Good cops, bad cops. One.

This is the first of what will be a three-part post.

If your first reflex in response to any story involving a confrontation between cops and citizens is to side with the cops you are either a cop, related to a cop, have watched too many episodes of Bluebloods, or you have never had any run-ins with cops yourself.

I guess there are people who haven’t. It’s not my experience. Every adult man I know and quite a few women have at least been pulled over at one time or another by a cop who was clearly looking for an opening to throw his weight around.  Keep in mind that most people I know are white and middle class. Generally, police see it as their job to keep us safe not keep us in line. Few of us have been stopped and frisked while walking down the street, minding our own business. But all of us can tell at least one story of having had to sit there and bite our tongues while the cop writing us up for a minor traffic violation tried to provoke us or seemingly dared us to become provoked with his rudeness, presumption, arrogance, swagger, and smug sense of having the upper hand. This is more likely to have happened more than once when we were young to those of us who are men and old enough to have worn our hair long when we were young. But it’s happened no matter what age we are and at any point in our driving lives. Women I know have been pulled over just so the cop could flirt with them or hassle them in a creepily hostile way that very likely grew out of some sort of sexually-based resentment.  And it’s been all makes and models of cops. State troopers. Sheriff’s deputies. City cops. Village constables. Anecdotally, the biggest jerks are college campus cops.

Which isn’t to say all cops are jerks. Few of us think that. Most of us think fairly highly of cops. But we know from experience that there are plenty of jerks and incompetents and incompetent jerks on every police force and these incompetent jerks carry guns and they have or think they have permission to push around the people they are sworn to protect and to serve.

So, like I said, I don’t understand how even middle class white people, hearing of an ambiguous confrontation between a cop and a citizen---that is one that isn’t a case of the cop facing off with someone who is not in the middle of committing a violent crime---that ended badly for either the civilian, or the cop can have as their primary and dominant thought that the cop must have been in the right without at least the concurrent thought that the cop could very likely have been a jerk or an incompetent or both.

I’m using jerk as the kindest of catchall words for what some bad cops are.

I’m sure the thought does cross many people’s minds, but, generally, even when it does, it gets quickly pushed aside.  Most people, most white people, react to stories about run-ins between cops and civilians as if they’d never heard of there being such a thing as a bad cop. Moreover, they’ll react as if there aren’t any sorts of cops except good cops. Tell them a story in which the cops are clearly at fault and they’ll immediately rewrite it in their heads to turn it into a story in which good cops had had to deal with with a bad situation in the only way they could under the circumstances and if anyone was at fault it was the civilian who must have been doing something wrong or the cops wouldn’t have been there.

There’s a simple reason for this. People know what they “know”, and all most white people “know” about cops, whatever their own direct experience, is what they read in the newspapers and see on the TV news. And going by the news, the streets are full of stupid, crazy, desperate, and violent people doing stupid, crazy, desperate, and violent things and it’s the cops’ job to handle all that stupidity, craziness, desperation, and violence. Who would volunteer to do that, day in and day out, except for best and bravest people?

Oh sure, they’ll allow, there are a few bad cops, maybe more than a few. But when they say “bad cop” they mean corrupt cop, not a cop who one way or another isn’t up to doing the job competently. In their thinking, almost all cops are honest or reasonably honest and almost all of them are good, as in competent and as in decent, caring, and brave.

But say what you want about there being good cops and bad cops, most cops are neither. They’re in-between cops. They’re doing their best to get by cops. They’re they have their good days and their bad days cops. They’re counting the days until retirement or at least their next vacation cops. They’re they have too much else on their minds cops. They’re promoted one step beyond their level of competence cops. They’re how did I get myself into this and what’s the easiest and quickest way out of it cops. They’re like most people in most occupations, doing jobs they don’t particularly love anymore, if they ever did. They’re overworked, underpaid, and under-appreciated. Some days they like what they do, they take pride in their work, in their position, in their achievements, but most days they just show up because, well, that’s what you do. They’re there because they have to be there, it’s their job, it’s their livelihood, it puts food on the table, pays the rent, pays the bills, gives them something better to do than nothing, and they’re just trying to get through the day without putting any of that in jeopardy. Without getting in trouble. Without causing trouble. Without screwing up and getting fired.

The difference is that when a cop screws up there’s a real chance someone might wind up dead.

The problem for all of us as a society is that the cops, individually and as a tribe, and the civic entities that employ them have decided that when a situation like that happens, when a cop’s screwing up is going to make someone dead, it’s better that that someone be a citizen, any citizen even an innocent one, and not the cop.

This is especially true when the cop is white and the dead citizen is any other color but particularly black. That makes the problem worse for African-Americans. Much worse. But it’s still a problem for all of us.

Problem?

A danger.

On a personal and on a societal scale.

End of Part One. Click on the link for Part Two.

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Comments

[fdchief218]

Odd thing about this post is that I got pulled over the other night.

It was clearly a bullshit stop. The excuse the sheriff's deputy used was that I had a headlight out, which is something you can see every night you drive around here - we have no annual state inspection, so there's no real pressure to replace a dud headlight - but the real reason is that I was tired and driving cautiously which to these jokers probably meant "this guy's probably had a few, so let's stop him and see what we can find."

