Let me first say I know the police are vital to a functioning society, but they are people too, with all the good & bad that can comes with it. When they're good, keeping the peace & generally being helpful, great, but when they're bad, things can go sideways real fast. There are failures at every level. Bad laws, bad policy, poor or improper training & toxic cop culture where bad behavior can percolate or even thrive.
We didn't get to this state of affairs overnight. We're not going to fix it any time soon. A lot of the outrage is media driven, but it's just giving a widely seen view of things that have gone on in some form or another for decades. Literally shining a spotlight on things like never before. The outrage is because some believe there's no accountability & no meaningful reform. In many ways, it's gotten worse in recent years in some places. This blue wall helps perpetuate bad cops not facing consequences. Many police forces know who the bad apples are, but seemingly are unable or unwilling to do anything to reform. Cops are forced into situations they aren't trained or well suited for. There's been a militarization that often escalates things rather than deescalates & resolves them.
Too often police only make a bad situation worse by bugling an over reaction. Again I'll concede most cops are good guys. It's the bad ones that've soured the public image of all cops. I'll give you a few stories I remember from our local boys in blue.
Back in the mid to late 70s we had one officer who shot & killed a young black man running away from a suspected burglary. I don't know if he was guilty of anything, but since he was running away, he got a bullet in the back. There was some outrage, but ultimately nothing happen to the cop. A few years later, he did it again. Again, outrage, but all that happen was they pulled him off the streets, & assigned him to work at the Civic Center where all the government offices, courts & jail were. He worked there till he retired.
I think it was some time in the 80s. A couple of cops were at The Country Palace. A popular dive bar with a country band & cheap beer. They were out of uniform on their own time. I don't recall the details but there was some kind of altercation in the parking lot. The cops were unarmed, but went to their trunk & retrieved their guns & shot & killed a guy, because he was about to throw a beer bottle at them, so they were in fear of their life. Now the guy they killed was white, so no racial biased there. Cops were found justified in combating a bottle they probably could have ducked, but there you go.
There was another incident at the Blue Parrot. A bar in the basement of Godfathers Pizza. It was another popular spot. No one was killed, but a couple of cops roughed up several people. No one was charged, & the cops just got some paid time off. Again white officers on white bar patrons. Just cops being thugs & getting away with it.
This one is not just cops, but cops covering for a drunk fire chief. This happen right in front of my house in the 70s when my sister was living here with my grandma. She had a blue 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger with a black vinyl top. It was parked out front in the street. The fire chief was coming down the main street a block over that does a 90 degree curve to my street as the main drag into down town. Anyway, as came down toward my house, he wavered to the right & plowed right into my sisters car, pushing it over the side walk, & up the embankment. Apparently, the cops showed up. They drove the fire chief home, & towed the car away. My sister got up the next morning to go to work, but looks outside & her car is gone. She thought it was stolen. She calls the police to report it. They inform her, no, not stolen. It was in an accident, & here's the name & number of the guy that's going to pay any damages. A possible drunk driving charge for the fire chief quashed. The good old boy system at work.
One last one from just a year or two ago. Cop car was driving down the road in one direction. A guy on a bicycle going the other way. The guy on the bike gives them the finger as they pass. What do the cops do? Do they keep driving, & think the guy's having a bad day & let it pass? Of course not. They do a u turn & come back to chew the guy out & give him a bad time. I'm sure the cops got a lecture, but do we have to lecture the cops to not be thin skinned jerks. It was in the news, so I'm sure there was a complaint filed about it. I believe the guy on the bike was black, but I don't think that was an issue here. It was just the cops being bullies. Nothing more.
Again, most cops are good guys, but when people lose confidence in them, they all get painted with the same broad brush. When you can't tell the difference between the good & bad ones, better to assume they're all bad for your own protection. Especially when the good ones turn a blind eye to the bad one, because of that blue wall of the cops against the world.
Another story from over in southern Illinois a couple years ago. Most of the state is very rural. Lots of little towns & small police or sheriffs department. There was a sheriff who got busted for being the biggest drug dealer in the area. I don't recall the details, but in these areas, a lot of places do good to have a town marshal. Only the bigger small towns have a police force of any size. The sheriffs are the big dogs of law enforcement. These are counties, some of which are still dry since prohibition. If you want a taste, you have to go to another county, or the local bootlegger. They don't make their own stuff. They just sell liqueur out of their back door without a license. The state police is probably the most professional in rural counties, but often these are local guys with take home cars that patrol large areas, so I guess you have a better chance of fair & honest treatment.
I'm not going to vouch for these two links. They both seem to ring true, but again, you be the judge. The comments at the end of the second are especially enlightening. I posted these a while back in a different thread. The first illustrates the need for reform at every level.
Sometimes the police are caught in the middle enforcing bad policy coming from state & local government that is ill conceived, & harmful to people at the margins of society. They are easy targets for undo harassment, & have little or no means or ability to rebuff ill treatment by the cops.
There are so many layers to this onion, it's hard to conceive where to start, but we must start somewhere. Defunding the police is a bad way to put it. Better to say reallocating funds to better target some things that police are not trained or best equipped to deal with. In other words, take things off of their plate, & let other social services deal with them.
