I keep needing to remind myself of something: I have liked every cop I’ve ever known. The number’s not large, mind you; four, perhaps five people, one of whom’s faces I can remember clearly but whose name has escaped me. At least one is a Facebook friend who may read this. Alternate universe me actually is a police officer; if you Google search my real name most of the results you’ll get are for the other guy since I’m as diligent as I can be about keeping my name off the Web.
But as much as I want to generalize, I keep having to remind myself: I know cops. I am friends, or at least cordial acquaintances, with two of them. They aren’t all bad people, as much as it frequently seems like they are. They’re just embedded in a system that encourages them to be bad people, and if…
My friend Keith posted this on Facebook the other day, and he gave me permission to use it as a guest post when I asked.
It’s impossible to separate racism from the long train of abuses and usurpations that police departments in this country have perpetrated, but even if racism could be made to go away overnight, that by itself would not be enough to solve the problem with policing. There’s another dimension that needs urgently to be addressed.
If you ask a police officer to tell you what his job is — or, for that matter, ask the average person what the job of a police officer is — he will most likely say something like, “To get criminals off the streets.”
This is a serious problem.
“Criminals” is a category of beings. Suppose a police officer has a certain idea in his head of what a “criminal” looks like. That idea may be influenced by either conscious or unconscious bias. The officer has to make dozens of snap judgments a day, under stressful conditions, of whether the person he’s dealing with is a “criminal” or not. And if he decides that person is a “criminal,” he understands that it’s his job to “get the criminal off the streets,” by whatever means necessary.
A “criminal” is a bad person. A “criminal” is dangerous. A “criminal” doesn’t deserve respect. A “criminal” has no rights. A “criminal” abuses the public, so abusing a “criminal” is righteous vengeance. It’s justice.
There are many things wrong with this mentality, but one salient flaw in it is that deciding who is and is not guilty of crime is the exclusive domain of the judicial system — the courts. Jurors are supposed to decide guilt, not the police. Sentences are supposed to be handed down by judges, not by an officer’s service weapon.
Moreover, “criminals” DO have rights. These rights are spelled out explicitly in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, indirectly, in the Fourth. “Due process of law” means that criminal defendants have the right to be judged guilty or innocent not on impulse or emotion but by standards of evidence, honestly obtained and fairly presented in court. And once they’ve served out their sentences, they’re not supposed to be considered “criminals” anymore.
But this is hard to remember and harder to honor, because we’re so accustomed to thinking of “criminals” as the enemy, the destroyers of peace and order. And if it’s difficult for us regular folks, it’s even more difficult for police, who fight an unending battle against “criminals” every day of their lives.
This is why the thinking — and, crucially, training — of police needs to undergo a fundamental shift.
We, and they, need to stop thinking of the job of police departments and police officers as “getting criminals off the streets.”
We, and they, need to start thinking of it as restoring citizens who are committing crimes to the status of citizens who are not committing crimes.
There are two elements to this change in framing.
One is the recognition that all the people whom a police officer interacts with are citizens with rights that he must respect. (Of course, not all of them are U.S. citizens — and it’s not only U.S. citizens who have rights. But this is a matter to confront another day. For now, let’s settle for defining “citizen” loosely, as a human being with social and political rights and responsibilities.)
The second is the emphasis on criminal activity rather than criminal identity. There are not “criminals” and “civilians.” There are citizens who are committing crimes and citizens who are not committing crimes. Citizens who are not committing crimes must be treated with respect, dignity and full recognition of their legal rights. Citizens who are committing crimes ALSO must be treated with respect, dignity and full recognition of their legal rights even as they must also be made to cease their criminal activity and to submit to the process of law for what they’ve done.
A person who is not committing a crime should not — must not — be treated like a “criminal.” An African-American man driving a nice car, a teenager hanging out on a streetcorner, a protester in the street: none of these people is committing a crime. There is nothing that they need to be made to submit to. Their compliance is not an end in itself. They are free people, citizens with rights. Unless and until they commit an actual crime, there is no reason and no justification for the police to make them do anything.
