Let's stop affirming the idea that police officers are the enemy

How would you react if someone suggested that black people in general were a problem in society because a tiny percentage of black people commit crimes? You’d consider that racist garbage, and you should.

The black community is a collection of smart, hard-working people. No one wants crime out of their own community more than they do. It can be a struggle to eradicate it, but people should not have any doubt that the black community by-and-large wants it eliminated.

The same can be said for America’s police community. Clearly there are some cops who abuse their positions and authority who need to be fired. That’s why we’ve offered some of the proposals you’ve seen on this site over the past several days.

But it’s tragic in the extreme that, in the course of asserting one societal group’s right to be treated with respect and dignity – with no stereotypes or broad-brush indictments – we are treating the other group in the exact way we demand others not be treated.

Police officers are not the enemies of black people. They’re not anyone’s enemies. Not even criminals. They are people in charge of protecting the public from crime. That requires them to apprehend people who pose (or who may pose) a threat to others, and it often requires them to ask questions in the course of investigating such crimes.

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It is not police officers job to hurt people, and almost none of them want to. It is not their job to kill people, and with the most infinitesimal number of exceptions, none of them want to.

In 2019, according to the FBI, 48 American police officers were murdered while performing their duties. Another 41 were killed in accidents while in the line of duty. Over the course of American history, more than 22,000 police officers have given their lives in the line of duty.

If you’re a cop, the odds of this happening to you are quite long, but you never know when you’re going to walk into a situation that requires you to implement your training to protect your own life. Six of the murdered officers listed above were simply making traffic stops. Four were working on investigations. Three were attempting to serve search warrants.

Cop-killings don’t happen as often as the TV makes it seem, but they are an ever-present danger for every law enforcement officer. These are people who spend every day trying to help troubled people, victims of violence and even perpetrators of crime. The job imposes so much stress that many suffer mental breakdowns as a result. Many resort to alcohol and other self-destructive coping mechanisms as well.

This is no excuse for killing George Floyd. It is no excuse for the mistake that saw Breonna Taylor gunned down in her own home in Louisville. It is no excuse for the shoving of 75-year-old Martin Gugino in Buffalo. Whether we’re talking about mistakes or intentional abuses, incidents like this need to stop and stop now.

I often hear people in journalism complain that it’s not right to criticize police officers because what they do is so important. Precisely. That is why it’s important, and such a big deal, to discuss when they police irresponsibly. As a supporter and defender of police officers, I can do no less than to take the same position about policing.

That’s exactly why I advocated yesterday for the weakening or elimination of police unions so that police officers would revert to at-will employment. This would make it much easier for departments to fire people like Derek Chauvin, who already had multiple reprimands on his record before he encountered George Floyd.

But the fever pitch of the moment finds it much more troubling about police officers gaining mainstream acceptance. The very liberal mayor of Minneapolis was booed out of a protest on Sunday because he refused to endorse defunding the police department entirely. Over the weekend, A&E refused to air its most popular show, LivePD, because it was afraid of taking heat in an anti-police environment. Likewise, Paramount refused to air Cops for the same reason, and has actually scrubbed any mention of the show from its web site.

That is the atmosphere in which police officers are now operating. Calls for their complete elimination are being treated as serious proposals. Television shows that depict police officers positively are removed from the broadcast schedule.

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In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, writer Alyssa Rosenberg proposed that all TV cop shows be canceled. This is how far we’ve gone culturally toward the idea that police officers – by their very nature – are the enemy of civilized society.

Of course, police officers are essential to the preservation of civilized society. It’s astonishing that the same people who have been saying for years that the public doesn’t need guns, because the police will protect them from crime, now wants the police done away with. Anyone who doesn’t understand this should check out the 2013 film The Purge, which depicts a 24-hour period in which all crime – including murder – is legal. This is essentially what the disband-the-police people are asking for.

And with emotions running high right now, there’s a real danger that politicians will give this movement far more of what it wants than they should. The same politicians who overreacted to the coronavirus and completely destroyed the U.S. economy are perfectly capable of a similar overreaction that will lead to record-high crime and murder victims to rival the COVID-19 death toll.

I understand the calls for different training, and for certain techniques to be banned. But what people need to understand is this: In the situations referenced above, police weren’t following their training. They were acting in contradiction to their training. That’s why things went wrong. You can change the training all you want, but training isn’t going to make a fundamentally bad cop a good one.

No form of police training tells you to keep your knee on a handcuffed suspect’s neck for nine minutes. Derek Chauvin wasn’t trained to do that. He did it because he’s a bad cop, not because he’s poorly trained.

The solution is to root out the bad cops while providing the necessary support to keep the good ones safe, healthy and mentally strong. Good cops are among the most valuable assets in this society. And they want very badly to keep members of the black community – along with everyone else – safe.

I understand the importance right now of listening to black people’s concerns, and to saying much less than we hear. At the same time, it isn’t going to help them or anyone else if we nod and affirm diagnoses of the problem that are simply not accurate. Demonizing police officers and making them all out to be the enemy will take us nowhere toward making the black community safer.

The police are not the enemy. Black people are not the enemy. People need to listen to each other, hear each other out and embrace a clear understanding of the struggles each of us face. We do not need to indict each other with broad stereotypes that promote mistrust and work against understanding.

It’s wrong to look at all black people with suspicion. It’s wrong to deny them the benefit of the doubt you would give to anyone else. Everyone – whether they think they’ve been guilty of this or not – should contribute to the establishment of a society in which no one does these things.

And the same goes for the police. They’ve got issues to deal with, and we need to make sure they deal with them. They also have one of the hardest and most important jobs in the world, and we need to give the front-line cops the same love and support we would want in our own jobs. Because almost all of them deserve it.