Why can no one trust the police?
I want to start by saying I’m deeply saddened by the events of Dallas, and the lives lost all around. Violence begets violence, so violence can not be the answer to our problem. If anything, this just pours more fuel on the fire.
Remembering back to my last ride in a police car, I was 4 or 5. My parents had accidentally forgotten me at a drug store, probably fussing over my younger brother, and had driven off, leaving me there alone. Once I realized that the car wasn’t in the lot anymore, I saw a police car, and asked the officer for a ride home. I knew my address, and was even able to give him directions (I was pretty proud of myself). Parents were relieved, I was relieved, life goes on.
Protecting and serving. That’s what it should be about. But now we call them “law enforcement.”
It’s not about protecting and serving anymore, if anything, that’s placed under the 911 on the police car. It’s about enforcing the law, and you can tell it from the way the police treat citizens.
3 servings of felony a day
Our laws are a hot mess of ancient rules, past litigation, and cultural edits leaving us with a reeking vomit that in no way resembles its original contents.
“You’d be sad without the police” they always say, when you say how the police are corrupt, or are misbehaving. “You’ll be happy when you need them,” they echo.
In theory, nobody hates the legal system. It exists to dispense justice for people who do terrible things. Murderers, rapists, terrorists, pop stars. But in today’s legal system, the only people who can navigate it are… lawyers. Even then, you are in need of a legal team to understand all the laws that relate to daily life.
So how anyone hope to follow the law if you don’t know the law? Many papers and books have been written about how the average person commits 3 felonies a day.
We’re all breaking the law. Life seems to go on, and most days, it proceeds quite swimmingly. So why is this a problem? We only punish the people who really deserve it.
If everyone is a criminal, are you a guard or an officer?
Imagine yourself as a LEO (law enforcement officer). Your job is to enforce the laws. Everyone is breaking the laws, so you start out realizing that everyone is a criminal.
Just like the police cruiser passing people doing 5 miles over the speed limit, you can’t stop everyone who’s a criminal. There’s just not enough hours in the day or paperwork in the office. As for jail cells, we’ll just pack them in tighter. After all, they’re only inmates, criminals.
As an officer, you think that you must be on the look out for those “really bad” people. Those violent people who hurt others. The people you heard that are trying to kill you, that you might not see.
Realistically, you’ve just become an authoritarian dictator. As a police officer, since everyone is committing crimes, you get to pick and choose you want to go after. You are inherently targeting people from the get-go. Targeting people is your job.
Pulling someone over for a missing or broken tail light is a perfect example. If someone doesn’t “look right”, you can stop them and pull them over. It doesn’t take many years of driving to notice that cops love pulling over cars that are old, beat up, and with out of state plates. They also love stopping people for absolutely no reason, just because they don’t think the color of the driver’s skin matches the cost of the car they are driving.
If we really thought broken tail lights were a big thing, we’d just record the plates and send them something in the mail. Cheaper, more effective, and safer for all involved. But this will never happen, because speeding, broken taillights, illegal lane change are all ways to leverage one crime into a witch hunt.
If you’ve ever watched an episode of “Cops” or “Alaska State Troopers”, you’ll also know that cops can look the other way if they want. Cops understand there is a huge amount of paperwork involved, and for many small crimes, they can turn a blind eye to it.
So the way the cops apply the law to people is fairly arbitrary. This leaves us with a hopefully benevolent dictator who will keep us safe.
If everyone is a criminal, and police are constantly arbitrarily exercising their judgement, this must lead to bias? They will be nice to people who they think are “mixed up with the wrong crowd” or “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, and be especially bad to people they feel are the “bad apples” and “repeat offenders.”
People that look like others they have investigated (and found guilty, like post people they investigate) are more likely to get stopped and investigated. Once the police are looking at you, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, they can throw you in jail for one reason or another.
The Stanford Prison Experiment is a famous experiment in which participants played both prison guards and inmates. The inmates were not actually criminals. The guards were not allowed to physically harm the inmates, but were told:
You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy
Police put themselves in harm’s way by choosing to be a police officer. That is a choice. It’s not for everyone. Not even a small child is naive enough to think that a police officer could not be shot by a bad guy.
When you are constantly in fear of your life, that feeling that anyone might be waiting to kill you changes everything. Even if it’s unfounded. And when everyone around you is a criminal, and you job is to enforce the law, you start treating everyone like the criminals they are. Abu Ghraib and the wars in Iraq and Vietnam are perfect examples of this.
The rising costs of being a criminal
Being policed, on the other hand, is not a choice. We have to follow the rule of law, or be subject to the consequences. Once the police realize they have nothing more to gain by bothering you, they will send you to court. The fees alone in dealing with the court, having legal counsel, and any fines are bad enough.
If convicted, even if you spend no time in jail (more fees for that too), that black mark on your record will follow you for years. Many companies simply filter out anyone with a criminal history, because they can. This leads to the exact situation where desperate people do desperate things and actually become criminals. Long after we’ve judged them as such.
If you aren’t convicted of a crime, the cops are likely to still ransack your living area with a search warrant, destroying your possessions with no recourse, and stealing anything of value they may find as “civil forfeiture.”
So what now?
While police officials and groups are saying that most officers are good people trying to serve, I think the government, the legal system, and the police unions have brought this completely on themselves.
When everyone is a criminal, and millions of people are in violation of federal drug law, and cops are arbitrary thugs who harass people who are doing nothing wrong, we should be angry at them.
Being a police officer is a choice. If you’re not ready for that, then you shouldn’t apply.
Over time, I think police become too accustomed to seeing everyone as criminals, doing more soldering than policing. Police officers with a history of corruption or racial bias just have to go.
We need to provide more assistance to our police departments and justice system change these facts. We need to increased, stable funding for police departments to eliminate tickets and civil forfeiture being used for funding. We need to provide better mental health and screening for police officers, not just initially, but constantly. Once officers show signs of PTSD or mental distress, we should evaluate if we think they can still serve to the high standards we demand. We should set up a nation wide health organization for police officers to help assist with mental health and physical health issues, with benefits for life.
Being LGBT, black, brown or a minority are not choices. We can’t simply quit out problems. We can choose our police, and we need to choose better.
We need to change the system where we are all criminals. Only then can we stop being treated like it by the people we pay to keep us safe.
