Peace Enforcement in America Today

I have been struggling with how to write this piece. While most of my friends and family would tell you that it’s a rare occasion I don’t freely speak my mind (and they’d be right), I go about writing this piece very aware of how perception impacts what we read or hear. In this case, I want my meaning to be very clear; non-arguable; not easily misunderstood. I want my statements to be precise to the point of removing any chance of ambiguity – even for those who are seeking specifically to see meanings other than what I intended. There are a couple of “warning statements” I feel I need to voice here to assist with clarity.

I don’t condone, in any way, Officer Chauvin’s actions in Minneapolis. Whether his conduct and performance ultimately is proven to be unprofessional or criminal (or both), at best he needed to be disciplined and at worst he needed to be imprisoned. Which way that goes will depend on the evidence and the jury.

I believe that much of the angst and anger felt toward Officer Chauvin has less to do with the in-custody death of an arrestee and more to do with a breach of trust.

I believe that the mainstream media intentionally and wantonly, without regard for outcome or even motivated to inspire as much violence as possible, sensationalizes every potentially racial incident that they can. Doing so not only increases their viewership and thereby raises their advertising revenue, but it also inflames tempers leading to more incidents of violence, thereby creating even more “news” for them to report on. They make their own jobs easier by inciting conflict in society. Think about that one and understand that this motivation has nothing to do with reporting the news, impartiality, professional journalism, etc. It’s all about ratings and easy work.

Now, moving on…

Our society faces a challenge today. It’s one centering around trust, community and justice. It’s a challenge that exists between large segments of our society and all uniformed law enforcement professionals. I specify “uniformed” because most officers or deputies who wear a suit or plainclothes don’t usually have the same visual impact as uniformed officers. There’s a reason why “uniformed presence” used to be the first item on any use of force continuum. When a member of the public encounters a law enforcement officer, there are usually one of three reactions:

1.   Oh, look. A police officer. Let me say hi, thank him for being here and wish him a great day!

2.    Oh, a policeman. Um… what’s he doing here? Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to be worried?

3.    Uh oh, a cop! (followed by either running, lying, etc. because the person has some suspicious or criminal history they are trying to hide.)

Yes, there are a ton of variations in between those. There’s also one farther down the list that involves not lying and not running but actively assaulting with intent to harm or kill the officer. Which reaction a person has depends on many factors from what they were taught growing up to previous interactions with law enforcement professionals and even to their own behavior.

In my now 35+ years working in the law enforcement profession, I can’t begin to count the number of times I heard a parent say to a young child (“young” being under the age of ten), “If you don’t be good that policeman is going to lock you up and take you away!” Such statements can be heard daily all around the country and if that parent has said it once to a child, you can bet they’ve said it countless other times. Eventually, no matter how many police officers and/or deputies get down on their knees to greet that child, be friendly with that child and encourage that child to have faith in law enforcement… eventually the parent’s continuous negative statements and threats about the police will win in forming that child’s outlook. Eventually, that child will grow up completely incapable of having that first reaction, listed above, when they see a uniformed officer. They will have been conditioned from near birth to not trust the police at best, or to be afraid of the police, and that’s the “medium” option. The worst option is that they could grow up actually hating all uniformed law enforcement because their entire childhood was filled with being taught to be that way.

That’s vastly different from the parents who teach their children that law enforcement professionals are there to help them and society. I was raised by parents who taught me to appreciate the presence and services of law enforcement officers. I grew up watching The Andy Griffith Show and, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a police officer when I grew up. But I didn’t want to be a police officer who worked an area so busy that I ran from call to call to call just generating paperwork and statistics. I wanted to be a police officer in a place where I could spend time helping people and solving problems.

Sometimes solving a problem and helping someone meant making an arrest – and I made my fair share. Sometimes solving a problem and helping someone meant NOT making an arrest, but rendering some assistance and finding an equitable solution to a given situation. Early in my career I recognized the difference between keeping the peace – which to me meant exercising judicious use of discretion and focusing as much on helping people as on generating statistics – and enforcing the law.