Many of our biggest problems are linked to joblessness, poverty, homelessness & drug addiction, which get connected to drug law enforcement. Reform of drug laws is way overdue. They've spent untolled piles of cash. Filling our prisons with non violent offenders, & drugs are just as available as ever, if not more available. Billions down the drain. Millions of lives ruined, with no sum gain.
We've had the war on drugs since Nixon. Thrown a endless stream of cash at it, with little or no effect. I think it's time for a change in strategy at the very least. Civil forfeiture laws have been so abused, that in many places, they've become a license to steal to enrich the police & local government. They've turned the law upside down. They take your stuff, & you have to prove you're not guilty, which if often all but impossible. Due process has gone down the drain. These law were meant to take big ticket items from top tier criminals like fancy homes, sports cars & the like from big drug dealers. Now, if junior sell a bag of weed out of moms car or in the driveway. They take the family car & house, & leave a regular family homeless. They auction it off & buy more toys for the cops, & the courts & local municipality get a cut too.
Poor mental health treatment has dumped people on the street for the police to have to deal with. The effects of which have been shall we say less than ideal. This all started back in the 70s, when states started closing, or vastly downsizing state hospitals, & other mental health programs to trim budgets. Many patients became homeless & untreated, & end up as another police problem they shouldn't have to handle. They end up in jail or prison or dead, when they should be in a hospital, or at least with some form of treatment. It would be cheaper in the long run. It's a problem no one wants to pay for, but we end up paying for it anyway at a higher price by dumping them in prison, jail or a grave rather than in a hospital.
The racial aspect of law enforcement has a long & sorted history. There have been vast improvements, but we've got four hundred years worth of sins to overcome. I'm afraid this will be an issue for a long time to come. Recent events highlighted in the news is just the lighting of a match to the wood pile we've been building for a long time. Only time can tell
Many southern states still teach the great lie that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about states rights. The states right to own slaves is more like it. They've tried to rewrite history since the teens or twenties. Also a era when the Klan had it's resurgence. The south didn't want to face the fact they were fighting for the evil of slavery. They want to flip it, & call it a noble lost cause.
The police are not going to get any sympathy by playing the victim here, or with backhanded threats that they won't help next time we need them. If that's their view, turn in your badge & gun & find another trade. Otherwise, work to make things better. Clean up policing, & take responsibility for your mistakes. As Harry S. Truman said, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen". I'm sure Joe Friday would have a great speech for both sides of this.
I better leave it there. Volumes could be written on this, but real positive action to improve things is the only recipe to resolve any of this. This screed probably will get me branded a a crazy liberal, but really, I'm in that vast middle ground where a good chuck of the populace is. Some of us lean a little one way, while others lean a bit the other way. No side has all the answers. If you think they do, there's your first mistake. Countries with only one side are usually called dictatorships, or some near cousin. I don't relish a system like that here. In this country, we collaborate & compromise. If one side is getting their way too much, we're doing it wrong.
I'm going to close with a few word on Facebook. A subject I know nothing about. Never joined. Don't plan to. It's deceptively innocent. A public bulletin board to post pic & comments for friend & family & to message one another. Once you're ensconced there, they distract you with what they call the “feed”. Either you get sucked into an echo chamber of your own views, or something to send you off half cocked. Something tailor made to get a reaction out of you. What ever they're algorithms say is most advantageous to Facebook or their advertisers.
The internet was intended to be a great equalizer in the field of communications for all. I remember some of the early years of the internet when it was wide opened, & most businesses didn't know what to do with it. Anyone could try their hand at a website. There was lots of creative stuff, albeit at dial up modem speeds. It's been largely taken over by big moneyed interests & trolls, some of which are from unfriendly interests & countries. We've become packets personal profiles to be traded for fun & profit. We generate data. The latest commodity. Our every keystroke & mouse click is money in somebody else's bank. It's still a double edged sword. Despite big business having an out sized footprint, on the web, what would have the kids done during this recent pandemic if not for online learning.
TV is declining, & online content of endless variety is more than broadcast or cable ever dreamt of being. Pick your poison & follow the rabbit hole. The latest addiction. Endless content. With smart phones. It's in your pocket. There becomes no escape for some. An ailment for the age. Too much data. A good reason I'll never have a smart phone if I can help it. Truthfully I don't like having a phone in my pocket, although in an emergency, they're pretty handy. For the most part, what I see is people being distracted from the reality around them, sometimes tragically. We are now becoming unhinged from the here & now about us. We've forgotten how to be alone. We become alone in a crowded room. I heard John Cleese say once in an interview that our attention span on average had been shrunk to that less than a gold fish. In the end these things are just tools. We're still struggling to master them. Like any tool, it can be used, abused & misused. A gas stove can blow you up, burn your food to a crisp or make a feast fit for a king. It's all in what you do with the tool.
Well I better lay this one down for now. I've worn myself down on points that I'd think are self evident, but like at work, I stopped asking why anymore. I just shake my head.