues who did those things we abhor.
As a result, many a fine, All American Boy shot those family men and dog lovers in the head every time the opportunity presented itself, because they were part of a system that was what it was, and many a young child lost his kind and gentle father as a result. The problem was that for whatever reason, the majority in the SS or Gestapo chose not to heal their own system. Whether they had any real choice to or not is of course arguable, but it does reduce to only that. They chose the path that appeared immediately expedient, and many found they had chosen wrong. --A***
A***,
I think that what you are missing is not what decent men SS or Gestapo members were at home, but what they did at work. Frankly, the comparison of all cops to these Nazi elite is unfair to most cops, who are not only loving family men, but decent, professional cops at work. Were there reluctant members of the SS or the Gestapo? Maybe, but as units they carried out the dictates of the Nazi state with few quibbles and with little regard for the consequences. Cops in this country today are disciplined, frequently if not all that publicly, for their misconduct. I doubt that this was ever true for the members of the Nazi elite police and SS members. As long as they were carrying out the orders of their commanders, they were totally safe from censure. Cops in America today may not come in for as much official discipline as you'd like to see, but they are disciplined and that is in stark contrast, I am sure, to the Nazi thugs to whom you so often compare them.
As I said in my response to R*****, there will be people in this country who, no matter how well cops clean up their act, will view them as jack-booted thugs, either because of their own experiences -- a cop not as polite as they might wish, perhaps brusque, when giving them a ticket they earned or a cop issuing a field-sobriety test and than asking them to blow into the Breathalyzer and taking them in for DUI -- or those people whose politics, anarchic or nearly so, cause them to believe that even a good cop is the agent of the State, which is a hateful and unnecessary appendage which should be abolished. I suspect, taken all together and adding people who dislike cops for what they have done to criminal friends or relatives, the numbers are not trivial. With some people, no matter what you do, you can't win. That doesn't mean you don't try, and I'd urge -- and do -- that cops and their departments and the politicians who employ them (but for whom they really don't work; ideally, the cops work for us) make changes: demilitarize, purge the worst apples first and then try and retrain the rest, removing them if they seem unresponsive to training. But rest assured, cops will never be universally respected. Criminals have friends and those friends -- and relatives, as I said earlier -- will often side with the criminal and hate the cops for putting them in jail. Guaranteed.
Jamie
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I'd really like to know what you have to say about any of this, good or bad.
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