The other day I was doing some target shooting at a private range with a cop I know, and we started talking about the very common dislike of cops found throughout society. Which got me to thinking. A few observations:
There is a clear difference between the sexes in attitudes toward the police. White women, with only one exception I can think of, do not seem to harbor a personal resentment of the police. White men often do.
Libertarian types often see the police as the jackbooted storm troopers of an authoritarian state. Since most cops are local, this seems to me a bit overdrawn. (The Montgomery County SS? I don’t think so.) Some of the federal outfits, as for example BATF, do come pretty close to being storm troopers. But I know intelligent guys who really see all cops of any kind as the spearhead of dictatorship. Part of their outlook — at least of libertarians I know — is that many if not most laws should be repealed, as for example those outlawing drugs. They don’t seem to make a distinction between laws they don’t like and the people who enforce them.
The tendency is for people to see in the police the frightening face of whatever they don’t like. I know a guy in California who is involved in the fathers movement, these being men who want, among other things, to change the hostile attitude the courts have to men in divorce cases. He really believes that cops hate fathers and want to take their children away. Guys who hunt or shoot not infrequently think the police want to confiscate everyone’s guns. (Actually most cops, though not all, are supporters of the Second Amendment.)
There runs through all of this a (italics) desire (close italics) to hate the cops. The facts are irrelevant. I hear assertions like, “All cops lie on the stand.” Some cops do. The guy I’m thinking of insists that all, without exception, lie. For these folk there seems to be an emotional satisfaction in hating the police.
Note that I’m not talking here about people with rational grounds for being angry. Some people have had genuinely bad experiences with the police, having run into incompetent, rude, brutal, or dishonest officers. In departments with low standards, you can find lots of bad cops. Corrupt departments exist. New York, for example, is famous for corruption. The dislike I’m talking about isn’t tied to specific misbehavior. Often it borders on fantasy.
Minorities manage to see the police as the tools of racial oppression, regardless of the race of the cops. This isn’t news. From blacks, however, I get email saying that the police are part of a complex conspiracy. The belief is that the US government imports drugs to destroy the black community, and then the cops arrest blacks on drug charges to further damage black people. Again, never mind that in many urban jurisdictions the police are black themselves. One fellow emailed me that the police put blacks in prison so they’ll get AIDS, which he believed to have been invented by whites to kill blacks.
In all of these people, there is absolutely no desire to know anything about the police. None of them ever say, “Fred, you ride with cops. What do cops really think about this or that? What kinds of people are they? Do they really want take over the country, spread HIV, and beat people up? What are things actually like downtown?”
Instead they assume that they understand cops perfectly, despite for the most part never having been in a police car or knowing any cops. For some reason everybody’s an expert on the police. People don’t think they know everything about agricultural policy, but casually assume that they grasp the inmost motivations of anybody who carries a badge. Usually accompanying this curious certainty is the view that, because I spend time with cops, I have been brainwashed.
What is happening, pretty clearly I think, is that a lot of anger about other things is getting displaced onto the police. That’s psychobabble, but it happens. This is obvious in the case of minorities who imagine conspiracies. Among white males, the hostility definitely appears more often in guys who carry around a lot of generalized anger. And they profoundly resent authority. It isn’t bad things the police do that rub them wrong. It’s what the police are.
The consequence is that cops can’t win this one. They are going to be disliked by a lot of guys no matter what they do.
Late to the party on this one, just getting caught up on articles.
For the guys with a lot of generalized anger, how much of that anger is because they are POS’s as human beings, because they lack introspection to see just how sh*tty they are? How many of those apples didn’t fall far from the tree? Anger is a childish technique someone uses to put the other person (so they think) into a conciliatory posture so the angry person gets what they want. Why do we continue to tolerate it as a society?
How much of negative police contact is self-inflicted? How much could be avoided by people behaving like adults in an advanced society? What if those people had not made a lifestyle choice of refusing to be honest with themselves and others? How many of these issues and personality defects could have been avoided with parenting techniques that went beyond “Ah’m gonna whup yew!” or the suburban equivalent “Wait till your father gets home!”
When does society stop countenancing self-deception and childish behavior and start expecting people to behave like adults? “Because we said so” – and wrapped in that are standards which are better for society than letting people do whatever pleases them since they were children.
We have sewers and airplanes and spacecraft because we enacted higher standards. We demanded better from people, and got it. How many cops would say that you can arrest your way to a better society? Has that worked, anywhere, ever? What happens if we demand better of ourselves, our families, and our communities, and allowed those communities to fix their own problems?
What happens when you tell small children “There is something greater than you in control of everything, give it up to that Greater Thing”? Is that the most insidious seed we could plant in young minds, and how much of that is the root of society-wide self-deception and every addiction? When you externalize effects in a small child’s mind, and you do that to **nearly all of them** how do you expect them to become responsible adults?
What would society look like from the cop’s perspective if we stopped raising children who look externally for every meaning and satisfaction? What would that do to a cop’s outlook if they did not have to wade through the worst of society every day and the horrors they see because of it? Those people who are the worst of society were tabula rasa babies at one point. What got them to where they ended up? Maybe that would be the thing to focus on, huh? Rather than a human cop’s response to swimming in that pool *every* *day*?
Is it the cops that need to change or the behavior of the people? Which do you think should be first? The problem with letting things slide is that the perceived changes lag more and more behind the deployed solution. It will take wherewithal and guts on everyone’s part to get to that better place. Are wherewithal and guts features of our current society? No? More’s the pity, but that was each person’s choice.