As for people who have committed or are in the process of committing crimes, the domain of the police is to investigate and apprehend, to stop the crime in progress and to hand the perpetrator over to the court system for judgment. That’s it. Because the perpetrator is still a citizen, just one who at the moment is not abiding by the law and needs to be restored to the status of one who is. It is not the domain of the police to administer punishment.
Refocusing the mission of the police from what people “are” to what they are doing or have done will make it more difficult to justify police brutality and detention without charge. It will dismantle the logic underlying racial profiling. It will lay a foundation on which police and communities can build mutual respect and trust. It will bolster people’s freedom to exercise their rights of conscience. It will make evident the moral necessity of restoring people’s right to vote and right to free choice of employment after they’ve paid their debts to society.
I’m going to start this with something I said yesterday.
What will be painful: they’ve got CNN on in this damn waiting room, and they keep going back to that poor kid getting her ass beat by that cop in South Carolina the other day. Having to watch/hear the footage is rage-inducing enough; I swear to God if I have to listen to some fucking Hoosier conversation about it I’m gonna go to jail today, and it’s good that we’re already at the hospital.
I have a new policy, and I’m sticking to this motherfucker: if I am ever in public where a 24-hour news station is audibly playing over a television set, and I’m in a situation, like a waiting room, where I literally cannot get away from the TV, I’m unplugging the goddamned thing, and to hell with the consequences.
I had to spend several hours in a waiting room yesterday because my mother was having her hip replaced (as of last speaking to her, around 6:30 PM last night, she’s doing astonishingly well; I’ll see her again this afternoon after I get my son from school.) CNN was on on the television in the waiting room. It was on multiple TVs, so there was nowhere in the room I could have gone to get away from it, and I’d neglected to bring earphones with me– not that I really could have used them, since my aunt and my dad were both with me and that would have been kind of rude.
CNN kept lying, or putting people on the TV who were lying for them– like, for example, the police chief, who insisted that there were no complaints against “Officer Slam” despite the fact that he’s the subject of a lawsuit right now. And the chief kept blaming the kid for starting the altercation, and the fact that she’d hit the police officer kept coming up.
Note that, at that time, I had not seen the “third video” that showed her hitting him, so I was just going on faith that it had happened and that it was more or less as those describing it said. CNN wasn’t showing it.
I was managing to keep it together. I’ll be fine, I remember thinking to myself, so long as no one around me starts a conversation about this bullshit that I can hear. And here’s the thing: shit woulda been the same even if the people talking had completely agreed with everything I think. I cannot tolerate this kind of evil any longer, and my blood pressure meds and mood-altering drugs are not enough to overcome the rage. I don’t know that anything is.
So naturally the old white lady sitting across from me had to start yammering about how Kids These Days and how everything was the girl’s fault.
It… did not go well. Now, on my end: I am actually trained in crisis intervention, and I’ve been in dozens of situations over the years (read Searching for Malumba— I talk about a bunch of them!) where keeping an absolute lock on 1) my emotions; 2) my language; 3) my tone of voice, and 4) my physical stance and presence were absolutely critical to keeping things from going very south.
I referred to her solely as “ma’am” during the entire conversation. I did not raise my voice, I did not so much as lean forward, and I kept my laptop in my lap and my hands on the keyboard during the entire conversation.
It began with me pointing out that I have been involved in urban education for fifteen years, and during that time I have had literally dozens of situations where it was necessary to remove a student from my classroom, and at not one time during all those years was violence, much less that level of violence, necessary to remove the student from my classroom.
“That man should be in jail,” I said. “He has committed assault against a child, and he should be in jail.”
She tried to tell me– I swear to God this is true– that I didn’t understand what kids were like “these days.”
That didn’t go too well either.
Yammering about how she’d hit the cop.
“So what? That’s a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in a chair. He’s a grown-ass man in body armor who can bench press 600 pounds. Who cares if she hit him? What difference does it make?”