They went into full-on "Cops" mode; lit up the searchlight, came up on both sides of the vehicle...and suddenly realized that 1) I was a white guy wearing a safety vest 2) driving a pickup with a company logo on the side. They did the usual ID check just because otherwise it would have been WAY too obvious that is was a bullshit stop and then let me walk even though the insurance card I presented was expired (I had the current one in the key-pouch but had forgotten that was where it was).

I didn't get jacked around...other than 15 minutes of my life that I'll never get back. And I was very polite and cooperative, so there were no other consequences. But I drove away swearing a blue streak at the Washington County Sheriff's Department from the Sheriff himself to the lowest garage mechanic as a bunch of ticket-happy officious assholes.

So much for Officer Friendly.

[nancy]

Also Lance, these are cops who know that the number of guns being purchased and carried in this country has gotten to Crazyville. I have to think that is on their minds every time they leave for work. I do wish the cops in this country would take a stand with the NRA, which clearly cares not a whit for the safety of law enforcement officers in the face of the gun lobby and arms merchants who fuel the non-debate.

[Falstaff]

Well, this one hit me where I live.

I've never had a bad run-in with a American cop that I can remember -- I have a notoriously bad memory, and could have easily have forgotten one if I had it -- but, more importantly, my father's a cop. I love and respect him, grew up around the men he worked with; my best friend's father was a homicide detective, and he was like a second father to me. For crying out loud, one of the first picture-books I remember from early childhood was called "Policeman Dan" and explained how all policemen were your friends!

It's important to note that I, a white male, grew up effectively middle-class in a much nicer neighborhood than my parents' income reflected, and also I was pathologically shy as a kid. Even so, even on the one occasion where I had a serious brush with the law -- an idiotic incident of teenage shoplifting when I was seventeen -- the cops weren't even called. (One guess as to why THAT was.)

My gut reaction when dealing with police-related issues, while it's been evolving lately -- the militarization of police forces in the U.S. has been gnawing away at me for ages and ages now, since well before I moved away from the U.S. eight years ago -- is almost always a positive one. I tend to judge all cops by my father, who was... still is... a mild, quiet man who became a policeman because he genuinely wanted to help other people, and also to have a job where he worked outdoors and didn't have to sit inside doing paperwork. (Which he likes to say, given that he spent most of his nearly forty-five year career as a detective and sergeant-supervisor, shows how much he knew.)

My experience has been different since moving to Australia. (Why does Typepad's spellchecker think the misspelling 'experiance' ought to be spelled 'Spencerian'? That seems very random to me.) The Queensland State Police, who are responsible for policing all across this state, from the state capitol, Brisbane (where almost all the people who live in the state actually live) to the tiny towns and villages in the tropical far north or the desert-y deep west, are notorious for abuse of power, especially against the particularly powerless -- there seems to be a scandal about their treatment of people in general and Aboriginal Australian Queenslanders in particular several times a year here.

And I have had a run-in with them. It came at the end of a week-long stretch where my wife, my daughter, and myself had a terrible flu; my daughter had twin ear-infections, and was absolutely miserable and unable to sleep, and like any four year old (never mind an autistic one) was confused and very upset as to why her ears hurt and she felt so bad. Stress levels rose to record highs, and someone did something to annoy somebody -- I'm pretty sure I was to blame; I don't remember, but I can be a titanic pain in the ass when I'm sick -- and my wife and I ended up having a very, very loud shouting match. At five in the morning.

Well, one of our neighbors called the police. I guess I can't blame whoever it was; I have a very loud voice when I'm calm (I'm slightly deaf and usually can't tell at all what the volume I'm projecting is), and when I'm upset I tend to bellow, and my wife is not shy about yelling back. And the two policemen who responded were....

Look, I live in a rough neighborhood. You wouldn't think so on first glance because it's green and leafy and looks like an American dream of the 1950s (which is, in fact, when almost every house in this area was built, to house soldiers returning from WWII) but it is, and possibly that has something to do with the way those two men made as certain as they could that both my wife and I were as humiliated as possible before they went their merry way. I guess I'd just be vaguely irritated at my memory of the situation if it'd just been a case of them being snotty to me; I still feel guilty about yelling at my wife like that. But they browbeat her too, which -- if they really thought she was a victim of domestic violence -- is in my mind absolutely inexcusable.

I joke sometimes that I had to leave America to become a republican (as in, someone who believes Australia ought to be a republic, not a commonwealth with a queen) who hates Liberals (as in, members of the extremely conservative Liberal Party, which -- the columnist E.J. Dionne once wrote that it has that name exclusively to confuse Americans, and while the truth's a lot more complicated than that, it's a funny line). I lived in the U.S. from birth to the age of twenty-eight (all of those years in Oregon, mostly in the city of Portland but with time out for college in the small town of Ashland, where Southern Oregon University is located) and while I had a traffic ticket here and a parking ticket there, I was never treated with anything worse than bored disinterest by the policemen I interacted with.

Like Muhammad Ali said about Angelo Dundee, I have the right complexion and the right connections. American police don't tend to hassle middle-class white guys all that much, especially when they don't go out much and are scrupulously law-abiding (except, back then, when it came to the speed limit). Other folks, though... well, I suspect you'll be covering that further on in the series.

[Falstaff]

...wow. I didn't realize how long that comment was until I saw it up. Apologies, mine host.

[ninja3000]

Campus cops are the worst? You got that right:

http://bulletin.swarthmore.edu/fall-2014-issue-1/spying-swarthmore