Police officers are your friends. They are public servants. They are there to keep us safe from criminals. In a perfect world, these would all be statements that were always true. In an increasingly paternalistic and government dominated society, this is not the way many of our communities view law enforcement professionals. Rather, law enforcement is viewed as the overbearing or possibly even abusive parent, who is to be feared more than respected, hated rather than appreciated. Regardless of your interpretation of the facts in Ferguson, it is difficult to deny that much of the community and the others who have descended on the scene have little trust for white policemen. Aside from the motivations of a few of the activists who make their money from unrest, the distrust of the community for the police force comes from a perception that the police are their enemy. One can argue the rationality of this conclusion, but there is little doubt of its cause; the treating of law abiding citizens as though they were criminals. Persecution along side of prosecution. I am not one to see nefarious motives behind every action, but it is an undeniable fact in our history that blacks have often been treated as guilty until proven innocent by our law enforcement community and society itself. Trust is difficult to rebuild, and even innocent actions can be interpreted as aggression by the historical “enemy”. I am not excusing the generalizing of enemy status to all law enforcement or even to all white people, I’m simply explaining it; and after all, whites have done a lot of generalizing of their own.
Neither is the problem exclusively in the black community. With the proliferation of ever increasing laws and regulations, it is becoming increasingly probable that even generally law abiding citizens will have a brush with the ever lengthening long arm of the law. It may be that we are caught with too many bullets in our magazine, an illegal bonfire, an unlicensed animal, an unpermitted deck, an unregistered boat, or failing to obtain a social security number for our child. It may be that we failed to claim a gift on our income tax, pay sales tax on our garage sale, purchase health care insurance, or obtain a going out of business license to go out of business. As law enforcement is forced to become the orderers of society rather than the protectors of it, they become our keepers rather than our servants, and no one loves their keeper. I must believe that few police officers enter the academy dreaming of traffic enforcement; it is their natural desire to become a force for good in the world and catch the bad guys, but increasingly their shifts are absorbed with regulating regular citizens.
In Rotterdam last year police were called in because a 16 year old emotionally disturbed boy refused to leave the school bus after creating a disturbance. Though the police seemed calm in talking to the boy, they eventually deemed it necessary to physically remove the boy. Having worked with adults with psychological and behavioral issues, I have been trained and trained others in physical management techniques that are both effective and safe. The police used the techniques they use for criminals, twisted the young man’s arm behind his back and snapped his humerus as other children watched. The scene was almost identical to another student injured by police at a Texas high school. In Miami Beach a teenage graffiti artist was tasered by police for tagging an abandoned McDonalds. It killed him. In South Dakota four police officers found it necessary to taser an 71 pound eight year old little girl for threatening them with a paring knife. The police chief justified their response by saying that they could have used their batons or handguns. And it’s true. The tools of the policeman’s trade are guns, clubs, tear gas, and 50,000 volt tasers. With those tools we send them to calm down an eight year old girl? These tools are meant to apprehend criminals, as is the training and general mindset of the officer. Turning our crime fighters into the babysitters of society, well, things get lost in the translation. We remove them from their natural station of dealing with criminals, and recast them in a role they are ill equipped to handle. Likewise with our warriors in the military. Their natural role is to break things and shoot the enemy. In such a role they are often viewed as heroes and liberators. But then we expect them to change their role to peace corps humanitarians. We suppose that the country they occupy will take solace in their armed presence, but no one loves their keeper.
IMHO: Police and soldiers are like those in any other occupation. There are good ones and bad ones. Sometimes the best ones are not very nice people, which is fine with me when they are going after the bad guys. The problem comes when they are required to regulate a basically law abiding population, where the transition from public servant to gestapo can be an easy slide. The militarization of our police forces along with the subtle shift to increased police presence in the regulation of society as opposed to the apprehension of criminals risks a metamorphosis from “protect and serve” to “control and dominate”. Allow me the rare opportunity to praise President Obama for his intention to take a second look at the federal policy of selling surplus military equipment to local police forces. Increasingly our local boys in blue are looking like the “standing army” our forefathers warned us of. We need no centurions in the streets keeping order of the rabble, we need no Stasi to check our papers just in case we are breaking some arcane rule. We need no keepers; we have enough enemies.
