Discussion for article #232477
Thank you for this, it was a great read.
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Great piece. Well written, but an old fashioned newspaper person would say it needs an editor.
Not really surprising. Professional identity trumps personal identity, most of the time. Impressive that the reporter could get anything out from behind the wall at all.
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What you see a lot lately, especially when egregious crimes like the two NY officers being executed, is the condemnation of minority parenting skills and community accountability. But when white people commit crime, who exactly is it that’s standing up and taking the blame for parenting incorrectly or not upholding community standards of peace and accountability. All white crime is usually blamed on a failing mental health system, availability of guns by some, or just plain on a bad individual. Sure you’ll occasionally hear someone say “what do you expect his Mom/Dad was a dirtbag loser” or something to that effect, but try to find someone who says “we in the white community have to take responsibility and reduce future occurrences of white people acting badly, because its our job alone as whites”? There is no one who ever says that. But there are people all over the television and internet every time a black person commits a crime (or even is the victim of violence) who say its the singular responsibility of the black parent, black neighborhood resident or black political leader to own up to some collective inferior effort in the humanity of people with the same skin tone as them.
Nothing is more damaging to our society than one majority, more wealthy, more comfortable racial group taking absolutely no personal responsibility for violence and crime by white citizens, but instinctively blaming anybody with dark skin for violence and crime committed by black people no matter how geographically, physically or behaviorally removed they are from the minority criminal whose race they are invoking as the reason the completely disconnected, non criminal, minority community members must step up and take responsibility and expend their time and resources alone to reduce this “black” problem.
If its the parents, neighborhood leaders and school teachers who are falling down on the job and letting these violent misfits get so anti social, it would seem like the problem would have been easily solved by the people with the most power and influence in society by now right? But all half or more of those people want to do is deny responsibility.
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Why are the “bad” cops always getting a pass? In addition to the parenting, educating etc - how about root out at the very least - the worst cops?
Politicians freak out about teacher tenure - what about cop employment? You know “they” know who the bad apples are…
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As a mid 50’s white man I know the high majority of white people have a fear/distrust of non-whites that they don’t talk about and deny when non-whites are around. And my guess is that a lot of non-white cops feel that there’s too big a tide for them to fight in the system, much like any job situation where they are a minority.
As far as crime statistics I’d be willing to bet there is a stronger correlation between crime and income level/job availability than between race and crime. And anyone that denies that blacks are not discriminated against in the job market is lying, they know it, and they are lying to themselves if they think anyone believes them.
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This was a great read. It’s pretty interesting as well to note the current officers, and the retired and ostracized officer. Seems to be quite a bit of indoctrination in the ranks.
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I think this is in part age related. I think a majority of people under 30 are not as fearful.
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I would suggest the author check out a one-man play, “Cops and Robbers,” by Jinho “The Piper” Ferreira. Many of the same observations and insights, from the West coast. Excellent.
I’d love to read more articles from this writer. Very good read.
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Within the hour, the blame was being passed around to President Obama, Al Sharpton, De Blasio, Attorney General Eric Holder and Al Sharpton.
“You said Al Sharpton twice.”
“Blaming Al Sharpton is my favorite.”
[/melBrooksRiff]
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“Law enforcement hasn’t changed in 2,000 years,” he said. “If you’re in this business, you’re a part of a paramilitary organization. And this organization is run by the politics of the region you’re in. The politics of cops in New York City and most of the country is different from those of black men.”
The cops are doing what they were hired to do: be a paramilitary organization that protects the existing state and economic system by terrorizing minorities and the working class.
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This article is one huge, voluminous, and wordy lame defense of the dehumanizing people by police officers and then justifying with a screw the public attitude that is the “code of blue”. This is a vivid display of attempting to excuse the failure of an elite group of people with incredible authority choosing (yes, choosing) anti social, sociopathic behavior of not caring that they are murdering innocent people, It is the same intellectual justification of the concentration canps mentality of doing away with the "misfits"in society rather than utilizing the system that society has set up to deal with the socalled “misfits” in society and attempting to preserve a life rather than snuffing out a valuable life. Society, as a whole, has put a higher value on the life of an innocent than on the life of someone being paid to put their life in danger. This article makes cleat that they are no longer public servants, doing what society has hired them to do and those people CHOSE as a profession, they have become a society unto themselves and seized the power to snuff of the lives of innocents on a whim. The people whose live are being thus made valueless are the lives of nearly 50% (people of color) of the population that was allegedly “protected” by the police officer worth less than the other 50% of the population. They are using this amoral, and unlawful “Code of Blue” as the vehicle for behavior that society decided was not appropriate practice of the awesome authority police officers receive with their commission.
