Good Cop, Bad Cop.

Since people first came together in groups around campfires, there has been the problem of crime.   By it’s very nature, society begets criminals.  Some people just want to take advantage of other people.  It’s the way things are, it’s the way things have always been.  We learned long ago, that we can not rely on people to police their own behavior, so the idea was born of selecting a chosen few from among the masses to decide what rules we should follow as a society.  They were then tasked with enforcing those rules.   We try to carefully chose the most upstanding people among us to be the enforcers of our rules.  But despite our best efforts and intentions, like anything else, there has never been a way to perfect this process.   History has proven time and again that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Our law enforcers are not exempt from these rules.  They are the rules of the universe and that’s the way it is.  We try our best to weed out the corrupt, but the process can sometimes be difficult despite our best intentions.

You don’t have to turn far these days to see the headlines, webposts, tweets and newscasts screaming about the latest Police Officer being accused of use of excessive force or abuse of authority or even outright corruption.  Yes it’s happening.  It has been happening since the dawn of society.  There have and always will be people who abuse the authority vested in them by the rest of society.  As a Republican society, it is our duty to point out these people, call them out and do our best to weed them out of the positions of authority.  It is our responsibility as the harbingers of free speech to point these things out whenever we can.  Our founding fathers built our Constitution around this very principle. They thought so fiercely about it, that they made sure that the very first amendment to our Constitution protected the right to call out our elected and appointed representatives.

In our society, our media is a for profit business.  As such, the competition for advertising revenue is pretty fierce.  The historic trend in media has always been to look at what the most successful guy is doing and steal his ideas.  Right now, the most successful trend in media appears to be pointing out the abuse and corruption in our law enforcement and bringing it out into the light.  This attention is probably long overdue.  For way too long, our media has allowed too many incidents of abuse to fall by the wayside without the attention it deserves.  For some time, the media has had no interest in covering such events and have been more interested in making sure they keep up with their competition.  But now, the demand has come for stories about Police abuse, especially if we can mix some racial stuff in there with it to stir it up a bit.   If it’s a story about a white cop appearing to use excessive force with a black person, it’s going to sell.  It’s the story of the week.  That is just the trend in media right now.  News agencies appear to be attempting to make up for years of ignoring these stories by bombarding us with as many as they can, as fast as they can find them. 

While I absolutely applaud and approve of any effort to expose and remove any people from positions of authority who are abusive and corrupt, I have been starting to take exception to some of the stuff I am seeing floating around, especially on the internet where there is no standard for fact checking or accuracy in what people post and report. I see stuff posted every day that is postured like a news story, but lacks any actual quotes from witnesses or officials.  There is no evidence that the author ever asked for, or looked at any official reports. These posts are always chocked full of conjecture and hearsay and a whole lot of opinion, but usually pretty sparse on actual facts.  The end result of this is a lot of misinformation and innuendo being spread like a fire around corners of the internet.  I see way too many people that I respect and admire taking these so called reports as absolute fact without considering the source of the information.  I love the freedom and instant access of information that the internet provides, but these are the kinds of things that lead to conviction and sentencing of an accused before our society ever has a chance to give them their due process.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS ENTIRELY OPINION BASED SOLELY ON MY EXPERIENCE IN MY PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE.

(Not to be confused with websites pretending to be actual news outlets since this is a blog based entirely on my personal opinions)

As the “wife of a Police Officer”, I have had many opportunities over the years to see how much of the law enforcement process works.  I will state without hesitation that there are absolutely corrupt and abusive people in law enforcement that should not be where they are.  We need to weed them out for sure.  But there is something else that you are not seeing.  Something that I see every single day.  Something that will happen a hundred or a thousand times today in cities across the country.  It happens in every law enforcement agency in the United States with so much regularity that it becomes just another activity.  It goes mostly unnoticed and unmentioned.  It’s usually covered up by the perpetrators and hidden from view by the brothers on the thin blue line.  They will fiercely protect a fellow officer and lie about it to keep their secret.  If you ask about it, most officers will just shrug and give you a stupid look and turn away or change the conversation.

Every single day, Officers will dig into their own pockets to use their money to help someone in need.  They will buy food for a hungry person.  They will rent a hotel room for a homeless mother who has no food for her three children.  They will use their own time and resources to do their best to make sure she has some kind of foothold, any kind of foothold to get her started on the road to self reliance.  Officers will stop and help someone change a tire.  They will help someone cross the street, carry groceries for an elderly person despite the 45 pound gun belt they are already dragging on their hips.  They will dig clothes out of their own closet to bring to people at a hidden homeless camp in the woods because they know that the weather is about to turn.  They will take up a donation among the squad of underpaid road patrol officers to purchase a bicycle for an autistic boy because his parents are both struggling to pay the bills.  On his way home, that officer is going to bring a teddy bear that he purchased with his own money to a young boy at the hospital that was in a serious car accident yesterday.  There won't be any cameras there for that.  If there are, he will turn away and come back later after they leave.  It has been my experience that this kind of activity happens with far more frequency than abuse of authority.  I have personally witnessed these things hundreds of times, but pictures of an Officer fixing a tire apparently does not sell newspapers. That officer will go home at the end of a 12 hour shift, and turn on the news to a story about another officer abusing their authority, and they will sit and shake their head with the rest of us.  

With the sensory bombardment of “Cops being bad” it becomes very easy to allow ourselves to become enraged about the abuse of authority.  We should be enraged when it happens.  We should also reserve ourselves to responding with the appropriate jurisprudence for the situation. Bad people do bad things.  Sometimes good people do bad things. We need to remember that the media is in the business of selling us stuff. They are going to put their best spin on it to get us to buy it.  Rage is a pretty strong sales tactic and the media loves to use it.  It starts to become easy after a while to become jaded to all persons tasked with law enforcement positions. Especially if all we are seeing is stories of abuse repeated indefinitely only to be broken by the occasional commercial attempting to sell you the latest trendy prescription medication.  It becomes hard to remember that not only are Cops people too, they are almost invariably the people who go out of their way to help the guy next to them when there is no reward or gain in it for themselves.

So the next time that you are sitting in front of the television and you see a story come on about a Police Officer accused of using excessive force on someone, being corrupt or even being accused of general maleficence; just remember, there are probably dozens of law enforcement professionals watching the same story in front of their own TV's shaking their heads with you.  It is incredibly demoralizing for them because they know that not only does it cast a negative light on their entire profession, but it also washes over anything positive they have striven to silently achieve while no one was looking.