She asked me what I would have done “if that ever happened to you,” apparently not having heard anything I’d said.
I pointed out again that it had happened, repeatedly, as well as any number of other situations far more dangerous than a moody child sitting in a desk, and that I had resolved those situations without resorting to violence.
“Well, I suppose you’re just an expert, then, aren’t you?” she sneered.
Eye contact.
“Yes. I am.”
She wasn’t expecting that response, I think.
At that point she started babbling about relatives who used to be teachers and a friend who used to be a cop and blah blah blah I cut her off. Pointed at the TV. “That’s your child,” I said. “Right there. That’s your little girl being dragged across the floor by a grown man who can bench press six hundred pounds. If you can seriously look at that and place any of the blame on the child, ma’am, you very badly need to examine your soul.”
At that point, my dad leaned forward a bit, holding a hand out toward me; I think he thought I might be about to get up. Nah. I got this.
At some point she shut up. Interestingly, the guy she was with– he didn’t vibe husband or boyfriend, but they were definitely together– only spoke about three times during the conversation, and only did so to agree with me.
A few minutes later, once the press conference was on, CNN had some sort of ed person– maybe a principal, maybe a Ph.D researcher, I dunno– on, and the anchor asked him what the proper reaction to that situation should have been. The man went on to more or less exactly repeat what I had said, which was gratifying.
I didn’t speak. I did, however, point at the TV.
It is good for everyone that I had not seen this video prior to that conversation. This is the magical “third video,” the one that shows the girl “hitting” the police officer. Basically the whole thing is repeating the first few seconds in slow-motion over and over again, so once you’ve watched the first fifteen seconds or so you’re probably good.
Trigger warning. This fucked me up for most of last evening. I suggest you not watch the video, and just trust me that I’m describing it accurately. If you’re human, this will enrage you.
That’s “hitting” to these people, and if you click through to YouTube you will see that the headline appears to have been written by someone who may be wrapped in human skin but almost certainly lacks any actual humanity.
“Officer Slam” has grabbed this child around her neck with one hand, and with the other he is reaching underneath her legs. She flails backwards at him with both hands.
There is literally no way for this to be any more clearly self-defense than it is. Furthermore, given the angles of the two, and the fact that he’s got her by the neck, the risk to the “police officer” is minimal at best. And let’s not forget, either, that he initiated the contact.
I had thought, from the media reports, that she had punched him before he went after her. No. Not even close.
If you can watch that, and you still think that the actions of the child are in any way relevant to what went on, there is something terribly, terribly wrong with you.
Furthermore: watch carefully the reaction of the other teenagers in the room. Think carefully about that. There is just about nothing kids like watching more than somebody else getting their ass beat. In damn near any classroom in the country a scene like that would have produced pandemonium. Half the kids would be doing their best Chris Tucker impressions and a handful of them would be screaming at the cop. They’d be out of their seats and running around. A couple of them would be standing on desks to watch.
Not one of those fucking kids moves.
Because they are terrified.
That kind of fear has no place in a school, ever. This man should not only be fired (granted, he has) he should be jailed, and it is abundantly clear that he should never have been allowed inside the walls of a school to begin with. Any of the bullshit charges filed against the two students who were arrested should be dropped immediately, and the young woman hurled to the floor should at the very least have her college tuition paid for by the police department.
I’ve said this before, and I have to remind myself of it every day: I have liked every police officer I have ever personally known, and in particular the three SROs I’ve worked with over the years have all been professionals who were good at their jobs and worked to build rapport with their students instead of ruling by fear and intimidation.
But that reminder is mattering less and less the longer this goes on.
America’s police officers need to patrol their ranks, they need to eliminate the deep, deep, deep rot that exists within their organizations, and they need to do it right now. Because the police are, more and more every day, looking less like a group of people whose job is to “serve and protect” and more like a mercenary army who are not only allowed but encouraged to kill and injure the rest of us as they see fit without any chance of consequences.
