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- Fuck tha police? Really? -
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Wednesday, August 20, 2014
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http://gawker.com/cop-pens-touching-op-ed-do-everything-i-say-and-i-wont-1623985263
It got me thinking.... you know how noncompliance with an officer can in and of itself be cause for arrest? Is this measure fair or even necessary in order to uphold the law? Should we even need to submit so completely to police officers? Is it necessary for them to be able to command such subservience, merely in order for them to carry out their jobs properly?
Everything I have been taught up until this point says yes, but now I am finally thinking about these ideas again. I am not sure. I know that I think that being a police officer is a job, and they, too, have families that they need to go home to at night. So if they're getting threatened or charged at by someone carrying a weapon, I wouldn't at all deny them the right to protect themselves. However, when is using a handgun necessary in this sort of self-defense? Can't they just mace or taze their attackers? Does asking that question demonstrate my profound ignorance when it comes to weapons?
They need some level of unadulterated obedience in certain situations where timing is everything. People need to pull over when they're told to pull over, stay still when they're told to stay still. Sometimes that second between a police officer hesitating and a noncooperative person pulling a gun can be the second between their life and their death. But on some fundamental level, yes, we are showing that the government values the lives of its authorities; aka the police, over those of its citizens; in that situation, over the life of the perpetrator carrying the weapon. Because officers are taught to shoot if there is the slightest hint of their own life being in danger, rather than automatically giving the citizen the benefit of the doubt.
I'm not sure where the line lies here between discretion and authority. On some basic level, I think that the police need to change the way that they handle and respond to crime just so that they can boost Americans' quickly dwindling confidence in the police. If a nation's police force does not command its citizens trust, if not their respect, then it cannot be an effective institution. So perhaps at this point it is just a matter of the police creating enough good PR and community rapport, but what is happening right now in Ferguson is only evidence of the direction other cities could potentially go if citizens stopped trusting the cops and tried to take the law into their own hands. Anarchy and looting accompany days of protesting that are government-free in vision and idea only; as at the very same time emergency rule and curfew are declared and the National Guard is called in. Police acting in self-defense are certainly not always morally in the wrong, but every time they do so they risk losing the trust of the communities they serve; and they need to handle these matters with extreme sensitivity after the fact. This was clearly not what happened in the case of Ferguson and Mike Brown.
At the same time, I remain befuddled when I see posts like this:
' There is an implication here that informs the entirety of Dutta's argument, which is that cops never are the aggressors in situations, and instead only operate from a place of reaction. A really bad time to make this argument would be right this very second, when every night America gets to watch Missouri policemen shoot endless canisters of tear gas at peaceful crowds of protestors and journalists.'
Ok, obviously not all cops act from a 'place of reaction', some of them are aggressors, but it's obviously the vast minority of cops who are aggressors, or we would live in a different sort of nation entirely. I think it's worth at this point comparing the police force in the U.S. to that in other, often lesser-developed countries, where police corruption and brutality are the norm rather than the exception. This is not to say that I'd like to make excuses for the U.S. police when they may act corrupt or brutal themselves. Rather, I think that these differences indicate how our systems of checks and balances and largely trustworthy, well-meaning police force are evident, how they indicate that most of our cops indeed do NOT act from a place of aggression.
And secondly, the crowds of protestors, while largely peaceful, certainly have had moments and elements of violence. Some protestors have been throwing molotov cocktails, others have been taking advantage of the general disarray to loot stores. Citizens lives and property are being endangered by these violent actions; citizens who are themselves taking to the street in peaceful protest are being harmed by their violent 'compatriots'. It makes complete sense for the police to be trying to protect people and property from the destruction that happens when these protests go from being nonviolent to violent.
It is certainly unfortunate that imposing a curfew curtails peaceful protest as well as violent protest, but I think that in light of the danger posed by the violent protestors, it is a fair sanction. I wish that the police did not have to impose the curfew by violent means, but shots and molotov cocktails from violent protestors often leave them with no choice. At the same time, it remains a fine line to toe. Was the curfew actually necessary? How much violence were these violent protestors actually initiating, and did the responding force of the police actually match the initial force of the protestors? Again, like the case of Mike Brown itself this remains to be a grey area, hard to prove one way or another based on heavily biased eyewitness accounts, from both sides.
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