I had a Chief once who told me that if I didn’t generate X number of pieces of paper (tickets, warning, reports, arrests, etc.) every shift, then I wasn’t doing my job. When I (probably not very respectfully) pointed out that I didn’t think law enforcement was only about finding every potential violation I could to generate as many pieces of paper and statistics as I could, but also helping people to improve the community we served, he told me I was in the wrong profession; that I had no business being a policeman. His statement: “If you don’t like arresting people, why are you the police?”

Well, the truth is, there were some people that I enjoyed arresting: the serial rapist that I happened to find in suspicious circumstance one evening, stopped, checked for warrants and quite happily put the handcuffs on.  Still, I didn’t SLAM the handcuffs on and he wasn’t injured in any way. He was arrested – but trust me: I WANTED to make it hurt. I did my best to maintain a professional demeanor and treat him impartially. I was there to be “coldly professional.” Had he resisted arrest, it would have been a different story. I would have used ‘that minimum force necessary to effect the arrest,” and there’s no way to tell what that level of force is until you’re in the fight.

There were also people I arrested where I really wished I hadn’t had to. It’s difficult to explain but there were people who broke the law – no matter how minor the violation – and due to agency policy, state law, whatever… I had no option but to arrest them. I always practiced good officer safety skills and I was, instead of coldly professional, neutrally courteous to them. They were the arrestee that would get to pick the radio channel we listened to on the way to central processing.

There were also people I could have arrested but didn’t – and got heavily criticized for it. I remember one habitual drunk in an area I worked who liked to get staggering drunk and walk down the middle of a state highway. That was always fun. His name was Billy. He was a nuisance. He wasn’t trying to commit suicide but he just didn’t care. In an earlier life, Billy had been an engineer. His wife and kids died in a house fire while he was on travel for work. He climbed in the bottle and never got out. But when I got the call for the drunk and disorderly in the roadway, did it always require an arrest? No. More often than not it meant getting Billy someplace he could sleep it off, get a meal, get clean and have a shot at getting his life back together. Arresting him would mean he’d have no choice but to be temporarily sober and he’d MAYBE get fed. He’d be released within eight hours and back on the street drunk again. To accomplish that I’d have tied up two to four hours of my own time, put a black mark on Billy’s already screwed up life, and tied up the time of at least three other people in the corrections and court system. At least one police captain I knew heavily criticized me for the way I dealt with Billy. “It’s not your job to help people,” he told me. “It’s your job to enforce the law.” To that captain, Billy was drunk in public and that required he be arrested and processed. That same captain refused to back me up on ANY call after the first time he witnessed me dealing with Billy and he even went so far as to order officers under his command not to back me up either.

I viewed dealing with Billy as a matter of keeping the peace and not enforcing the law. Yes, he disrupted traffic, but solving that problem was a simple matter of getting him out of the road. He had no home but the local homeless shelter knew him and when he wasn’t staggering drunk, he apparently worked hard at the homeless shelter to make up for the work he caused them and to “earn his keep.” Yep, that’s the guy I wouldn’t arrest for being drunk in public. In plenty of places in our nation, being drunk in public isn’t even a crime. I’ve been to Las Vegas far too many times and seen plenty of people drunk in public to make that big of a deal out of it. But for that captain I mentioned above, I was missing out on statistics and failing to enforce the law.

I share all that to “set the stage” so to speak. Quite thankfully, no one I arrested ever died in my custody. That’s more due to circumstance than anything I ever did right or wrong. I made my mistakes and any one of the folks I arrested could have died in my custody – but it wouldn’t have had anything to do with anything I did. Just like a lot of people, some of my arrestees had medical conditions that could have killed them at any time. A significant portion of people who live on the streets and/or those who are involved in a criminal lifestyle, have multiple underlying health conditions that continually threaten their lives. Think about people with horrific nutrition (not because they don’t have access to healthy foods but because they choose to live on energy drinks, alcohol and junk food), stroke-level blood pressure, accelerated or irregular heart rates and respiratory issues because they either smoke like a chimney – multiple packs of cigarettes per day – or they smoke a variety of drugs.

