So, there was a time when the Police forces across our nation were trusted, looked up to, and served their communities. Times have changed, but I often ask myself what has actually changed?
What I generally hear from people is stories about how crime has gotten worse, the escalation race of gangs getting bigger guns leading to the police getting bigger guns and having to be fearful of everyone. Beyond that, I also read stories about how the police forces have been taken over by ex-military who are more familiar with combat and policing activities in a warzone than protecting and serving in America.
Fundamentally, I think both of these perspectives and most other perspectives are wrong.
I think back to when I was growing up in the 80s. I was taught to always respect police officers and to obey the law. At the time, the town I was in was 99%+ white and I remember seeing officers walking the sidewalks on Main Street, interacting with residents, and generally just keeping an eye on things.
As the Great White Flight hit the town in the late 80s and early 90s, it shifted to about 80% black and Hispanic by about 1992. By 96, it was over 96% black.
What changed during this time wasn’t a sudden influx of crime. It was more about how the officers treated residents. Around the same time, the local steel mill, Acme Steel (no joke, it was called that), took a huge downturn and ended up laying off almost its entire work force. Other area steel and manufacturing plants, man of which were in-dependent on Acme and other steel shops, closed down. The chain effect rapidly dried up the revenue coffers for the area towns. These towns still had to pay the bills, but their commercial taxes plummeted and residential taxes were no longer rising, or in some cases dropped off as well.
What many of these towns did was turn to the residents to raise more revenue. Initially, they passed a few bills to raise property taxes, sales taxes, or instituted things like vehicle registration taxes. When those were not sufficient to make up the losses, or the towns just wanted more money, they turned rapidly to their police forces and court systems.
In the case of the town I eventually worked in as a Fire Fighter, they went from having a few people in court each day for traffic violations, to being completely overflowing and having to build an expansion on the Municipal Court to handle the influx of tickets. I remember hearing my parents go from constant talk about respecting the police in the late-80s to fuck the police in the mid-90s. Where in the 80s they might get pulled over for a busted tail light and advised to please fix it, in the 90s, my mom got 3 tickets in 2 months for not stopping right on the white line at an intersection. Eventually she started to drive over 10 miles out of her way coming home from work to avoid an area where cops would watch for rolling stops, 5mph speeding over the limit, and a bunch of other minor violations that they would use to stack tickets worth hundreds of dollars onto area residents.
Needless to say, this wasn’t all that changed. Suddenly, just walking down the street could get a copy to pull up next to you in a deck out squad car asking what you were doing. When me and a friend would go roller blading around some area streets for exercise, we would regularly get hassled by cops asking what we were up to and how much longer we would be out. One time we were even accused of trying to sell drugs.
This is why Americans don’t like police anymore. Its not because crime is going up (its not) or because people are all secretly criminals (we’re not). Its because police are no longer there to protect and serve. They are there to generate revenue for their towns and states.
If cities and states want their police to be more respected, they need to start by returning police forces to their original goals.
- Stop setting up speed traps
- Remove Red-Light cameras and other technology that turns people against police with no safety value.
- Walk, don’t just drive the streets. Police should be meeting with and interacting with residents, not just enforcing laws against them.
- Stop assuming people are doing something nefarious just because they are outside.
- No quotas on tickets for traffic cops or other positions.
- Change reward structure to include public approval of Police.
- Means-test fines so that low or no income individuals do not have lives ruined.
- Focus on the Protect and Serve motto and don’t milk your residents.
We need to change the entire mindset of Police Departments and Municipalities. Police should NEVER be used to generate sustained revenue sources or have their fines and levies included as part of an expected budget. The goal should be to eliminate all fines and levies if possible by improving their towns and building a stronger relationship with their residents.