I’m taking a quick break from
bail to weigh in on the current, seemingly endless series of incidents concerning
law enforcement officers and the public, one of the latest occurring during an
undercover sting where I used to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A lot of people are
rightfully concerned that without cameras, we wouldn’t even hear about a lot of
the incidents, like the one in North Charleston, South Carolina, when the
officer shot Walter Scott eight times in the back.
Yeah, it was a good thing
somebody had a camera at the scene, because it appears that the officer in South
Carolina was getting ready to say something like, “He took my Taser, and so I
feared that he posed a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to
others.” These days, you can shoot a guy in the back and get away with it if
you say the right thing afterward.
But more cameras, including
body cameras on the officers themselves, aren’t the answer. Instead, the answer
to restoring the relationship between law enforcement and the people they serve
in America is a complete overhaul of practically everything that the officers currently
do.
Police departments and other
law enforcement entities should start with their mission statements, re-drafting
them with the help of citizens so as to memorialize the contract that allows
them to carry and use deadly weapons on our streets. Interacting with citizens
has to be positive for everyone. I know a police department today that actually
punishes its officers by making them work at the department’s front desk where the
public comes to ask questions. So when officers screw up in that department,
their punishment is to interact with people. How messed up is that? I’ve been
to that front desk, and the people working there aren’t the happiest campers on
the playground. The whole thing is a fundamental disconnect between the police
and the people they serve.
Law enforcement should also completely
change its hiring practices – I know another police department in Colorado that
didn’t want to hire ex-military or people with law enforcement experience;
instead, it hired waiters, who knew how to serve, and then taught those waiters
how to be police. The relationship between the police and the public in that
town, by the way, is exemplary.
Law enforcement should completely
change its training, too; the current method of training that involves giving
orders and ratcheting up the response based on the amount of resistance to
those orders is simply not working. Police and other officers must be taught to
diffuse environments, to occasionally back away, and to understand the overall
perspective of the situation.
Finally, law enforcement should
change its primary focus, which over the decades has slowly drifted from
protecting the public to protecting the officers. This isn’t the first time
that we’ve had to question our fixation with officer safety. After Columbine,
we recognized that officer safety was secondary to saving people’s lives in an
active shooter scenario. Quite frankly, if we’re all that concerned with
officer safety, we really shouldn’t allow undercover sting operations to begin
with. They’re pretty dangerous.
If I were younger and wanted
to create a social science theory describing what people wanted in their police
forces, I would call it “the Matt Dillon Theory” of law enforcement. If you’ve ever
watched Gunsmoke, then you know that Matt often ran headlong into danger to
help people. He faced the bad guys upright and played by the rules.
Occasionally, he’d have to shoot it out with them, but only if they’d been
warned and decided to shoot Matt first. He never shot women (hey, it was the
50s), drunks, or kids. And he never, and I mean never, shot anyone in the back.
In my opinion, that’s the kind of law enforcement officers we all want. What we
have, instead, is pretty far from it.
I like cops – I know a lot of
cops, and I used to work with cops when I wrote about a billion parking tickets
back in the day – but I can’t ignore what’s going on. The biggest public
backlashes we get in America are when single incidents reinforce and amplify
the public’s notions about what they already believe. The fact that people are
taking to the streets to protest these single incidents is because the people generally
believe all officers are angry, power hungry control freaks looking for a
fight. It’s going to take more than body cameras to change that
perception.
