This story is obviously even more relevant today. It is far more relevant.
It is about my experience gained from spending several thousand of hours riding with a regular officer mostly on night shifts. I was the director of the local mental health center and was known as the social worker cop, and not in a disparaging way among the many officers I rode with or met in the course of my duties. I was the one called on to comfort crime or accident victims and they were glad to have me there to do this.
The only people who looked askance at me for doing this were some fellow therapists who had negative attitudes about the police and thought it was unseemly that I was interested in doing this.
”In a discussion on MSNBC of how Trump’s doctor has finally revealed his story about the infamous letter one of the guests (I don’t recall her name, let me know if you do) said Trump is a thin skin narcissist with thugs. She was referring to the hired thugs sent to get the medical records from Dr. Bornstein’s office.
Bornstein is essentially alleging a holdup, where the bandits demanded and got the material they sought through a show of extra-legal force. Bornstein did not file a police report after the incident, but he certainly could have.
I spoke with TJ Raimey, senior associate attorney at Atlanta's Bader Law Firm, who told me that "without a warrant, without notice by the government to seize property, that's a violation of someone's rights." A former police officer himself, Raimey says that "the intellectual property contained within those records, that's the property of the treating physician, he has the right to his papers and objects."
Raimey stops short of calling the alleged "raid" a robbery since Bornstein and his office gave up the records willingly, but they did so under intimidation, opening up the door to a possible constitutional rights violation. From CNN
We still don't know whether Keith Schiller, Trump's former bodyguard and current White House assistant, was armed when he paid his visit to Dr. Bornstein. My hunch is that he was.
This got me to thinking about the intimidating, powerful, and armed authorities Trump can order to do his bidding, not overseas but in the homeland. I don’t consider them thugs, although there may be bad apples in the bunch. However, they are armed to the teeth and have the extraordinary power to detain and arrest anyone.
As someone who was not only a go-to therapist for police officers, and who also published the number one website, Police Stressline, on police stress. I have strong opinions about good policing and what makes an effective and ethical police officer.
A number of print police magazines republished my articles. This is from Florida.
The author
I also was an auxiliary police officer for 20 years. When Chief Clifford Kline (who retired as a Detroit street cop and moved to our rural town and became chief) asked me to become the only auxiliary officer on his seven-man department he told me that the main thing I always had to remember was that my badge gave me the awesome power to deprive someone of their freedom, if only for a short time, and under extraordinary circumstances their life.
Mason, Michigan police, (above) taking a break at my house, about 1980. Below, me visiting at the police station with me holding the only supplementary firearm we had in our police cars, a 12 gauge shotgun. The regular officers wore kevlar vests under their shirts. I never had one. We never had the intimidating armor vests and helmets the police now wear not only at protests but sometimes on regular duty.
When I see these heavily armed and body-armored federal agents wearing police on their uniforms all I can think of is how, as a mere volunteer cop I was considered something less than “real police.” If I was only a real cop wanna-be, what do you call these folks?
I have known probably 100 real police, some as friends, some as ride-along partners, some as acquaintances, some as clients. Our job was to protect and to serve, and as one of my cop friends, Jim Shelley, used to say when I rode with him and were preparing our police car, to “go out and crush crime.”
I spent many hours riding with Jim and have great memories of our long talks and our adventures. When he left Mason PD he went on to have an amazing career as an author and in law enforcement
Much of the policing we did in our small Michigan department was focused on watching for drunk drivers and we won the MADD statewide award for best enforcement twice. That too was real policing.
When we moved to Middleboro, Massachusetts I went to their reserve-intermittent police academy and became a special police officer.
In all modesty, I worked with “real cops” during a time when the police seemed to be mostly respected and admired by law-abiding residents.
Our job wasn’t to do the bidding of a thin-skinned narcissistic president with a racist political agenda.
Now: The era of police thugs
cops.usdoj.gov/...
I am hardly an expert on the reforms that are imperative in far too many police departments. In many ways there is no need to totally reinvent the wheel. The concept of community policing has been around for a long time and even William Barr’s DOJ has a paper about it.
It is noteworthy that there is no mention of racism or racial profiling in it. Initiating community policing nationwide is just a start, but it is barely scratching the surface of the disease of systemic racism through law enforcement, let alone that far too many police officers whether racist or not are examples of toxic masculinity and prone to escalate the slightest affront against their authority to the use of unnecessary force.
This article from December, 2019 explains reasons why community policing is not the answer.
Excerpts:
Proponents of community policing argue that embedding police, particularly in Black communities, can build trust and partnerships that would have changed my calculus, to call NYPD. But the strategy is flawed and has drawn resources away from communities that need it and instead directed them toward policing. Time has shown that community policing is merely an expensive attempt at public relations, after a long history of racialized police violence and injustice, and does little to reduce crime or police violence.
For many people that I know, their relationship with the police is irreparable. No amount of conversations or events will fix the relationship, or make them comfortable calling 911 in an emergency. Divesting from policing and investing in communities will ultimately make people far safer than police ever will.
I believe that whatever organizational changes are made in the approaches to policing, from total demilitarization to, for example, replacing a significant number of regular officers with specially trained social workers, every department must be purged of officers up to and including chiefs, who are racists. In addition, overly aggressive officers and those who do not possess the interpersonal skills needed to solve conflicts with words instead of force should be removed.
All job candidates must be thoroughly screened with extensive background checks and psychological assessments.
For an example of a background check I can say the following about a neighbor of mine because he’s dead. He’d applied for a job as a Boston transit police officer, a job requiring mostly foot patrols and constant interaction, some dangerous, with the public. They called me for a background check having determined I lived across the street from him. I told them truthfully about his volatile temper, something I had been on the receiving end of, and his abuse of his ex-wife which she’d told me about. He didn't get the job.
If a police union gets in the way of firing unfit officers, assuming they have had a right to appeal and make their case, and been able to elect to engage in rigorous counseling and retraining, I think the only way to get around this is to eliminate the entire department and start from scratch.
Addendum:
I don’t think I’ve seen any community posts by current or retired law enforcement officers and no comments from them come to mind. If you are one please tell us about your experience and your opinion about what needs to be done to reform law enforcement.
Related: Bill de Blasio vows to boost social services and cut police budget amid calls to defund NYPD
