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A Few More Words on the Police and Police Work
I posted here yesterday expressing gratitude to Jay Nordlinger for a piece he wrote in the Sept. 22 issue of National Review. In that piece, “A Job Like No Other,” Mr. Nordlinger expressed his sympathy with and gratitude for police officers. In my post I included this short quote from the piece:
The truth is, I think, we want the police to appear when we want them to appear, applying exactly the amount of force we deem necessary. We want them to be invisible, until we are threatened, when we want them to swoop in out of nowhere to save the day. We want them to be perfect — according to our own views of perfection. In this sense, a policeman’s job is thankless.
My selection of only this quote may have conveyed the impression that Mr. Nordlinger’s piece, which for 25 cents can be read here, was purely an encomium to police officers, one that failed to acknowledge the many ways in which the police open themselves up to deserved criticism. But here is another quote from the piece:
The police have come in for a very hard time on left and right. Are there police abuses? Of course. Do the police need to be policed, night and day? Of course. Does a badge make a person a lord or a god? Of course not. Should every government agency, be it ever so humble, have a SWAT team? No.
My post brought some stinging commentary from a few members, one of whom posted a link to this Kevin Williamson piece, posted Oct. 23 at National Review Online. In that piece, Mr. Williamson tells of police conduct that was shoddy at best and perhaps criminal at worst, including an incident in Georgia in which an infant was burned and disfigured by a carelessly thrown flash-bang grenade during a SWAT raid.
Referring to the Kevin Williamson piece, Ricochet member Bryan G. Stephens commented thus:
If the police were at least held accountable for this mistakes, but they are not. They do whatever, to whomever, and then go about their lives, leaving death and tragedy in their wake.
Please, Mr. Dumphy [sic], come back and defend all these things or put them into some sort of perspective as to how any of the things in this article are the police somehow crossing a fine line.
I will not defend the abuses cited in Mr. Williamson’s piece. Indeed, back in June I wrote critically of the tactics the Georgia officers employed that resulted in the baby’s injuries. And I wrote so approvingly of Radley Balko’s book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, in the Aug. 19, 2013 issue of National Review that my review is quoted on the book’s Amazon page.
But yes, the majority of my writing – here at Ricochet, at NRO, and at PJ Media – has been devoted to defending police actions that have been, for one reason or another, brought to national attention. Often these actions are misinterpreted – either through ignorance or adherence to an agenda – by reporters who shape the public’s perception of the events.
I cite here just the latest example, this from the Los Angeles Times. As I do on most days, this morning I first checked the news on the L.A. Times website. Had I thought of it at the time, I would have grabbed a screenshot of the page as it appeared, for as I write this the paper’s home page has of course changed. But as of about 8 o’clock this morning, there at the top of the page, displayed most prominently in both position and formatting, was a story about an LAPD officer accused of kicking a handcuffed and unresisting man in the head. A newsworthy incident to be sure, but is it more newsworthy than the shooting death of two sheriff’s deputies in Northern California? That story was consigned to a spot farther down the page. Is the story about an abusive cop more emblematic of the police profession than the one about two men who lost their lives while doing their job? Someone at the Los Angeles Times apparently thought so.
Returning now to the comments on my earlier post, Bryan G. Stephens wrote of an experience in which he was stopped on the highway late at night after swerving to avoid a collision with a truck. You can read the entire comment here, but distilled to its essence, he said he “felt attacked, scared, and violated,” this despite the fact that he was sent on his way without a sobriety test, citation, or even a harsh word from the officer.
Mr. Stephens, my suspicion is that the officer may have had a different interpretation of your near-miss with the truck, and that he was merely doing his job when he pulled you over. I further suspect that the officer has had the experience, as I have, of informing someone that his son, daughter, father, or mother had been killed in a traffic collision with a drunk driver, and that he is especially vigilant to people driving in such a manner that suggests they’ve had one too many.
Everyone, at some point in his life, has had an unpleasant interaction with a police officer. This includes police officers themselves. I’ve worked undercover assignments in which I was stopped with some regularity by officers who didn’t know I was a cop. Most of these encounters were cordial, but a few were not. I choose not to let the unpleasant experiences color my thoughts about the great majority of my fellow police officers, who do their job with dignity, honor, and sometimes selfless valor.
Published in General
Perhaps one day I will again have respect for law enforcement (and the criminal justice system as a whole), but currently I simply do not. The only encounter in my adult life has been wholly negative and tainted my attitude.
In fairness to the LA Times (as someone who doesn’t live anywhere near LA or California), it’s normal for any paper to give a higher precedence to local news. California is a big state, and I wouldn’t consider Northern California to be local to Los Angeles.
I’ve actually been pretty lucky with my encounters with local law enforcement. The few moving violations I’ve been given have been fair, and the officer was professional in giving them out.
Most of my life has been spent in mid sized towns, and maybe that’s part of it. Strangely, my only encounter with the LAPD was when I was crossing the street against a red light in downtown LA, and a motorcycle cop stopped me on the sidewalk and gave me a jaywalking ticket. I was annoyed, but at least he wasn’t singling me out. The LAPD had become famous for their jaywalking tickets (are they still?).
I’m also white, though I’m also respectful when I’m stopped. I hope my not engaging in “contempt of cop” has more to do with my treatment than my being white.
