Twitching With Fear

Madame:

I have a question for you and our readers.

Not what your intellectual thought is, but what is your first emotion when you think about the state police or your local police?

I’m betting it’s fear.

And ask yourself, if you’re not Latino or African-American or Arab-American: If YOU feel fear, what must they feel?  If YOU feel no closeness or warmth or confidence toward or from the police officers, what must minorities feel?

And those who film injustice have fear.  The man who caught the apparent murder of Walter Scott on video so feared for his life that he almost erased it.

If those who are to uphold the law, to be the honest servants of the law, instead hold us in disdain and themselves above and around the rule of law, what do we then have?  Who do they really serve?

It does not appear to be “merely” epidemic, it appears to be common police methodology, and not just against minorities: plant evidence if necessary, provoke someone into committing an “offense,” harass, intimidate, and show “them” that their lives are really subject to police whim.  All in supposed service of “keeping the streets safe.”

It not only feeds a prison-industry system with its required bodies and labor, but it brutalizes both the oppressed and the oppressors, each of which carry around fear, distrust, anger, and resentment that always house the potential to explode at the slightest stress or disruption.

Police officers who subvert their honor, morals, integrity, and the confidence of their families and the public by subverting law in supposed service of it have strayed and stained far.  Their fellows who protect them and acquiesce in silence have also done so.

That violence and murder by the police are too often accepted by those police as normal or even desired is very disturbing.  That we even have to explain how wrong revolting actions are—indeed, have to explain to a fine level of granularity—is even more disturbing.

That many police forces do not emphasize—sometimes do not even have—resolution protocols where violent means (and especially deadly violent means) are the least desirous of options and only resorted to when truly unavoidable, should disturb us greatly.  And that even when violent means are determined to be necessary, why is there a presumption that deadly violent means are the preferred or even only option? 

Because it might surprise you that, even getting past the fact that an unarmed mere runner probably shouldn’t be shot at by the police at all, that police often have no training, no protocols, and no desire to shoot to wound.

America is paying a terrible price for its over-emphasis on individuality.  For there are great evils that arise from all that disconnection.  The police may have often disconnected themselves from us.  But we have also often done the same toward them.  We need reconnection, stat.

We will know we have it when the first emotion we have about the police is fear no longer.