Police and Violence

 Justin King (Beau of the Fifth Column on Twitter and YouTube) recently noted, in a tweet, the lack of sympathy for police in an online forum for military and security contractors. After a gunman shot and seriously injured two Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies, he noticed a series of comments ranging from ironic to hostile, and it puzzled him.

I don't pretend to know the reason this particular community appears to have turned against the police, but I do know about some trends in police training. When I consider the notions of honour I observe among people in high risk occupations, and compare that with what I see in police training and police behaviour, I can see one explanation for the hostility in the series of tweets Justin King quotes. I may not have the right explanation, but I think my hypothesis fits the available information.

Watch any television show from forty years ago and compare it with just about any similar show today, and the change in police tactics and equipment will appear instantly. Where twenty or thirty years ago a pair of detectives might knock on a door, today's shows portray squads of officers in full body armour taking down doors with battering rams. Television may exaggerate, but it tends to track social change, and police behaviour has indeed changed. Radley Balko has written about this, calling the phenomenon The Rise of the Warrior Cop. In the most important sense, however, the dominant attitudes in police training and department policies make the police of today less truly warriors than the police of forty or fifty years ago. Driving a Bearcat or an MRAP and wearing a plate carrier and a tin hat does not make anyone a warrior. Trading a revolver for a Heckler & Koch rifle doesn't make anyone a warrior. One thing only defines a warrior: a willingness to die for something outside yourself. Warriors die for a principle, or for their friends, or their country. A generation of training and policy have combined to impress on police the idea they have a single duty: to go home at the end of their shift with a whole skin. In one particularly egregious case, in the United States, a municipality fired an officer for failing to kill a citizen, claiming he took an unacceptable risk by attempting to deescalate a confrontation instead of shooting. 

It is a commonplace to say the police have a problem with "bad apples", but I consider "the fish rots from the head" a more appropriate metaphor. Many of the issues with police behaviour arise from official policies and training, often with provincial or state and national support, and driven by promoters and influencers with an international reach. The result seems clear: much of official and unofficial police culture inclines officers to kill people in their charge rather than take the risk of making non-violent choices. It does not surprise me to see respect and support for the police have declined as well. 

In 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez shot both their parents. The brother claimed they did it because their father abused Erik, but prosecutors argued the brothers did it to acquire their parents' estate, and the prosecutors convinced a jury. For some commentators, this case came to sum up the increasing impatience with criminals and excuses for lawbreaking. A phrase attributed to talk show host Maury Povich locates Americans' turn towards harsher justice system at the moment "when Lyle Menendez reloaded". 

In the same spirit, we might locate the tipping point in our attitude towards the police at the moment Officer Jeronimo Yanez panicked. In that moment, and over the anguished debate in the months and years following, the public came to see the difference between the beliefs many Americans held about the police, and the bleak reality.

The people and the police have had a clear social contract: we paid the police far better the other civil servants, we respected them, we supported and paid for extensive ritual of mourning and shows of respect when an officer died in the line of duty. In return, we expected the police to protect us. We expected what Sir John Hackett referred to as the "military virtues", primarily fortitude, or courage, and honesty. Joseph Wambaugh claimed a police officer needed three qualities: "courage, a sense of humour, and compassion". Undoubtedly, many of officers still show these qualities every day, but we have seen our fill, recently, of police officers who manifestly do not. When the distance between the social contract and the actual behaviour we see grows large enough, we experience an  unbalance, a literal tipping point.

Yet no neat symmetry truly exists between the public impatience with crime and the excuses for crime in the conservative eighties and nineties, and the revolt against unethical police behaviour today. Nobody put the Menendez brothers through courses in shooting parents. Nobody trained equipped, and prepared them to shoot anyone they considered a threat. Nobody threatened to fire them or throw them out of school for leaving their parents alive. We have done all that to the young men and women who offer themselves to police us. If the training programs we put the police into seem designed to turn out sadistic poltroons, then strange as it seems, we must like the idea of having sadistic poltroons policing us. More accurately, some people with power and privilege seem to like to idea of having other people policed by bullies and cowards.Fortunately, individual officers usually rise above the abusive training and conditioning we subject them to. That does not mean we don't need to change our idea of policing and the way we prepare people to police. We need to do it soon.