So let me address in summary some of the critical comments I’ve received, particularly about the diary title as being an attack on “all police” which it is not. First of all I think some people are working under the impression that “police” are an ethnic group or a religion who are a Constitutionally protected class.
They are not.
Nobody is born a cop, it’s choice but also bares with it a responsibility to maintain integrity and the trust of the communities they serve and should be protecting.
Secondly I took the issue up with former Baltimore Officer MIchael A Wood Jr who is one of few police Officers to come forward openly about police abuse to see if he thought the title was too “divisive” and he gave my tweet a like sharing it with his followers but didn’t complain.
Third, I don’t subscribe to the idea that any class of people, protected or not, are monolithic and therefore share some type of basic common intrinsic trait related to that class.
Again, they do not.
As far as I’m concerned it’s about as logical to think the idea of “all police” being bigots or biased as to expect all of them to be blonde, or all of them right-handed, or all of them to be short-tempered. They are individuals, and they all have different ideas, traits, tendencies and perspectives. They couldn’t possibly all be the same on anything, that’s a severely flawed idea so I never even considered it when crafting the title. All of them simply couldn’t possibly all be bigots, nor could all of them possibly not be bigots, this isn’t an all or nothing situation.
However, they aren’t meant to function as individuals when they’re on the job. Their training, experience, supervision, discipline and internal culture is designed for their working behavior to be consistent with the rules, laws, regulations, expectations and structure of their organization. They aren’t all the same people with the same motivations but the results of their actions are intended to have some consistency.
And unfortunately, they do.
The problem with “American Police” is that the structure and system they have joined and sworn to serve has shown itself to be critically flawed. It’s a system that is designed based on bigoted ideas that go all the way back to pre-revolutionary Slave Patrols. It is as system which attempts to base it’s strategies on flawed distorted statistics which are used maintain a police bias in practice and procedures that stops and arrests black citizens twice as often, searches them three times as often even when fewer drugs and guns are found on them and uses force against them four times as often even when the crimes they are accused of are not more violent, and in fact violence is far better correlated to poverty, and higher levels of poverty density IMO, than it is to race.
Any particular officer doesn’t have to be a racist for this flawed system to continue exactly the way it has for, well, two and half centuries without yet correcting itself.
Because it can’t correct itself. If it could it would have already.
IMO adding more female or black police isn’t going to fix this, it’s a nice idea but it’s like trying to raise the Titanic with a 1,000 fishing poles. This system has centuries of weight and inertia. 43% of Baltimore’s police are already black and their still doing exactly the same thing as the White Officers who came before them, because they’ve been indoctrinated into the System.
I’ve had personal conversations with a Black police officer in my very own neighborhood, one who was part of the local body cam pilot system and he come up with the very same “It’s just a few isolated cases that have been hyped by the media” excuse that you’ll hear every day on Hannity or O’Reilly. The stats prove him dead wrong, and I have them all right at my fingertips, but he didn’t care. So it’s not just about racism, it’s about the structure of the system.
For example there’s no way that this should be acceptable police procedure, but it is.
NYPD has argued that the Officers here were the “Victims” even though punches to the back of the head do nothing to help get handcuffs in place and also they’re banned by the MMA because they can cause brain damage. This was just gross incompetence on display, a three-on-one fight and they claim the little skinny dude at the bottom of the pile nearly beat them. A little Brazilian ju-jitsu and this is over in seconds. Pathetic.
And where are the “Good Guy” cops to stop or report these guys?
No where. Those guys, like my local Black Cop friend, are just fine with all this. This is the “cost of doing Cop business” and “he had it coming anyway.”
The DOJ reported that Baltimore PD had 2,818 incidents of brutality reported over the past six years yet only found one case — one credible case — that was “outside policy.”
Jesus Hussein Christ, that’s gotta be a policy that SUCKS right?
Now there’s your problem. It’s not just the “bad guy” officers, it’s the system that ignores, rewards, protects and promotes them that needs to be seriously, drastically changed.
Lastly the point of this diary isn’t to “convince those on the other side” of anything. If the DOJ reports themselves don’t do that, nothing is going to. And in the case of these particular cities we’re past the argument phase, they’re now entering into the bargaining section where each of these Departments will be placed under a consent decree, and their operation taken over and monitored by a Federal judge.
They’ve already lost the fight, no need to keep thrashing about — it’s over.
However, my other problem is that the DOJ probably isn’t going to do nearly enough to change the fundamental systemic structure that causes and maintains the problem in the first place. We need to create a robust oversight regime that can keep the police honest, on their toes, clean house when necessary and get rid of the bad seeds before they take root.
That’s going to be a long term task. It’s going to require action at the state and possibly federal level with major reforms to many parts of the justice system beyond just police.
And I don’t really care whose feelings it hurts, it has to be done. If we can’t get past hurting cops delicate feelings when we’re telling the truth about how their repeated failures are impacting the rest of us, we’re not fixing any of this.