I must say, however, that I have been unfairly treated by the U.S. Border Patrol. Apparently the way I act often matches those of drug dealers. One time, I crossed from Detroit, Michigan into Windsor, Ontario. I drove around for about a half hour, and came back to Detroit. I was in a rented car, alone. They detained me for over an hour. They were real jerks. I don’t know. Call me naive. But as a U.S. citizen, I should have the liberty of entering my own country without a lot of crap. In my travels to other countries including overseas, I’ve never been treated as badly by other countries as I have the U.S. Border Patrol.
I’ve had some experience with police, both personally and vicariously due to their interactions with my son who suffers from schizophrenia. I agree the vast majority do as well as any of us would do put in their shoes, but there is something about police work that attracts a certain personality type, and the cocooning effect of civil service protections and massive budgets for technology [like the flash bang grenades that burnt the infant’s face] exacerbate the problems caused by the “Barney Fyfe’s.” My personal experience was with a midget sadist that held a 3 million candlepower flashlight on my face for several minutes. My son’s issues are too numerous to mention. Some level of personal civil liability for egregious violations of people’s rights should be part of any reform.
Modern police officers are caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one side, they are tasked with enforcing a legal code that is incalculable in scope, confusing, nonsensical, corrupt, and otherwise reflective of a totalitarian, self-serving bureaucracy. Many laws are good and necessary. But most should never have been written.
On the other side, police are targeted by a culture which increasingly tears down symbols of order and goodness: the cop, the priest, the stay-at-home mom, the soldier, etc. Our stories are full of anti-heroes and sympathetic villains. Journalists sell a lot of print with reports of individuals and agencies who have abused the public’s trust.
I’m sympathetic to these and other pressures upon police today. And while tales of corruption abound, more examples of honor and charity are necessary to balance them.
By all means, focus your reports on law and order done right. Just remain honest about the things worth complaining about.
I’ve only had one moving violation in my life and I have been driving for about 60 years. I was flying down 101 from Santa Maria, only one other car in sight, with a semi several miles in front of us on an incline. Well, that ‘broad’ in the BMW next to me thought she was going to pass on the right and get ahead of me to pass the truck first. I don’t have “Little old lady from Pasadena” for my plate holder for nothing. I put the pedal to the metal and off I went, in a ’82 Subaru XL. Suddenly there was the Chip next to me, waving at me to get behind him, which I did of course. But the BMW took off, which made the cop mad and he stayed on her tail until she finally stopped.
I pulled up behind him and he threw a ticket at me, but yelling at me, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
“Yes sir,” as I looked at the ticket, and with relief stated, “exactly 75 miles an hour.”
Bless his heart, he was so mad at the lady in the BMW, he probably booked her, because we were going well over 95 mph, and I’m sure the BMW would have beat me up that hill. Oh, the speed limit at that time was 55 mph. That’s why I made sure there wasn’t any Chip around when I took off.
Never did figure out where he was hiding. I’ve been back over that route numerous times, and can’t spot his hiding place.
Edited to correct typo, car was an 82 Subaru, and looking at the ticket, Chip charged me with 73, but I thought it was 75. I kept the ticket for prosperity. Have never gotten another, as that one cost me dearly.
I agree with Dunphy 100%. In Santa Monica ( a saner place than most out-of-towners would think) we had a mass shooting in 2013: the spree lasted only about fifteen minutes, started at home with killing two armed men (the killer’s brother and father), and ended by Santa Monica College police within a minute of his entering the campus. That’s about as good as police can do, in terms of response time and marksmanship; close to perfect. Joe Friday and Clint Eastwood couldn’t have done better. The police were applauded. But few if any know the names of the SMC team; it may be actually better for them that way, but it leaves a hole in a sense of community honor. People forget.
On the other hand, a few years ago a mountain lion somehow made its way into downtown and after rapid, effective cordoning by Santa Monica city police, several tranquilizer darts failed to stop it and a quick shot to the head was needed to end the danger. Well, for weeks local web sites were full of slightly cracked “cat ladies” and other animal obsessives taking the side of the lion (of course) rather than that of the cops dealing with a scary and un-plannable situation, not to mention the little kids in a nearby school. I pin that to animal rights fanaticism and a certain soft-in-the-head quality often associated with people of a certain age who live alone rather than to an anti-police bias, but the anecdote fits the main point of the OP; people have deranged standards of perfection in a job they’d never dream of doing (or have the slightest talent for) themselves.
In the course of my 45+ years of driving, I’ve got 4 or 5 tickets, one of which caused me to spend a night in jail, but that’s another story. I’ve never had a bad experience with a policeman. We did get visited by the police once when having a party, but they were polite, and just asked us to keep it down some.
Of course, I’ve also never had a bad experience at the dentist’s. I guess I’m just lucky.
Aaron Miller hit the nail on the head. Our insane, hyper-criminalizing laws making every American guilty of some kind of obscure felony on a daily basis, plus a criminal justice system giving prosecutors leeway to intimidate people into false confessions via “plea bargains” (along with financially ruinous legal fees) are the real problems. There are undoubtedly individual cops who are abusive and/or corrupt, but in general the police are not what is broken with American criminal justice.