I have thought about Officer Ed McCarthy many times over the last 4-1/2 years, wondering what distance has come to separate the inherently good, entirely service oriented Irish cop of my childhood from the brutish, thuggish types that answered my desperate calls for help when our family was in crisis. I've thought about him often in these days when the police have been so often in the news, at the vortex of a rising tide of inexplicable violence tinged with racism. I remembered him, with fondness, as our city buried a seemingly "good cop" who died trying to talk a young black man out of suicide in the heat of the summer.
What is it, I wonder, that makes for a "good cop?" Over the years, I've known many law enforcement personnel; parents to the children who have passed through my classroom. They are as uniformly human as parents of any other profession -- some are wise and kind and perceptive while others are frighteningly angry, mean-spirited, and vindictive... It is my observation, based on limited data, that not everyone is cut out for police work; and that not all who begin the work should continue it. The truth is that, in the performance of their duties, police see things that are hard to witness, and that can work to change them for the worse. Some are strong enough, but not all of them.
Every time I hear another report of a young black man, woman, or child shot by a white police officer, I wonder why it matters what the respective racial identities might be. Is it measurably worse, or better, for an armed police officer who is black to shoot an unarmed white citizen? I don't mean to deny the depth of the pain at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement in this country. I think that anger and pain is entirely appropriate and justified. I do however wonder if our fixation on the race of the officers and their victims obscures a very salient fact: Police should belong to us. They should come from our communities. They should know us, and we should know them. They should serve as we choose for them to do, and they should yield only the powers with which we endow them.
As police departments have moved toward an increasingly militarized stance; equipped with weaponry and technologies developed for the battlefield, is it any wonder that our streets have come to seem like war zones? How is it possible to police a neighborhood that is populated entirely by strangers -- the other? How can we send young men and women out to prevent violence and protect the citizenry, if they do not know those same citizens. Shouldn't our police be our brothers and our sisters? Shouldn't the cop who patrols our streets know the elders in our communities; the power brokers; the neediest of our neighbors? Shouldn't our children flock to greet our neighbors who serve and protect? And -- shouldn't they be entirely safe and welcome in doing so?
I think there are some BAD cops. I think there are some very bad cops; people who haven't the moral strength or judgement to fit them for that so very important role. But I think there are some, even now ... decades from my childhood, who serve with honor and dedication and a sense of mission, and they should be the models for the future of a better kind of policing. Our police ought to come from us. They ought to be "of" us; raised in our neighborhoods, and intimately familiar with us. They ought to derive their powers from our consent, and they should have no power at all except what we give to them. We ought to be able to clearly define what it is we need them to do, and we ought to negotiate with them about how those needs can and should be met. From the streets of Detroit to the sidewalks of Liberal, Kansas, there should be no police with power to destroy our children's lives. They ought to work with us, for us, beside us. We ought to embrace them and hold them close.
As long as police see the citizens who are theirs to protect as "THEY," there is a problem. As long as we see our police as "THEY," there is a problem. Policing is hard work, and it is work that we need to have done well. But as long as we are not defining the parameters of that police work, we will continue to be served badly, and that is not a function of race.
Sue, I too look back with a nostalgic fondness to the cops of my youth; individuals who would stop when my gf and I were walking up from the highway and drop us home; who you could speak to - a real dialogue; Men (primarily - it was the 60s/70s) who truly took the adage "to serve and protect" to heart. Of course there were probably lots of times they weren't great - no one has ever denied cops are human too - but my GOD- where are those police today? I often tell people the cops had to work long and hard to make me dislike, despise and have ZERO respect for them - it didn't come easy but required ripping every last drop of positive approbation I had for them at one point in time. The ones I see in Toronto on a regular basis are thugs, stormtrooper mentalities with an us (the cops) versus "them" -mentality that sees the populace as the enemy - together with a completely unearned sense of entitlement and belief of their being above the law. From dragging my children from under the hooves of stormtroopers in full riot gear at a PEACEFUL - duly organized LEGAL protest against poverty to the horrors of the G20 here which continue to haunt me - I have ZERO respect and ZERO belief in the cops of this City.
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