Stop-And-Seize Turns Police into Self-Funding Gangs
Actually, the core problem is that when (usually) white, middle-class America sees a police boot on someone&#x27;s face their instinct is to say, &quot;Well, I guess he deserved it.&quot; This is particularly the case for working middle-class mothers. Based on anecdotal conversations, when they see a story about the police shooting an unarmed man in the back, they think, &quot;Well, the guy was probably going to grab someone&#x27;s little girl and take her hostage.&quot; When confronted with stories where the cop was undeniably wrong, they say, &quot;Oh just a bad apple.&quot;<p>Another problem is when (usually) black America sees a police boot on someone&#x27;s face, and notes that statistically it&#x27;s usually a black face, and their instinct is to say, &quot;Well, I guess it was because he was black.&quot; When confronted with stories where the face is white, they say nothing.<p>This breaks my heart. We should never allow a police boot on anyone&#x27;s face for any reason. The police are public servants, our servants, there to keep the peace, and stop violence from happening. They are not the punishers - that is the role of the court. They are not above the law - they need to hold themselves to a <i>higher</i> standard of conduct. <i>The police should be the best of us</i>, but instead we get low-to-average intelligence physically large men who can keep themselves clean and fit, fill out basic paperwork, and who can follow orders. Emboldened by the attitudes of white, middle-class women that &quot;cracking heads&quot; is a sign of order, also a sign of machismo, and absent any authority to stop it, it continues, and it gets worse.<p>Now, cops go out on a disturbance call, escalate it to violence, and then they &#x27;hurt the bad guys&#x27; - cracks some heads, throw &#x27;em in jail. The cop moves on, but &#x27;the bad guys&#x27; keep getting hurt, in local lock up, by a justice system that will never hear their case, and then for years by a privatized penal system that takes every economic and social advantage of the prisoner that it legally can.<p>What we have now is a police force whose individual instinct and unmet need for &quot;respect&quot; (actually, dominance) drives their decisions. No-one can stop them. The police have each other&#x27;s backs. The judiciary has the backs of the police. And the voters are split between two very different, very wrong reactions to the problem - which takes back seat to things like &quot;the economy&quot; and &quot;abortion&quot; in every election.<p>Right now, the best we can do is tell the stories of the people who&#x27;ve been harmed by the police. We need to focus on white, middle-class people, to address both mistaken instincts. We need to fund independent police-malpractice commissions with real teeth, to investigate allegations of wrong-doing. More than anything, we need to reform the way police work is done, making it illegal, for example, for a uniformed cop to coerce a suspect, to lie about the law, or to escalate a situation. We need a &quot;broken windows&quot; policy <i>applied to the police</i> where even small breaches of policy - words of disrespect, for example - trigger a reprimand. We need to ask ourselves why cops <i>swarm</i> on every encounter with a citizen, why they have their hand on their gun when they walk up to your car, why they beat people up so much and get away with it.