Thanks for helping me out when I had once again overestimated what I could get done and underestimated how long any one task is going to take. Great wedding weekend although it seems as though the entire state of Georgia is under construction. Here's something I learned: blowing bubbles out the window of a car sitting on the interstate in traffic makes women smile, children laugh, and men irritated.
First I'll go back to our other discussion for a moment: Agreeing that criminality is overstating much of what we're talking about, probably most. As I stated early on the problem we are having with it is the law which must have a standard to go by when in reality it would take great wisdom on a case by case basis to come to a fair and wise decision based on each individual circumstance.
I read the question you posed and answered it in my mind before I got to the end of the sentence. Safe. The only time I feel fear when seeing a police presence isn't when seeing an officer but when seeing a police car when I'm driving. Like everyone else I'm afraid of being pulled over. Blue lights make us all nervous. But if I am in a business or restaurant and a police officer enters, that presence makes me feel safer than I did before. Those feelings are based on my experiences with officers who have been polite when ticketing me for some infraction where I know I've been guilty and times when they've been needed and responded promptly and courteously. Also a couple of incidents when accidentally summoning them to the house earned a certain three year old boy a badge and friendly lecture about what constitutes an emergency.
Are these experiences the result of being white, privileged, middle class? Maybe. Even probably. I have never been stopped unnecessarily. Certainly never harassed or even made uncomfortable. But even so somewhere in the back of my mind rattling around is the awareness that here's a guy with a gun and a badge and authority along with some scenes from movies with bad cops. There are plenty of real life stories of corruption and cover ups so the concept is hardly a foreign one. Where I think we enter dangerous territory is when we start to assume that it's the majority.
Most officers want to do their job, protect their community and go home at the end of their shift. If anything the day in and day out of the profession makes them less, not more likely to behave in a way that would interfere with doing any of those things. When we see a uniformed officer assuming that he is a danger in some way isn't any more accurate than assuming everyone in a military uniform loves war and bloodshed. Or that every black teenager hanging out on a corner is dealing drugs and belongs to the neighborhood gang. That we see this trend in white officers shooting black suspects is tragic and disgusting. But lets dispense with promoting fear when it isn't necessary. It isn't fostering the reconnection you allude to in your closing.
The South Carolina case is murder. For whatever reason the officer shot an unarmed man in the back as he was running away. And hardly at a pace that would have stopped the policeman from running him down to grab and handcuff him. Were it not for the video this officer could tell the standard story of being in fear for his life and having no choice but to shoot. We can only hope that the placement of the wounds would have been cause for a serious and in depth investigation. Based on other cases it's doubtful.
It's fairly common knowledge that police are not supposed to discharge a weapon simply because a suspect is fleeing. An officer would have to prove that they were a danger to others. The old "stop or I'll shoot" is against protocol on modern police forces.
The majority of officers are working hard to make their communities better places. Many of them have diverse backgrounds and are college educated. But it does attract a particular personality. According to psychologists police officers tend to be:
Pragmatic
Isolative
Prejudice
Conservative
Suspicious
Cynical
Assertive
Action oriented
But these traits only hold true after several years on the job. The psychological testing that takes place before being admitted to the academy is meant to weed out particular personality type and avoid a force comprised of any one particular type of individual. The problem may be that, like politics, it's the job itself and the power it involves that corrupts the individual over time.
We are asking people to take on the work that few of us would want to do and perform it for years without being changed by it while operating in more stressful situations than most of us will every experience. That may be the root problem that needs solving and doing it in some way that doesn't lose the valuable experience of men and women in uniform is going to prove a challenge
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