I was recently working at an apartment project inhabited entirely by blacks except for the white maintenance man. As he and I conversed about life in general, such as the fact that he’d been mugged three times in five years (once jumped by five, who beat him up for recreational purposes and didn’t even rob him), he observed that a small number of blacks in America had been killed by police under questionable circumstances, but in our city there are one or two blacks murdered every week by other blacks, yet his neighbors weren’t complaining about that.
It caused me to point out that, even in the cases of police shootings, the officer is usually exonerated when the case is examined calmly in the process of the law. On the other hand, I added, we are recruiting men to go up against sociopathological miscreants so that we, ourselves, don’t have to. These men have to display courage, strength, skill, and — perhaps most importantly — the roughness of character to be cursed at, spat upon, and attacked with deadly weapons, and yet fight the goblins into submission, cuff them, and haul them down to 201. And then we complain that they in some way or another fail to display the gentleness of a hospital chaplain?
In what reading I’ve done regarding the profession, everyone affirms that today’s police are better trained than any in the history of the world. I’m willing to believe that. When I was a rent-a-cop in the late ’70s (a “security guard”), I was told in no uncertain terms that I was better trained than any rookie policeman was just forty years earlier. Street-level experience, of course, would have put a real cop back then ahead of me in a week or two, since my own duties consisted merely of signing people in and out or patrolling a property to keep an eye on things.
Despite the training that policemen undergo, there is still the problem of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Cops aren’t like the rest of us; that’s why we hire them. If we could do it ourselves, we would. When we are threatened by criminals, we say in essence, “Officer, wade into that pack of feral dogs and throw those suckers up against the wall for me.” And he does, usually. He’s ready for confrontation, unlike you and me.
I asked the white maintenance man, “You ever been mistreated by a cop?” He replied, “Sure!” I smiled and said, “Me, too.” I’ve always considered such events a small price to pay for an effective police force. Once I was driving a used car which I’d purchased from an individual the day before: cop wrote me up for an expired license tag, even though I had the paperwork to show him that I’d had no time yet to change the vehicle’s registration. A cop hid near a malfunctioning traffic light and, when my wife finally proceeded through the intersection carefully, he pulled her over and wrote her up, just collecting scalps. When I was a long haired teenager, I commonly got pulled over on some pretext and my car was searched illegally (without my consent). The maintenance man told me of a recent case where he, his car, and a passenger were stopped and searched because he looked suspicious: lower-class white man with black female passenger. He consented to the search because (1) he knew he was clean and (2) it’s better to have your rights violated than to endure the difficulty of standing up for them.
Police misbehavior has always existed and always will. “Bad cops” are continually being culled from the herd in every large police department in the nation. But even “good cops” often find it expedient to ignore certain proscriptions in order to catch offenders and keep order. I remember one case a couple of years ago where a cop was struggling with a problem and somehow solved it by thrashing several of the scumbags who were making society unfit to live in. There was a national outcry against him for his unprofessionalism. My own opinion was that, indeed, if he cannot control his anger, he cannot work as a cop — but give the guy a medal for valiant service as he leaves, because he made the world a better place by taking out the trash for us.
I don’t want counselors and massage therapists patrolling Memphis and trying to keep our diverse population from dragging the city into third-world status. I want tough and aggressive warriors. That means they will sometimes make problems that we have to work through, but it is suicidal to shame them for being tough.
I would add in closing that I’ve been ticketed a dozen times for minor traffic infractions over the past forty-four years and almost always the officer has been polite and professional. I heard some professional whiners on NPR recently complaining that blacks shouldn’t have to learn how to strategize a traffic stop to avoid getting shot, as though keeping your hands visible and following instructions were beyond them. Apparently having been taught to submit to authority is an element of white privilege.