“Cops Are at War Out There,” A Response
TL/DR: Left Wing radicals create a narrative that doesn’t match reality
The Jacobins were the radicals of the French Revolution. They beheaded thousands of Frenchmen who criticized their movement, turning what was a nobly aimed democratic revolution into a blood-soaked nightmare. It is with little surprise that I find myself criticizing their ideological offspring of Leftists. Jacobin Magazine is a radical, far-left publication, writing in apocalyptic terms to start a new revolution.
Their piece, “Cops are at War Out There,” claim that the institution of Law Enforcement is so oppositional, self-serving, and corrupt, that it cannot be reformed, and must be destroyed and reborn. They use a series of anecdotes, mined quotes, and half-cocked assertions to create a narrative of our world. The problem with half-truths is that they are rooted in reality, and can paint a compelling narrative. However, in order to actually improve our society we have to deal with the whole truth, and all of its implications. We can only do this through discourse, something I will attempt to further in this response.
Malevolence and Tyranny:
On September 6, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered the apartment of her upstairs neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, removed her service weapon, and shot the twenty-six-year-old man, killing him. One week later, on the day of Jean’s funeral, a Dallas judge released to the press the results of a search warrant that claimed to find a small amount of marijuana in the slain man’s apartment. “There could only be one purpose for that,” family attorney Lee Merritt said of the search warrant. “The only purpose is to look for information to smear the dead. That is exactly their specific intent.”
No, it isn’t.
Amber Guyger’s defense was that she was tired from a long shift, and accidentally went one story above her apartment. She found the door unsecured, and believed she was entering her own residence. Amber stated that she found the victim in the apartment, and mistook him for a burglar. Amber shot the victim, and killed him.
Shortly after the shooting, the internet does what it does best, and began looking for an explanation for the controversial incident. Quickly surfaced was a photograph of the victim, Botham Shem Jean, with several women, one of whom looked like Amber Guyger.
Amber was never identified as the woman in the photograph, but the theory was that the victim and suspect had a prior relationship, and Amber used her position in the Police Department to try to cover up the murder. A soured relationship, a drug deal gone wrong, a neighborly dispute, who knew? That didn’t stop the internet speculation that maybe this was all an elaborate scheme.
Police do not have the luxury of speculation, and cannot rely solely on the testimony of their employee. A search warrant of the apartment could nail down facts. Electronic devices could be recovered and sifted through for communications between the victim and suspect. Personal effects of the suspect in the victim’s apartment could indicate an intimate relationship. Found drugs or contraband could indicate a financial and corruption motive. The testimony of neighbors about prior heated exchanges between the suspect and victim could indicate a neighborly dispute.
Police are not psychic, and they do not know, what they know, until they know it. Evidence must be sought, taken on its own grounds, and theories remain theories until proven otherwise.
Ignoring evidence is stupid. The comment by the attorney that the search warrant was an attempted smear is misleading, but the attorney is doing his job. The attorney is representing the victim and the victim’s family to the best of his ability, pushing for a conviction of the Officer, and the acquiescence of the Police Department. He may just get it, as Amber Guyger has been fired from the Dallas Police Department, and is charged with murder.
“I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.” The victim of “outright challenges to my authority” while he worked his beat, Dutta warned, “here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you.”
This quote is used as evidence that Police are responding to civil citizen criticism with violence. This paragraph is pulled so far from its context, it might as well be on the other side of the galaxy. This flippant propaganda needs correction. The full quote is,
“ Working the street, I can’t even count how many times I withstood curses, screaming tantrums, aggressive and menacing encroachments on my safety zone, and outright challenges to my authority. In the vast majority of such encounters, I was able to peacefully resolve the situation without using force.”
The author, Sunil Dutta, then explains how he, and most cops, are able to resolve dangerous situations with nothing but quick wits and deescalation techniques. He also explains how these techniques do not always work. Read the full piece here. Jacobin follows this quote by stating,
This demand for complete obedience has real-world consequences. A 2011 investigation of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) found “a pattern or practice of using excessive force against individuals who express discontent with, or ‘talk back to,’ police.” A review of obstruction arrests — known as “contempt of cop” arrests — revealed the target of these police confrontations. In a city where black people make up 7.9 percent of the population, 51 percent of obstruction arrests were of black residents.
The following allegation that “contempt of cop,” charges are an arbitrary tactic used by Police to harass people of color can be resolved by one simple and beautiful piece of technology, the body-worn-camera. This leap forward has done so much for Law Enforcement that the camera is worth its weight in gold. The fear by Police that it would catch the private phone call, the bathroom stall, in-car profanity, or an occasional finger up the nose, is so worth having the actual interaction between citizen and police captured on film.
A thousand times to one, it exonerates the conduct and patience of Law Enforcement Officers. Zetabytes of footage go unseen because millions of annual interactions are within the law, departmental policy, ethical behavior, and the professionalism expected of our Law Enforcement. It is, however, easy to find the stereotypical knucklehead Cop with a chip on his shoulder, and a condescending tone, who escalates a situation when it could have been resolved peaceably. Sometimes this is a bad cop, sometimes this a good cop having a bad day, week, or month.
