Scrolling social media, whenever I stumble upon a post involving the police in any way, almost always there will be a few comments from the anti-police crowd: “cops are bad”, “cops just hurt people”, “cops only care about generating revenue for the city/state”, and so on.
As a former police officer, that kind of stuff bothers me, because I know it’s not true. I know from my own experience about 95% of the men and women of law enforcement are genuinely good people, trying to do good for the community. They do so under hostile conditions, including some really bad guys out there who want to kill you, a news media that will scrutinize your every action and never give you a fair shake, and a woefully uninformed public who nevertheless think they know better than you.
On the other hand, I have also personally been screwed over by bad cops. They do exist, and I don’t pretend otherwise, although the bad ones are a lot fewer than you might guess. I definitely have seen both sides.
I want to fight back against the “cops are bad” argument, not with a blanket “I support police” reply (even though I very much do), but with a fair and balanced assessment of how things are, and what we could do to make things better.
Here goes…
First you have to recognize how bad news travels fast, while good news travels slow, if at all. As a police officer you may have 1,000 interactions with the public, and 999 of them go well. Nobody ever hears about them. But that ONE time you mess up, oh boy does everybody know about it fast.
Nothing I did during my police career ever made the news, good or bad. Not that I cared about that. I’m just saying that I did (I think) a decent amount of good, and nobody knows about it. Is that fair? I arrested people who did bad, violent things. I got drunk people off the roads before they killed someone. I did my best to console people who had been victims. That’s the job.
I also did whatever I could to help people in little ways.
The lady who’s car broke down on the highway and caught fire — there was nothing I could do about the car after the fire department put out the flames, but I did give her a ride home.
The stray dog wandering around the neighborhood — yes I did stop and read the tag on his collar, and take him back to his owner.
The electric line that snapped and fell — yes I did sit there all day until the electric company finally showed up, making sure no kids accidentally touched the wire.
The family that flew away on vacation and then realized they left their garage door open, and had nobody else to call — yes we did go close it for them.
The single mom who called us because her 12-year-old son wouldn’t do his homework — yes we did show up and warned him we’d take him to jail if he didn’t do his homework (a bit of an exaggeration, yes, but he didn’t know that and it made his mom’s life easier).
The 16-year-old girl who just found out she’s pregnant and wants to kill herself because her boyfriend bailed on her — trying to convince her she has her whole life ahead of her while getting her into a mental health program. (So much of police work is really just being a therapist to people on their worst days.)
These are all real stories, and I was far from special. This is the kind of stuff police do every day, and nobody knows about it. I guess it’s just not interesting enough to report on, but it still means something.
***
Now on the bad side, I also have a few stories I could tell.
Of course I’ve seen the stereotypical egotistical cop on a power trip, sad to say. (Usually those kinds of guys either get fired early on, or they get promoted into command positions. Not much in between. But I digress.)
More often than not, cops that make mistakes do so either out of momentary stupidity (we’re human after all), or cynicism/jadedness that goes to far. The latter is easy to understand once you realize that people lie to the police all day long. The bad guys never admit it. People will pretend to be innocent sometimes even when you show them the video footage of them doing the crime (“that’s not me in the video!”). So it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking everyone is lying to you, even when they’re not.
I, as a civilian, was once falsely accused. The cops were looking for somebody; I lived in the neighborhood and happened to drive a similar car. They stopped me, started asking me a bunch of questions. Thinking I had nothing to hide, I answered everything honestly. They obviously didn’t believe me. Next thing I know they’re arresting me, and even throwing insults at me which I won’t repeat.
They took me to the local jail, then sent in the dumbest detective I have ever met to interrogate me. I can say from my own professional experience that this guy was really a terrible detective! The whole point of interrogations is to get people to talk, but this guy preferred hearing the sound of his own voice. He’d ask me a question and then cut me off before I could give an answer. At one point he asked me a question to which I answered “yes” but, without realizing it, I was shaking my head in the side-to-side “no” motion at the same time. He called me out on that. He said “your words are telling me one thing but your shaking your head is telling me another.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief because this entire situation was so ridiculous.
At that point I just stopped talking because this guy was an idiot and clearly not interested in getting any actual information from me. Some time went by and next thing I know they’re handing me back my stuff and letting me go. No apology, no explanation. The whole experience was maybe about 4-5 hours, and that was it.
Obviously they realized they fucked up and decided to go full CYA mode and cover their own asses. I’ve seen that too many times, unfortunately. They’re all afraid of being sued which is why they never, ever apologize for anything — that would be considered an admission of guilt on their part. They should apologize because it’s the right thing to do, regardless. It’s unfortunate they don’t.
Most importantly, this experience was a reminder to me how important it is to treat everyone as innocent until proven guilty, and to be courteous even towards suspects. If I really was the scumbag they thought I was then I suppose their insults would have been deserved — except I wasn’t. Just because most people they encounter are lying to them, they shouldn’t assume everyone is.
(Side note: between this incident and a couple other stories, I believe the particular department in question to be the worst in California… the department I worked for was NOT like that.)
***
How does police work go astray?
Young men and women, almost without exception, join law enforcement for the right reasons — they want to catch bad guys; they want to do good for their communities.
You go to an academy and they teach you about the laws. You don’t really question it, you just accept that “the law” is morally right and what should be enforced.
Then you go out on the street and start enforcing the law, as you were trained to do. You don’t think about it, you just accept that the things you were told were all true. Much of it is common sense. We all know it’s wrong to rob, steal, murder, etc. People who do those things are bad guys and we all want to stop them.
