Thank you for your comments. I prefer facts to rhetoric, and objectivity to raw emotion. I have spent a good deal of time listening to the “mainstream media” and I do not see a picture of police emerging as “racist, evil people out to murder a certain group” nor do I see them condemned for “every little action strewn out of context.”
Your typical, urban police department is not a legion of noble superheroes, as some on the right imply, nor is it a gang of racist thugs, as some on the left may assume. Dealing with the challenges facing contemporary policing in America will require us to move beyond the stereotypes on both sides and look critically at the issues of how we use our police forces and what we can — and ought to — expect of them. They do not have the resources to be all things to all people, nor to solve every societal ill. In many ways, frankly, we have set the police up to fail.
But we do no one a favor when we refuse to look at the role that the police themselves have played in creating the current situation. Police unions control a significant block of votes, which they have skilfully used to negotiate contracts that quite frankly protect bad cops and eliminate transparency. In my local department, we have cops who have repeatedly engaged in acts of domestic abuse — sometimes in public — and are still on the force. The union contract makes it next to impossible to remove officers who are clearly unfit.
And it gets worse. After a recent shooting, which involved several officers and resulted in the death of a teenager, the officers were taken back to the station, placed in the same room with a union representative, and asked to write up their personal reports, describing the events as they remembered them. Any chance that those reports had even a semblance of objectivity?
We need a critical, unbiased analysis of what works, and what doesn’t work, in contemporary policing. And we need to create systems that will give the police the resources and protection that they legitimately need while at the same time ensuring that they remain accountable to the communities that employ them.
Again, thanks for your comments.
