Think Before You Type

Today I found a blog post entitled “7 Reasons the Police will always be able to abuse power with impunity”. While it’s true that there are police officers and departments that abuse their power, if you look at the entire nation it’s far from the norm in American society. Try to read through the article without coughing up your lunch, then read my responses.

1. If it didn’t happen to you, it doesn’t matter

Complacency is a real problem in American society in many different ways. This rule applies to police doing good things as it does to police doing bad things, however. If all you do is read news, you will have an opinion of the police that is filtered by the media – which will be very negative and far from the actual truth, I can assure you.

2. If it happened to someone who is deemed trash, you don’t care

“Underclass” is and has always been a social problem in all human communities. This is why police departments have been making great strides these days with Community-Oriented Policing. Police leaders have recognized that the old system of simply stomping on the underclass to keep the overclass happy hasn’t worked, and steps are being taken to bring the underclass up rather than keep them down.

3. People feel safer is the person attacked is black or Hispanic (which they usually are), guilty or not

This point is related to #2, and both are true thanks to human nature. I am not here to argue that police abuse doesn’t happen. It most certainly does. This point subliminally implies that all police action taken against blacks and Hispanics is abusive, which is obviously false.

4. The police are glamorized, deified in popular culture, despite serving no practical purpose

This is the point at which the article deviates from accurate descriptions of human nature into ignorance of who the police are and what they actually do. Police are indeed glamorized in pop culture, however it is only a small fraction of police work that is glamorized. The gun-slinging, crime-fighting, foot/car pursuing, handcuff-slapping cop in today’s movies and TV shows is not representative of how the police serve the community.

“What do they do, really?” asks the author. The reality is that close to 90% of police activity has nothing to do with fighting crime, consisting rather of service to the citizenry. Police respond to every traffic crash, every missing person report, every vehicle stranded on a motorway, every parade and other large civic function, and on and on and on. The sheer ignorance of the author’s statement “I have never heard of the police actually protecting anybody” overwhelms me. If you really think that police only deal with criminals, then you have bought in to the media version of police work. You’re duped, and you should really take steps to research what the police really do before you make sweeping denouncements of them.

5. Schadenfreude

The author now takes a very pessimistic view of the human condition. Not even the most hardened, bitter, cynical street cop would say that humans have “no capacity for empathy and no common sense.” It’s clear that many, most in fact, do. Many people these days are outraged by police abuse of power, and that’s why the Taser is such a big deal in the news lately. That’s just one tiny little example.

6. You are dumb enough to believe that they are a threat only to the criminals

The point is made here that police officers are just humans too, with all the limitations and problems that come with it. That’s true. Most (in the United States, at least) live up to the oath they have sworn, though. The author then says that the aforementioned view of cops “comes from the fact that the majority of people’s only knowledge of how law-enforcement operates comes from TV, and TV is basically about propaganda.” Ironically, the author clearly hasn’t looked anywhere else for an opinion about law enforcement, either.

7. Most people feel safest as humble serfs needing the protection of stronger people

The police are necessary to keep criminal activity in check. The crux of what we call “law” is the fact that the magistrate has a divine authority to punish law-breakers. Without that authority, there is no law. Police officers are the first and foremost manifestation of the authority of the law. Without such officers, there would be no compliance with laws and consequently chaos and anarchy. All that being said, the police still need to be “policed”. In fairness to the author, some of the points accurately describe why corruption does find its way into police departments.

However, I would recommend to the author of this article two things. Try to find out what police officers really do, rather than just buying into the negative media hype about them. Doing a few ride-alongs would be my first suggestion, followed up by attending a “citizen police academy” which many good departments will host. I would also recommend getting out and enjoying life a bit, because you sound rather depressed.

Thieves in Your Head

Yesterday my mom called me and frantically told me that her purse was stolen right out of our house. She walked in and set her purse down in the living room, then walked around a corner into the dining room. She heard some noise and thought it was my sister, then came back a bit later to find that the purse was gone!

It would have been the most brazen act of daytime house-breaking I’ve heard of in a long time, except for the fact that she had actually set the purse down in a bedroom somewhere and forgotten about it.