Digging for Answers

Professor J,

My good man, we are struggling lately, aren't we? Or is that just me? But then we have been tackling a couple of issues that don't have easy answers. Although the older I get the more I think that things are more complex than I previously thought, that it's impossible to have all the information to make a fully informed decision, and we may not even understand the actual roots of lots of the issues we face.

In my last post I noted two separate uses for video documentation of police actions, I thought it went without saying that such footage wouldn't solve the layers of complexity involved in all of these cases. I meant only that the near universal access to cell phones results in publicizing these incidents and allows any citizen who witnesses such actions to document them. In supporting the use of cameras on and around police officers my thinking was that it might affect an officer's behavior occasionally (even once would matter) but the usefulness would also prove to document events and actions so that we no longer just rely on the officer or the suspect to give an accurate accounting of their actions. You are correct in saying that police in the past have tampered with or seized footage of this sort. For cameras to be effective in any real way tampering with them would have to bring about strict penalties. Think pilots tampering with the black box on their aircraft once the flight is under way.

Monday night the situation in Baltimore devolved into violence and I followed the events via CNN and Twitter. Social media provides a rawer version of people's attitudes than reporters are able to capture even on live television. The statements tweeted by a cross section of the country revealed underlying attitudes. First there is an huge amount of racism and an ugly disrespect for others that people are willing to express in a semi-anonymous form. But I think we all really know this already. The second thing is that people in the neighborhoods affected have great insight, dignity, and in many cases a sense of humor and insider perspective. But the third thing and the one I want to focus on is the devastating lack of understanding of poverty and its repercussions in this country.

I was shocked and saddened by the missing compassion in many of the statements. Limited to 140 characters people only have enough space to say what they actually believe (or think is clever) and not to flesh out complete philosophies. It's surprising how many people believe that poverty is a choice or a result of laziness instead of a systemic problem that affects the psyche of a human being and over time a neighborhood or culture. This is true in third world countries where we see people behave in ways that illustrate their hopelessness (images of young people throwing rocks at police in riot gear looked a lot like Palestine) but here, in America, it takes on an extra layer of cruelty. Here due to our consumptive lifestyles and the prevalence of advertising and reality TV we ask people to live under impoverished conditions while pressing their faces up against the glass of wealth and privilege. Then we just can't imagine what all the anger is about.  Because, after all, shouldn't they just go to college and work harder?

But then ask the people who tout that philosophy if college should be provided for free or student loan debt erased...

...or whether they want to invest in public transportation so people without cars can actually get to a job...

We send a lot of mixed messages. This week a mother who saw her son on television taking part in the riots and chased him down on the street is being praised for hitting him and cursing him. That video has gone viral. Meanwhile middle class parents praise her while increasingly shying away from physical punishment for their own children who are obviously misunderstood by teachers and others in authority when they are behaving badly. We cut government assistance and demand that single mothers find work, then the other night on CNN the black reporter wanted to know where all the parents of the young rioters were. It didn't seem to occur to him that it was possible they could be their jobs.

One of the underlying causes of all of these issues is that with poverty comes a lack of safety and a feeling of security that the middle class has no understanding of. Last week in my city a young girl was killed when a gang drove by and shot her to death while she was sleeping in her own bed and another child was killed playing in her own front yard.

We have trouble imagining why someone would fear the police because in our everyday lives we feel safe. There were a lot of jokes with pictures last night on Twitter about why people would steal toilet paper while looting a store. No one was taking a moment to think what those images, and there were a lot of them, might mean. One of the parts of feeling safe is feeling that you have enough. We don't seem to grasp that our cities have entire neighborhoods of citizens who don't know what the safety of enough feels like. I'm not condoning the behavior (do I really have to say that?) but pointing out that the disconnect we have leads to a dangerous lack of understanding and empathy which is getting to at least the first layer of these issues.

Having said all this, I return to the issue of police brutality, which is a very real issue. As you've pointed out there is a culture of covering up for each other in departments and in the justice system taking the word of the officer over a suspect. This isn't new. I would even say that this is the history of many local police departments and moreover law enforcement for time immemorial. It's the problem of authority in all its forms. It's the problem of giving people authority and arming them. It's the problem of giving them authority, arming them, and trusting them to do the right thing and police themselves. That's a lot to ask of people given how corruptible we seem to be. So the issue isn't if this happens or how often it happens but how to correct and prevent it.

I think that part of the problem is that we have taken officers off the "beat" of literally walking a neighborhood and being part of a community and placed them in cruisers that make them not people but the anonymous symbol of authority and, to some, oppression. We can link that to the actual design of modern American cities where few of us can walk anywhere and so even as citizens are disconnected from each other. We barely know our neighbors let alone the officers who patrol our streets.

We've also militarized local police departments to the point where many neighborhoods look like occupied territories, a complaint we heard about Ferguson. 

Probably one of the things that could be done to reduce all of these problems is the legalization of marijuana. Trying to police the possession and sale of that one substance keeps the justice system clogged and our for profit prisons full.

Okay, a question for the historian: What's a  version of law enforcement you can point to that was effective in all the ways we need it to be including protecting citizens from abuse? And would it be able to be replicated in a nation with the size and diversity of ours?