We hold our professional soldiers to a higher standard than this. The Geneva Convention, the Vienna Treaty, the Nuremberg Code and the London Charter place a MUCH greater burden of responsibility on professional soldiers (yes, even conscripts) to avoiding this “murder first, ask questions later” thought process. Yet, soldiers must make split second decisions about killing someone or being killed, just as police officers. An example of this higher standard is Lt. William Calley for the My Lai massacre. Soldiers who think that they can kill civilians wrongly, usually find out the hard way, that their thinking is wrong-headed in the extreme. Just ask Herman Göring, Martin Borman and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Oh, wait…you can’t ask them because they were all hanged for war crimes.
First and foremost, police officers need to acknowledge that not everyone they have killed is/was a “bad guy”. Police officers are paid to take the risks that they make a wrong judgment about whether someone is a “bad guy” or not and that the officer’s death can be the result of a bad decision. Also, that a police officer must be prepared to face terrible consequences if they make a wrong decision, either death on the street or life in a penitentiary. I saw a police movie"(We Own The Night) where Mark Wahlberg’s character states to Joaquin Phoenix’s character, “Better to be judged by 12 than be buried by 6,” I know that movies are a figment of someone’s imagination, but the sentiment expressed by that statement is apparently the guiding philosophy of police departments across the USA. If so, then police officers must be prepared to face the consequences of that statement. Amorality has a high price at times.
A police officer knows or should know that when they leave the house in the morning, he may not be coming home that evening. That is a risk of the profession they have chosen. Just as every firefighter knows exactly the same thing. Only the firefighter is not asked to make that critical decision on whether to take another humans life or not on a repeated basis throughout their working career. And that a mistake in judgment has a 50/50 chance of being wrong. Police officers are PAID to take the risk that their death or a life behind bars may result from a split-second decision that they made that turns out to be the wrong split-second decision. Sorry, Charlie, but the life you chose is cold and full of risk. That’s why society pays you above the average pay for a union-scale assembly line worker. To use your brain, not simply go into automatic “kill first and ask Questions later” mode.
If we wanted an automaton that was programmed to kill every human being that it came in contact with, we could, as a society, have those at a far cheaper monetary cost, but at a far higher cost in human lives. That’s why we don’t use assembly line workers as police officers and we pay police officers better than we would have to pay assembly line workers. Rightly or wrongly,our society has chosen the former rather than the latter and money, as cold and as heartless as it is, it is the only manner of compensation that we can give to those police officers for taking that risk in their admittedly dangerous profession. Money is society’s attempt to make the police officer whole, just as money damages to the paralyzed victim in a civil lawsuit. We can’t give the paraplegic back the ability to wald and we cant take the risk out of police work. So we use money as the only thing we know of to try and offset the pain of the life in a wheelchair or the constant fear that you could die today. So we substitute money as the only thing we know of to try to make it up to the accident victim and the police officer. Bot, the difference is, that unlike the police officer the accident victim didn’t choose to be paralyzed. The police office knew that was the price and reward for their chosen career BEFORE they signed up for the risk and CHOSE that career anyway…
It’s not the case that police officers are entitled to decide that EVERY case is gong to result in their death if they don’t take the life of the suspected lawbreaker. Society has, since the 1960’s, decided that police officer, because of the risk they are exposed to, deserve a larger reward than a large segment of society receives, as compensation for their proffered lives. Like a professional soldier, we have bought the risk of their lives in exchange for a wage scale that rewards that additional risk. I’m sorry to be so cold, but this position is logarithmically less cold than the colder position that EVERY police officer is excused for making the wrong judgment in EVERY case. Innocent people being murdered by police officers is NOT a part of the contract they made with society when they sold the risk of their lives to society.
If a police officer makes a mistake in judgment on rare occasion, that is understandable. But not EVERY case is a mistake in judgment that is justified or permissible by the calculus of the odds of death to the officer as opposed to the life of an innocent person. Putting it before a secret panel with an advocate who is supposed to be an advocate for the wronged innocent instead urging the secret panel to find the killing by the officer of that innocent citizen was justified, but with no one advocating for the dead innocent person (or even ALLOWED to advocate for the deceased) is indicative of a system that has become corrupt and broken. The criminal “justice” system becomes more detrimental to society than the “bad guys” it is charged with administering justice on behalf of the rest of us It’s as simple and cold as that: CORRUPT AND BROKEN.