I keep needing to remind myself of something: I have liked every cop I’ve ever known. The number’s not large, mind you; four, perhaps five people, one of whom’s faces I can remember clearly but whose name has escaped me. At least one is a Facebook friend who may read this. Alternate universe me actually is a police officer; if you Google search my real name most of the results you’ll get are for the other guy since I’m as diligent as I can be about keeping my name off the Web.
But as much as I want to generalize, I keep having to remind myself: I know cops. I am friends, or at least cordial acquaintances, with two of them. They aren’t all bad people, as much as it frequently seems like they are. They’re just embedded in a system that encourages them to be bad people, and if that’s not the most understated use of the word “just” that I see today something has gone terribly wrong. Cops aren’t all bad people. Cop culture fucking sucks. You could say the same thing about gamers, by the way, a group I consider myself a part of. The big difference, of course, is that gamers aren’t shooting young black men down in the street and getting away with it.
I’ve read through some of the grand jury testimony that was released today, and all of Darren Wilson’s testimony in particular. I’m not a news organization and I don’t have to pretend to be objective: Darren Wilson is a liar. He is a liar and a murderer and he is lying in his grand jury testimony and there is nothing that can convince me otherwise. Consider this:
“The third one could be fatal if he hit me right.”
This is Darren Wilson at the hospital, no more than a few hours after he murdered Mike Brown:
From head-on you have to look carefully to notice that his lower lip looks a little bit scraped. The redness on his face only vaguely resembles a bruise; it looks more like a sunburn or a bad day with his razor to me.
This man wants us to believe that he thought he was being beaten to death. Wants us to believe that Michael Brown was so mighty, so powerful and enraged, that he could have beaten a grown man to death with three punches.
No.
He literally calls Michael Brown a “demon” on page 225 of the testimony, the same page where he slips and calls Brown “it” instead of “he.” He says that holding onto Brown’s arm was “like a five-year-old hanging onto Hulk Hogan.”
Darren Wilson, according to his own testimony, is six feet four inches tall and 210 pounds. He is not a small man by any means. What he is is a liar. Michael Brown was murdered a hundred and fifty feet away from Darren Wilson’s car. There are no official police photographs of the body because supposedly the photographer forgot to charge his batteries. And Wilson’s story hinges on a call in to dispatch that, somehow, dispatch just magically never got.
This man is a liar and a murderer. His description of the events not only fail to line up with direct evidence– the location of Brown’s body and the evidence of hisown face make this perfectly clear– but his story from the beginning fails to pass the smell test in any meaningful way. He describes a cloud of dust rising as Brown charges him (p. 226) and, astonishingly, claims that Brown was “almost bulking up to run through the shots” (p. 228), as if this young black man was literally the Hulk or some sort of inhuman monster.
He also describes Brown as charging him with one hand in his pants. He’s wanting to make us believe that he thought Brown had a gun; I’m too busy trying to picture the image of a person bent over and charging headfirst toward someone with one hand down his pants to even consider the possibility. It’s so ridiculous that I can’t even talk about it in a straightforward manner. The image is comical.
The grand jury, remember, didn’t have to convict this person. That wasn’t their job. Their job was to decide whether it was reasonable to take him to trial. Let that float through your head for a moment. This man killed an unarmed teenager in the streets, claimed that he was being beaten to death and yet has marks on him less severe than my toddler has inflicted on me, claimed that, at 6’4″ and 210 pounds he was “like a five-year-old” next to an eighteen-year-old kid barely an inch taller than him… and the grand jury didn’t think there needed to be a trial.
Incidentally: he repeatedly insists that Michael Brown hit him with his right hand while he was punching him through the car window.
Darren Wilson was in the driver’s seat of his police car.
Brown was hitting him with his right hand, beating him nearly to death, according to Wilson’s testimony.
And the bruises and marks are on the right side of Wilson’s face.
Think about that for a moment.
The sickness in this country is very nearly too much to bear.
A story, if you don’t mind. Two, actually. Oddly, both take place on the same highway.
