It’s not hard for a cop to ruin your day
“In civilized life, law floats on a sea of ethics.”
W— Earl Warren
hen we were children, well-meaning adults often told us, “The policeman is your friend.” If you grew up in the times that I did, you might have been disabused of that notion fairly quickly—i remember in 1970 that a lawyer named Joseph S. Lobenthal, who’d just published a book called Growing Up Clean in America: A Guide to the Legal Complexities of Being a Young American, came and talked to my class. I don’t remember much about that visit, other than he gave a couple of my classmates very specific advice on how to stay out of juvie, and that he emphasized that although we were minors, we still had rights.
He told us not to be too friendly with the police. And I wasn’t—though I still went on camping trips with the police captain who lived next door and his three sons.
I had some uncomfortable experiences with law enforcement when I was a late adolescent, probably because—like most of my friends—i fit the profile of someone who might commit an offense. One of the most exciting couple of hours of my life was spent with customs agents in the Miami airport after I returned from several months in Brazil in 1978.
I also tended to keep late hours and to live where I could afford to—which was generally in shabby neighborhoods.
I didn’t really hold it against the police, because although I’d committed no crime, I understood that I belonged to a certain class—one that the police saw as rife with potential troublemakers. I learned that whenever I spoke with them I should be deferential and polite, though not to the point that they perceived my act (for it was an act) as ironic.
I spent a good deal of my early working life in police stations and sheriff’s offices, scanning booking records, picking up reports and chatting with whoever would tell me anything about what was “really going on.” I drank a lot of detective bullpen coffee. I became friendly enough with some officers to play basketball with them. I like to think I learned something about police culture.
Like any insular society, they tend to see the world in Manichean terms—you’re either with them or against them, you’re either cop or civilian. Many of them feel underappreciated and misunderstood, and that the general public regards them as a necessary nuisance.
They are mostly right about that. Almost nobody wants to see the police unless and until they need them.
I have needed them a couple of times in the past few years, and in those encounters they have been unfailing professional, courteous and even kind. But then they didn’t—as previous generations of peace keepers did—see me as a potential source of trouble. And I spoke softly and kept my hands where they could see them. The difference between my attitude now and the attitude I had when I was a punk kid is that my respect for law enforcement is genuine—i understand how difficult their work is and I don’t mean to make it harder.
I know most of them are good people, doing their best.
Still, whatever you might think your rights are, the truth is you are at a disadvantage whenever you are speaking to a police officer. Things can go wrong very quickly.
Maybe it shouldn’t be like this, but I understand why it is. As a society, we really only pay lip service to the value of police officers—we don’t pay them well, hence we can’t require them to be demonstrably better than average people. We like to believe that a lot of them are just that, but then we like to believe that of any modestly compensated but critical profession. We valorize cops, soldiers and teachers with our rhetoric, yet we grumble about what they cost us.
The truth is it’s not that difficult to become a policeman, to carry a gun and a badge and exercise dominion over your fellow citizens. We need police, and we will only pay so much to get them, and we can only select from the pool of applicants we get. And people want to be police officers for all sorts of different reasons. Some of these reasons are honorable, others not so much.
Some of them want to carry a gun and a badge for the wrong reasons. Some police officers are bullies. Some are thugs. Some are criminals.
I don’t think the policemen I used to know would be offended by these observations—i know most of them would agree with them.
Obviously people in all walks of life are capable of abusing power (some people in my business tend to romanticize bullies, to equate anger and bluster with dedication or tough-mindedness, probably because they remember how Lou Grant used to bellow at Rossi). But most of us don’t wield the kind of power over individuals that police officers do. It’s not terribly difficult for a cop to ruin your day if that’s what he decides to do.
They ruined Dr. Joe Thompson’s day recently—and he didn’t deserve that. I can easily imagine myself in our surgeon general’s place when the police showed up at his door because some rent-a-cop complained that a homeowner had jumped ugly with him. I can even imagine that I might have been less patient than he under the circumstances.
The good news is that reasonable people can listen to the audio. (Thank you, Freedom of Information Act.) They can judge for themselves how the parties involved acted.
We might all agree that we don’t want bullies among our police, we might administer the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to potential recruits and have them sit down and talk with a doctor, but we need police officers. And some people are very good at appearing to be reasonable, grounded people free of grievance.
Most of us get our ideas about what it must be like to be a cop from the movies or television shows. We all say we understand that real life is not like the movies, but not all of us really understand that. There are people who want to be cops so they can carry guns. There are people who carry guns who imagine themselves Dirty Harry, who imagine themselves Charles Bronson.
Not every uniform contains a fascist, but every fascist craves a uniform.