Improving The Relationship Between Citizen and Officer

Sort of a spinoff thread. How can we make the world a better place? I'm gonna wax deeep:

Is it fair to say that there's a 'relationship issue' in this country between police officers and citizens? If so, is this a recent or semi-recent development, or have John Does been muttering something about bacon under their breath after encounters with Johnny Laws since the beginning of organized law enforcement?

While I do suspect that the very first men charged with street-level enforcement of the laws of the land had encounters with citizens that were followed by various swine references (that the enforcer was meant to hear but not make out), I also have a hunch that the relationship between these two collective entities has gotten worse over the last generation or two. Do we think my hunch is correct? Did our parents think of cops as dudes with (a) too much state-issued power and (b) too much discretion on the hows and whens of employing the same? Or did they have a less cynical view of LE? Were they simply the good guys that you could turn to when bad guys did bad things?

Did our grandparents see the men and women clad in their firearm-accoutremented* blue uniform as objects to be feared, or at least distrusted, or as human beings with first names, favorite sports teams and dogs that they take on walks every morning? If the latter, then I think we just had a ding ding ding moment. Shit's fixing to get real up in this [itch bay]: From the perspective of Joe Citizen, the very simple goal is to see police officers as subjects and not objects. As human beings beings with parents, children, backstories, and 99 problems...just like you. How does Joe Citizen accomplish this seemingly simple objective? He just tries. He says hello. He makes eye contact. He even takes a stab at a deeper-than-superficial-just-going-through-the-polite-motions conversation when the time is right. Is it still acceptable for him to smell a little bit of bacon 3 seconds after receiving a lame=and-petty--as-**** traffic ticket? Sure, why not -- have a little fun with it.

Okay, John Q. Law: you're up next. Okay, so you know how you're assigned to patrol or otherwise oversee a geographical location. Your beat. The place where you work. Whatever you call it. We're renaming that. That's your community, and you hereby instructed to treat it -- and the citizens who reside therein -- as members of something that you are also are a part of. Your job is to integrate with the citizens of a community as a means to the end of protecting and serving the same. Your job is not to crack heads in Land Parcel A1A...pig (j/k).

Okay, this has gotten longer than I intended, and so let's back to the lecture at hand. The first thing I did was suggest that citizens and cops had 'relationship isues' -- that there facebook pages linked to each other in the relationship status field but said it was complicated. Lol. So, if that is in fact the status quo we're looking at, and if the status quo is in fact worse in this regard than it was a generation or two ago, then when was it that things began to go downhill? And what exactly was the reason for the decline?

The Wire actually hits on this very topic. Bunny Colvin has a theory about what caused the relationship to fizzle out. I"m not saying he's right, and I"m not saying he's wrong either, but just that his point is worth considering, and certainly isn't unreasonable. What's also really cool about this scene is that the recipient cop -- Culver -- starts to show a transformation after this meeting with Bunny. You see him progress from cop who wants to crack heads and generally be -- and, perhaps most importantly, be perceived as being -- a billy badass with a swinging [penis] that he'll swing just wherever he damn well pleases thank you very much, to a guy who cares about the community he patrols, ands attempts to form relationships as a means to that end. These are his people and this is his community...he just happens to be the guy charged with protecting and serving it. He begins to understand how that responsibility necessarily requires inclusion, not exclusion and accompanying head-cracking and billy badassery.

This wasn't supposed to be quite this long. I gotta kinda deep into the argument. But how deep we talkin' here?

[video=youtube;BA5za4VsskM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5za4VsskM[/video]
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*not a word. should be.

 

Law enforcement officers are citizens, just doing a job. Part of the problem is the creation of the special class in the minds of the many, and in some cases, the law.

 

That an expansion of their duties like drug enforcement.

 

Yeeeeep

 

Hold them accountable the same as everyone else. Have a special DA or some such who only handles matters of LE and executive misconduct.