I am driving in the left lane on 465 south, the Indianapolis bypass. It is late at night, and I am (admittedly) speeding. I pull alongside a vehicle on my right side, who is more or less matching my speed. I glance in my rear-view mirror to see a vehicle in the distance behind me, a vehicle that goes from “in the distance” to “ten feet off my bumper” in a matter of seconds.
The car to my right is still not changing speed; the one behind me is very clearly in a huge hurry. So I accelerate to get out of his way. And the very second I hit 81 miles per hour– I did admit I was already speeding, but hitting 81 put me in a different bracket for my ticket– the unmarked cop car behind me hits the lights and pulls me over.
I was livid. If he’d pulled me over for the speed I was already driving at, I’d not have been so angry. I’d just have been busted. But I was literally only driving the speed he pulled me over for because he’d come out of nowhere and he was tailgating me. For all I knew, he was drunk– again, it was dark and an unmarked car; all I could see behind me were headlights.
I’m not going to pretend that I remember the precise conversation, but I was not polite with the cop.
A second story, on the same highway: It’s nighttime this time too, I’m coming home from my college graduation party, and in fact am still wearing my graduation gown. This time, I just get popped for 75 in a 65 at a speed trap. (I feel compelled to point out here that I haven’t gotten a ticket of any kind in seven years. Just FYI.) It’s fair, and I’m not angry about it. Unfortunately, I can’t find my proof of insurance, or my registration, or something. I know it’s somewhere in the car, but it’s not in an envelope or anything and I can’t track it down. The cop tells me he’ll give me a minute to find it and goes back to his car to do whatever cops do for fifteen minutes when they pull you over.
I find my documents and, not thinking anything of it, get out of my car, my graduation gown still flapping in the wind, and walk back to his car to give him my papers.
He, absorbed in whatever he’s doing, doesn’t see me coming– doesn’t even realize I’m there until I tap on his window, startling him.
Now: tell the exact same stories, only imagine I’m black.
I got to wake up to this shit this morning, leafing through Facebook on my phone while trying to convince my legs and arms and torso that getting out of bed was going to be a thing that was physically and intellectually possible.
You may have seen the article yourself by now; the headline is “NYPD Officer Kills Baby Following Breastfeeding Argument.” It’s from a website that I’ve never heard of called the National Report. And I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with these people but everyone involved with the website and especially the author of the article desperately need the shit beaten out of them.
The National Report is, apparently, supposed to be a “satire” website, but they are painfully goddamned bad at their jobs. Important fact: this article is not true. It is, in fact, apparently entirely made up.
The problem here is twofold:
We live in a world where the NYPD, and basically police departments across the country, are so militarized and out-of-control that there is no reason to initially disbelieve the article; and
There isn’t so much as a wink anywhere in the article or on the website itself to indicate that this story isn’t true.
This. Shit. Is. Not. Funny. There is no universe where you can make cops murdering babies a funny story, and if you think there is you are in desperate motherfucking need of mental health care. If you’re reading this right now going “hurr durr librul no sense of humor,” do me three favors: 1) unsubscribe me, 2) never read anything I write ever the fuck again and 3) kill yourself. You are not human and I do not want you in the same world as me.
I read through the damn article begging for a sign that it was a satire or a joke or a hoax and couldn’t find one; only a subsequent Google search led me to the Snopes page that indicated it was false. Looking around at the National Report’s front page would have helped, but the site frequently seems to confuse “satire” with “flat-out spreading lies”– and the fact that they have appeared to have decided to double down with a follow-up articlestating that the (again, nonexistent) arresting officer has been cleared of all charges is just further proof that these people are fucking horrible, horrible scumbag meat-things whose bodies are in the shape of humans but appear to be missing some critical component– let’s call it a “soul”– that leads you to realize that cops killing babies isn’t fucking funny.
Fuck you, National Report, for even considering this bullshit, much less for the follow-up article, and fuck you, NYPD, for being such a fucking lawless street gang that this article doesn’t immediately fail the smell test.
Fuck today, too, while I’m at it. I don’t need this shit.
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