We grant to police officers the right to take lives. We have a higher standard of ethical conduct that we apply to the US Military than these officers expect that society should apply to them. We pay our officers very well (admittedly, police officers, as well as soldiers (I know because I was a conscript during the 1960’s) were severely underpaid prior to that), now, to put their lives on the line. Better, in fact, than we pay people in the military who work in a war zone and take many more risks that ANY police officer takes on ANY given day.
It wasn’t always the case about the better pay. The Code of Blue officers like to credit their loud-mouthed unions for “getting them” better pay and benefits. That is simply a crock. Although I am a HUGE supporter of unions, police officers (as with ALL public safety officers) owe their better pay and benefits to the TAXPAYERS or the supervisors the taxpayers elected to oversee the police department. But, as for their union being the sole source of their improved pay and benefits, I call bullshit. Ronald Reagan proved that you can fire an entire corps of critically needed, highly skilled, striking public service employees and still not pay the replacement workers any more than the already generous pay that the striker workers received before them. So we will cast the union theory aside as a factor.
What IS a factor is when it comes to unions the unions have provided police officers who the rest of the police force KNOW are guilty as sin of being “bad” cops, with lawyers to get them out of any disciplinary and/or termination actions, with the “Code of Blue” as an aid to the lawyer in defending the “bad” police officer. The “Code of Blue” unlawfully withholds critical evidence that is needed to chastise of eliminate the police officer who acted outside the norms society expects from its police officers. From this rises the expectation of impunity that pervades police forces across the USA. When that precious impunity expectation is challenged, the result is the Code of Blue treatment of those who supervise police officers and are ultimately in charge of employing those police officers with displays of reprisals. Like Mayor DeBlasio. And the police officers expect the same impunity to apply to them that they receive for their mistreatment of the people they are hired to “protect and serve”.
Police officers in the USA are out of control. They have become the stereotypical thugs that we associate with banana republics in the Third World. Instead of allowing the mistreatment of the persons who employ the police officers, those same employers, i.e. the voters, of police officers should demand the resignation or dispose of those representatives at the next election who allow this anti-social, sociopathic mentality to run wild in the law enforcement systems across the USA.
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Part of what I am hearing is that to ensure that they remain in good standing long enough to qualify for their pension that officers participate and reinforce the blue wall of silence and protect the known bad apples, criminals, thugs, racists and murderers for fear they will be ostracized and they will be forced out before their pension reaches the level where they feel they can leave.
Since the Blue wall of silence cannot be maintained without the turning of good cops into bad cops by requiring their participaion in cover ups let us take a tool of intimidation away from the thugs.
So if financial concerns are part of the mechanism that used to turn good cops into bad, and make no mistake looking the other way when a brother in blue violates a citizen makes one a bad cop, start taking all Police abuse settlements out of the Police Pension fund.
If the so called “good cops” start to realize that the pension they have sold their souls for will only pay for catfood they might actually try to live up to the oath they took and protect the public from miscreants and criminals espiacially those who wear blue.
When the penalties paid out to cover up the sins and crimes of the psychopaths are bankrupting pension funds there is no longer any financial motive to protect fellow blue clad scum from justice.
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One issue that I haven’t seen mentioned much is that NYC (at least when I worked for the city in the 90s) had a residency requirement for all city employees except those in uniform–cops, firefighters, and sanitation workers. This means that many, perhaps most, of the cops live on Long Island or in Rockland County and really do think of the city as foreign, often hostile, territory. It’s not their home, it belongs to the animals. And they may act accordingly.
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Fairly early in your screed you make the claim that a police office has to decide whether it is best to kill someone and possibly face life in prison or perhaps be killed. I would assert that that has changed completely and that police officers now feel (reinforced by the events of this past year) that if they kill that person the worst they face is paid leave for a few months. Whoopee. Several months of paid vacation if I kill you. Blam! Blam!
I like this idea. Right now you and I as taxpayers pay to settle affairs when the cops are out of line. The cops pay nothing.
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That is the point.
The Bluecoats and their nutcase allies are always speaking about the need for personal responsibility and individuals being held to account for their actions. Well it is time that those principles they espouse are applied to them.
No more free rides for the incompetent, inept, sociopaths that don the cloak of authority every day with the knowledge that fear will protect them. fear of losing a pension, fear of being left out in the wind, fear of irresposnsible behavior ruling the day.
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Thanks for publishing this great article. Great insight given to the ageless code of law enforcement officers of all persuasions.
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