Warriorhood and Danger:
In order to demonstrate the overzealous nature of Law Enforcement, Jacobin uses the following quote,
“Our officers often are thrust into the role of warrior to fulfill their obligation as guardians,” local police chief Chuck Jordan editorialized in the Tulsa Worldin 2015. “We are living in a world that is comprised of criminals who will visit violence on their victims as well as police officers without a second thought.” This is why Tulsa police must wear body armor and carry assault rifles and other “warrior equipment” — to protect themselves against the “ever-increasing levels of violence and types of weapons that we are facing.”
Warriorhood means a lot of things, but in the Law Enforcement context it means being prepared to die and kill in service of your community. Dozens of cops are killed by criminals every year. They are often caught flat-footed because of complacency and sub-conscious denial of the dangers they face. The most extreme example of this caught on film is the 1998 murder of Kyle Dinkheller.
Deputy Kyle Dinkheller was a Sheriff’s Deputy serving the Lauren’s County Sheriff’s Office, Georgia. He effected a traffic stop and began a verbal confrontation with Andrew Brannan, a Vietnam Veteran. It is clear from Deputy Dinkheller’s verbal warnings and tone, that he is not prepared to fight or kill Andrew Brannan. In full view of the Deptuy, Brannan ignores commands, retreats to his vehicle, loads an M-1 carbine, and begins firing. Throughout the interaction, Dinkheller has dozens of opportunities to confront and kill Brannan, but fails to do so because he cannot believe what is happening.
Dinkeller was not prepared to kill a fellow citizen, and was hesitant to believe that he himself could be killed. As a result, he was executed on camera.
More tragic is the example of the Parkland School Shooting. Deputy Scot Peterson, the School Resource Officer assigned to the school, stayed outside the building as his students were butchered. Like some Officers and Deputies, he wore the gun and badge and consoled himself in statistics. He was a glorified security guard in a country of 315,000,000 with one or two mass shootings a year, surely it wouldn’t happen here. But it did, and he was unprepared to risk his life to kill the gunman, and save his students. Seventeen students were killed and seventeen more were wounded in the incident.
Police must be able to flip the switch, from pulling a cat out of a sewer, to the taking of human life in self-defense and the defense of others. It is a psychological demand of the job that cannot be ignored, and it is rooted in the psychological concept of the chivalric warrior. One must be truthful, just, and kind, but also strong and dangerous. It is a difficult psychological conception to master, but it is the deepest actualization of what it means to be human.
Jacobin uses statistics to minimize the dangers Law Enforcement Officers face,
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is more dangerous to be a groundskeeper than a police officer. Garbage collectors’ job-related mortality rate is twice that of police. Roofers? Three times. Logging, the most dangerous job in the country, has a mortality rate more than nine times that of police. Policing is not only a relatively safe job compared to blue-collar occupations, it is getting safer every year. In fact, 2017 was the second safest year for police in the last fifty years; the safest was 2013.
When you can train trash compactors, gravity, and felled trees to be more considerate of human lives, please let me know. However, barring those improvements in safety, in the world of policing, the behavior and attitudes of the public very much determine the safety of officers. Encouraging citizens to be combative, and telling Police their fears are exaggerated, do not change reality on the street.
I won’t deny the statistics. There is a significant probability that a Law Enforcement Officer can do a twenty year career without being killed, but a man or woman cannot wager their life on such probabilities. The statistical safety of their job was likely not on the mind of Officer Joseph Shinners, or Officer Natalie Corona, as they were being killed just this last week. Shinners, 29, is survived by his wife and small child. He had only been on the job for three years. Corona, 22, was a five month rookie responding to a vehicle crash, and was executed by a by-stander. There was every probability in the world that it would not be them who were killed, but in the end, the rule means nothing to the exception.
As an Officer I’ve nearly been taken out by head-on vehicles not paying attention, and an eighteen-wheeler that was trying to get out of the way of emergency vehicles. I’ve directed traffic at a major intersection during a thunderstorm and blackout, when lightning was overhead, and visibility was a matter of feet. I fought someone under the influence of methampetamine and lysergic acid, and arrested a burglar who had a murder charge dismissed under retrial. I’ve pursued and caught coked-out domestic batterers, and been a trigger pull away from killing them. I’ve had men tell me they were going to kill me and my family, and have been exposed to an anthrax hoax-attack, week-old dead bodies, and the shit, piss, and blood of strangers.
I have filed no injury complaints, and to date have not been killed. Was I secretly safe this whole time? Was there an invisible force of probability making sure that I went home at the end of the day? Do I have plot armor in my own mortal story?
If so, that’s good to know. Now I can just gallivant about town without a pistol and armor, because I probably won’t need it.
Half-Truths and Revolution:
The problem with ideologically possessed people is that they can take a pattern of facts, create a compelling narrative, and sell it to an unknowing public. The reason why the moral indignation, and political brow-beating of Leftist culture warriors is so poisonous, is because it bars us from having a conversation about the nuances of our problems, and the varied solutions.
If anything I’ve said sounds exaggerated, or subjective, please find your local Police Department, and do a ride-a-long on a weekend night shift. After a few tours you can decide for yourself if we need reform or revolution.