Then picture that person having an open warrant for whatever crime and they’re aware of it. They see a police officer approaching and start running. It’s not a long chase because they can’t really breathe that great to begin with and the last time they exercised was the last time they ran from someone. The chase ends in them being tackled (because that’s the only way they’ll stop) and they fight the police officer as s/he tries to get them into handcuffs. The level and strength of their fight determines the fight they get back and the force used against them. In the midst of this, they have a heart attack. Is it the police officer's fault?

There are two answers I would expect to get in today’s world:

Nope. It wasn’t the officer’s fault. He was doing his job and did nothing wrong and the person died as a result of their own choices.

OR

YES! If that police officer had just left that poor man alone, he wouldn’t have had to die. If the police had been gentler in arresting him or just helped him instead of arresting him… he wouldn’t have had to die today.

In other words, if the police officer had just ignored the fact that the man had an open warrant; if they had just ignored their duty and let him go; if they had not fought him at all when he resisted arrest; if they had taken whatever assault he presented to resist that arrest; if they had just… not existed, then that “poor” man wouldn’t have died.

Now I’m going to jump back to the beginning of this piece a bit and ask you: If you’re a person who has been raised by parents who have taught you to fear the police all your life, which reaction are you going to have?

Society today has a generational problem and it will take as long to fix as it has to create. As sad as it is to say, riots are nothing new. I’m sure the English Crown said that the Boston Tea Party was a “riot,” using whatever term of the time fit. I’ve seen recent social media posts from some college students claiming that the riots we’re seeing today are “revolutionary” and should be compared to the civil war. Their claim is that these riots are warfare of sorts and the only way to enact change in a broken system. These students seem to truly believe that all police officers who aren’t themselves African-American, black or People of Color (POC), are actively taught to oppress and subjugate everyone else. Some of those students even believe – and I should say, it’s not just students but regular adults in every day society – some of them believe that even black police officers are “Toms” and put their fellow officers before their “brothers” on the street – their fellow black people or POC. As I was saying, riots are nothing new. The Watts riots, Rodney King riots, Freddy Gray riots and now… George Floyd riots.

To the best of my knowledge, riots haven’t accomplished anything since the late 1960s and then it wasn’t rioting that created change but targeted, meaningful, peaceful protests. Laws were changed as a result of peaceful protests and meaningful dialogue. Rioting creates more conflict. Rioting creates a circumstance wherein there’s a greatly increased chance of physical conflict between law enforcement personnel and everyone out participating in the riot. A riot involves criminal destruction of private property, theft, and personal crimes of assault, battery and attempted murder or murder. All of these CRIMES being committed put law enforcement officials and officers in the position of having to go out and do their job: enforce the law and protect lives as well as private property. Those rioting seem to perceive the police presence as an even greater insult. How dare the police stop them from committing crimes; crimes that they are committing in response to a police officer having allegedly committed a crime?

Yes, I said allegedly and some people reading this probably get/got quite upset about it. All crime is ALLEGED crime until the case has gone to court. One of the arguments I’m hearing fairly constantly is that our entire justice department in the country needs to be revamped. I am open to suggestions and solutions, but so far all I’ve read or heard is complaints about how things are. Some of the complaints are accurate; most are not. Most are based on inaccurate sensationalized microscopic moments of time inflamed and magnified by mainstream media.

If there is to be a solution it will involve 1) more responsible reporting from all media outlets. They cannot continue to be allowed to intentionally inaccurately “report news” that inflames and explodes society. They are causing harm as much as the person who stands up in a crowded movie theater and screams, “FIRE!” 2) Discussions between respected leaders on both sides need to be held and solutions need to be identified, planned, coordinated and enacted.

NOTHING will change with the commission of crimes. NOTHING will be improved if the only reaction to current circumstance is to riot and commit crimes. We are better than this. America is supposed to be better than this.