Other laws make less sense. Take seat belt laws, for example. Yes you are a lot safer wearing a seat belt while you drive, but you’re not hurting anyone if you choose not to. Except maybe yourself if you get into an accident, but shouldn’t that be your decision to make if you’re willing to accept that risk? Seat belt laws are one of the dumbest laws on the books (and there are many), because it’s not the government’s job to protect you from yourself.
As you become a little more experienced as a police officer, you find ways to use your “discretion” — sometimes you can overlook minor “crimes” that probably shouldn’t be considered crimes anyway. You do this to try to smooth things out a little in the direction towards the way things should be. However there are many limits to what you can or cannot do, and many other forces working in the opposite direction.
The most obvious problem are the legislators — the people who create the laws. Because they are politicians, they end up creating a lot of stupid laws in hopes of chasing a few extra votes. Then the word comes down from the elected officials, through the police bureaucracy, down to the individual officers that “you must go an enforce this new law! Make an example of someone.” You go and do it, because you were told to, and it’s your job, even if it leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth. You have to do it to keep your job, and after all you’re able to do more good by staying in the system than not.
Another big problem is the people themselves. Lots of people call the police every day for the sole purpose of getting someone they don’t like in trouble. The police are not supposed to be used for your personal vendettas, but once a report is made we have an obligation to act on it. So we do, even if we know it’s stupid, because we have to.
So many, many, MANY of the incidents where people complain about being “singled out” by the police actually started because someone else called the police to report them. There are lots of vindictive people out there with way too much time on their hands. The police hate being used in that way, but again it’s the job so, when called, they have to do something. Or at least appear to do something.
In the city I worked for, there was a little old lady (sigh… it’s always the little old ladies) who would call and complain because her neighbor, who was a school bus driver, would park the empty school bus on the street in front of this lady’s house during her lunch break. We would tell her “it’s a public street ma’am, anybody can park there”, but that wasn’t good enough. One day, the school bus was there, and technically parked illegally, being a little too close to a fire hydrant. Like clockwork, the old lady called, and I got sent out there. I talked to the old lady. I then tried to find the neighbor and ask her to just move the bus, but she didn’t answer the door. So, failing that, and seeing the bus was technically parked illegally, I slapped a parking ticket on it and left. Am I proud of it? No. But what else was I supposed to do?
Later on when the sergeant found out about this, he gave me shit for it. “You ticketed a school bus???” Me: “yeah but there were no kids on it.” He tore up the ticket. In my defense, I was young and just trying to do things by the book, as I had been trained. My older and wiser self would have told the old lady to stop wasting our time on trivial calls. But I digress.
The moral of the story is, if people didn’t call the police for stupid shit so much, we wouldn’t be involved in, well, stupid shit as much.
***
How can we make things better?
It’s true that our justice system is horribly broken. You have legislators passing stupid laws. You have irresponsible citizens using the police as their personal grudge enforcement team. You have activist judges releasing criminals back on the streets. (Nothing is more demoralizing for a police officer than to risk your life apprehending a bad guy, only to see him back on the street the next day like nothing happened. But that’s another story.)
And yes you have, sometimes, bad cops who make mistakes or do bad things. It happens, and when it does those people should be held accountable. I don’t wish to downplay it. But if you realize the shear number of incidents police deal with on a daily basis, when things go horribly wrong its the exception, not the rule. You wouldn’t know it from watching the news, but if we’re being honest and keeping things in perspective, police do a LOT more good for us than we give them credit for.
So first of all, we as citizens should give police the benefit of the doubt. Don’t automatically assume the worst. Instead, recognize they have good intentions, because 99% of the time they do, and let them do their work.
We have a real problem with personal accountability in our society. So many of the anti-police crowd hate cops because… they got busted by one! Nobody admits they deserved to go to jail, or that they actually deserved that ticket. It’s so much easier to blame that mean old cop who caught you than own up to your crap.
Secondly, if we don’t like the laws that the police are asked to enforce, we need to get our elected officials to change the laws. I admit this is difficult, especially in today’s hyper-polarized political environment. I could write a whole other article about that topic, but for now I just want to get at the fundamental principle, which is: legislators make the laws, therefore to get better laws we need better legislators.
There are definitely a lot of laws that need to change. But should we blame police for enforcing the laws they are asked to enforce? This is a thorny topic and again possibly another whole article. Generally I err on the side of “don’t blame the police”, although there is a trend pushing police towards more and more ridiculous things, and the “just following orders” argument can only go so far. I don’t have a clear answer for that. However I am encouraged to see at least a few cases of law enforcement refusing to do certain things and standing up for what’s right. The “Constitutional Sheriff” trend is one example. I’ve also seen stories recently about police refusing to release dangerous suspects that whacko judges had ordered let go, because the cops are not willing to allow endangering the community anymore. These are scattered, limited events, but it gives me some hope.
Which leads me to, thirdly: we need better judges. If a judge releases a criminal who goes on to commit the same kind of crime again (as they almost always do), that judge should be held personally responsible for it.
There’s no excuse for allowing criminals to rack up 30, 40, 50 arrests and still be walking around free. After about the 3rd arrest we should lock them up and throw away the key. This one step would eliminate probably about 90% of all crime.
These are just a few ideas. But until we can really reform our justice system, the least we could do is cut your neighborhood police officer some slack.