Jack Spillane didn’t get it quite right in his Sunday editorial (“We want police who are better than ourselves”). When society so persistently ignores police abuse, it seems clear that we want violent cops.
Jack correctly points out cases in which young local men have been stopped for questionable reasons or where they have been neglected when forcefully, and fatally, restrained. Mr. Spillane also correctly commends the independent investigations that followed cases that brought grief to families and community, and says that the investigators got it right both times. Hm. Maybe.
But then he writes: “we want our cops to be better than the members of the public they police.” And he immediately gives the poorly-trained policemen, and the police forces that do not reflect the makeup of the communities they police, a free pass. “We want them to have the skills to quickly defuse a situation. That’s not always possible.” Citing Jack Nicholson’s character, Major Jessup, in “A Few Good Men,” Spillane writes: “You can’t handle the truth! The truth being that there are bad guys in the world. And that overwhelming force is sometimes needed to control those bad guys.”
Even though he is 100% wrong, Spillane is close to the issue.
The issue is that we as a society do not wish to tinker with the brutality, the militarism, the authoritarianism, and the lack of accountability of the police. The same goes for our refusal to rein in the abuses of the national security institutions. The same goes for our refusal to hold accountable those who unleash torture, kidnapping, assassinations, reckless wars, and rampant “collateral damage” on civilians. The same goes for our refusal to hold accountable those in the military on whose watch abuses at Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and elsewhere took place. Indeed, this is Major Jessup’s world.
Whether we can or cannot handle the truth, the truth is – we are a violent, racist society. We know we are. How many wars have we started and how many people have we killed in the last 50 years? How many murders do we permit because we refuse reasonable controls on weapons? What kind of society leads the world in incarceration of its own citizens? What kind of people permit gruesome executions with mystery cocktails to be carried out in secrecy? We are almost unique in the Western world for our barbarity.
A police officer, no matter how friendly he is when he stops you, the middle class white, still has the power to end a young poor, black or Hispanic life in an instant – and what will you say? Regrettable. Tragic. Sometimes “these things” happen? Lip service. And what does society say? Oh well, collateral damage in the very necessary war against bad guys. More lip service, Jack.
Mr. Spillane concludes that we pay the police to protect us from ourselves. Not quite. We pay the police to maintain control over those we fear the most – the poor, the immigrant, the politically suspect, the “other.” It is not a coincidence that the police are also interested in middle class whites if they happen to belong to environmental or political groups. Look at the police violence we saw during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This is not the police protecting us from ourselves. This is the police terrorizing society.
Last week we witnessed shocking displays of defiance and unaccountability toward the New York City mayor and the people of that city by policemen attending a funeral. Their “thin blue” loyalty toward one another is apparently wider, and stronger, than to their employers.
We need the police, but we need police who are part of the communities they serve, represent the makeup of those communities, are accountable to them, and do not run roughshod over those communities. That would be a start.
This was published in the Standard Times on January 7, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150107/opinion/150109514
Comments are closed.