Ahhhh… Priorities

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It is nice to see the right to free assembly finally respected. No pepper spray or beatings here. No targeting peaceful demonstrators. No bullying the free press. No wrangling groups of people like they are cattle until they have no where else to go. It is good to see some things are important enough for the authorities to give free voice to the people. Especially when they are allowed to y’know, shoot people and set cars on fire over a FUCKING BASKETBALL GAME!!!!

In the common internet parlance: America, I am disappoint. Through months of mostly peaceful protest Occupiers have been sprayed, they have been beaten, they have had their heads smashed into windows, been left for hours without food or bathroom facilities after arrest and generally bullied by the cops. During all this too much of the narrative in this country has been built around the idea that somehow these protesters have deserved this treatment. Agree or disagree with them as you want, but these protesters have been making sacrifices and putting themselves in harm’s way to make this country a better place, not just for themselves, but for you as well.

Maybe they have the wrong idea about what needs to be changed in this country though I am not inclined to believe so. Even if I did, how can we be happy living in a country where this can happen to people trying to do right but meanwhile mass destruction of property on a scale that dwarfs anything done by the handful of bad apples in the Occupy Movement and violence against other people to celebrate a game is treated with a collective yawn. Oh it made the news, where it was treated like a “boys will be boys” situation.

Through this new social and political awakening I have been, and remain, mostly optimistic about the direction our country is taking.  If we are going to keep this momentum though, we have to call our media and our authorities out on these little hypocrisies. I am glad that the cops did not cross any lines in Kentucky, I am, but really, this isn’t about them, it’s about us, and how we react to these two very different groups of people.

Justice Is Blind, Not Deaf

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We put a lot of trust in cops. We need to. It is important to know that they are able to do their jobs with as little obstruction as the liberties we hold dear will allow. It is a potentially dangerous job that even if one is never in a position of having to pull out one’s sidearm is still stressful.  They have been given the power of life and death over us, with provisions, and it is important that we can trust them with it. Which is why incidents like this one bother me so much.

It is also why, as Professor Turley points out, it is so important for citizens to be able to record the activities of the police. We need to remain constantly vigilant for this kind of abuse, or else it will become common place. We have no way of knowing for certain how often this happened before citizens began carrying recording devices, though it doesn’t take much of a leap to think it happened more often considering they were less likely to get caught. It is part of human nature. These men and women are no worse of people than the rest of us, but the power we trust them with throws them in temptation’s way, which is why we need to make sure we have buffers against the inevitable corruption power brings. First of those buffers should be a reasonably unrestrained ability for citizens to record their interactions with police.

Second on that list should be better training for cops. Some departments, not many any more, but some, do not require more than attending a police academy. In my sometimes humble opinion it should require no less than a four-year degree. It should also require annual or bi annual ethics courses for the entirety of one’s career and a similar schedule of courses training for conflict aversion and resolution. I am sure some forces have this kind of training available but it should be mandatory and regular.

Third the law needs to come down hard on those caught in such violations. As I said, the trust we give them, the potential for abuse that crosses the line into the truly horrific is too great. I am opposed to the death penalty and always will be, but an abuse of that trust, especially on the order displayed in this case, where the officers mock the victim for her powerlessness, should be met with the harshest penalty the law allows. The harm this corruption does to our entire society, to the psyche of the victim and to the safety of their fellow officers who now have to deal with a public that trusts them even less is too great to consider otherwise.

These ideas all represent the minimum that should be done to prevent this sort of thing from happening. There are likely a dozen or more ideas that I am sure some of you would like to share, and I hope you do, so we can share them with our leaders. If we fail to hold our guardians accountable, we fail them and we fail ourselves.

Police or Thugs?

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Does anyone here remember Officer Friendly? Do you remember how we were taught that the police are there to help us? Does the phrase “to protect and serve” still ring somewhere in your consciousness when you think of the cops? Is that how we still think of our “peace” officers or do we think of this, or this , or especially this? When we think of those incidents, what is our reaction?

I know for my part I am sickened. I do not understand the casual use of excessive force especially on the part of Lieutenant Pike. I also know that I am not alone. What has to happen in your head to make it OK to pepper spray peaceful protesters? Who would make a hero of such a person? At what point do we say, “well, she had it coming” to a child who has a less lethalweapon used against her? When did our admiration of the police turn into victim blaming supplication of their abuse of power?

One can blame 9/11 in part I suppose. The hero worship that poured out of that day for the brave (and sometimes foolish) actions of the police that day made us, as a culture, more ready to accept the legitimacy-no-matter-what attitude toward their actions. That alone does not explain it though. America’s love/hate relationship with the police swings on a pendulum, but that pendulum has been leaning wider toward worship over the course of my lifetime.

In my teen years we saw the cops worshiped, though not to this degree, as movie after movie praised maverick cops who laughed at politicians and liberals in their righteous war against (usually very dark skinned) drug lords. The cops were victims of bureaucracy in our collective eyes then, and during the Reagan years, mindless adulation of authority was the word of the day, as it had been through most of the fifties and the early sixties.

What really makes this strange though, this current cycle of apologists for police excess, is so many in this country have an increasingly anti-government attitude. Whether it is Occupy Protesters or Tea Party Marchers. I know that the Occupy Movement is not happy with the cops, but what about the Tea Party? Did they forget that the cops are part of the government? Or is it that their corporate backers make sure to instill a proper love for the police who, before all else, protect their property and privilege?

I know I’ve quoted Acton before, but here it goes again “power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No where is this more obvious to me then the video of Officer Feldman, the first link above. I know Mike Feldman, I know him to be a good man, but he put on the badge and was given licence to enforce the law as he saw fit. He was told by our culture that he can do no wrong so when it became more expedient to spray chemicals into the face of a drunken but non-threatening individual, he did so, confident that he would not be questioned and confused when he was.

They are our servants, all of ours. They should not get their marching orders from the moneyed elite and we should not receive carte blanche approval of their actions. We allow them the power to harm and kill us in the name of keeping us safe. Because of this, we have a responsibility to ourselves to make sure they do not abuse that power, and to question every time they use it.