 

that function already exists. Not sure how well it is carried out, but there should be a completely independent IG who holds the entire department accountable. It should be separately answerable to civilian authority.

 

I know there is a significant race element to some of these issues. but I tend to believe it's much more about police power in a world where civilians now have access to offsetting power.

 

What do you mean by special cases?

And, yes, law enforcment officers are citizens adn I think really the crux of what I was attempting to communicate via Bunny Colvin is that a mental framework of "I"m a part of this community too, I jsut happen to also have the job of protecting and serving" si ideal. An adversarial framework is much less than idea. There will always be a certain level of that in a given stop of a citizen, and I can live with that, but when that escalates to mindset, it's a problem.

If I'm asked to assign blame to the officer side and the citizen side in proportion to what they deserve, I do think the cops deserve the lions' share. Citizen distrust is a part of the feedback loop, but that input signal is a bad experience with a cop (or perhaps observations of the same).

 

Yeah, i think these issues can and do exist where it's all white, all black and everything in between. It's a power + discretion + overstepped boundaries issue at its core.

 

Not a bad idea.

 

Some quick thoughts . . .

The relationship was part of the social contract and seemed to work well for most of the citizeney.

Post-ww2, the atomization of the individual, civil rights and civil disobedience, the war on poverty.

I recall a billboard in the late sixties showing an officer giving mouth-to-mouth to a child with the caption: "some call him pig."

Then the war on drugs and 9-11 and the full militarization of law enforcement, both in weaponry and mentality.

And here we are today

 

I had problems with the police when I was younger, but it was mostly because I was up to no good. Now, I don't do stupid shit, they pretty much leave me alone. I like our relationship.

 

Thats believable.

 

I know that you are a pocket carrier, so you aren't likely to run into this situation. But, you ever had a "concerned citizen" soccer mom call 911, and frantically tell dispatch "There's a man with a gun at the mall. He's going to kill someone!," because she saw you step out of your car, realize your shirt had ridden up when you unbuckled, and reach over and cover the sidearm with your shirt? Because I have.

And the three screaming squad cars that were sent to deal with me have. But luckily I had good ones, because one took a statement from the "witness" (which is what it would have been called in the police statement released after me getting shot) who correctly identified my vehicle, and after running the plates, saw I had a carry permit. So we all lived.

But I can tell you, I did it wrong. I reached for my permit when he asked me if I had a permit. He didn't have his gun drawn, but if he had... oops. That's a threat. And he asked me if I had a gun, and I said yes. So... maybe I should have said "I have a permit" when he asked me "You armed?"

But let's suppose they didn't run my plates, the "witness" didn't correctly identify my car, or the other officers looking for me in the mall caught up with me there. All they know is there is a man with a gun, and they came ready for a gun fight. Not wanting one, but ready for one. And that... is dangerous.

So, something to consider, as a carry permit holder. How you gonna handle the situation when soccer mom, teenager, hippie calls 911 because there is an armed and dangerous person posing with a cardboard cutout of Butch Jones in Walmart?

Also, I've been pulled over while running. No shit. I was running. I got the blue lights and everything. Because I was barefoot. So, I got "pulled over" and talked to because they were absolutely certain I had been robbed, and someone stole my shoes. And I know what you're thinking. You shouldn't be running, that's dumb. But if you are going to do it, wear shoes, sidewalks are nasty. And my response is: I thought this was America. Isn't this America?

 

Really interesting stuff here. I can totally see how things can look from the cops' perspective, and yet here you were doing nothing wrong and conceivably a threat.

 

It's combat for many cops on a daily basis. Not an excuse, but reality.

 

Agreed. I live off of the main bar drag in Adams Morgan, and I genuinely feel for them every weekend. They are put in strange situations that are hard to read and can turn ugly quick. I was walking my dog at about 11:00 on Friday night, and a bike cop looked stressed and nervous as hell putting out police tape. He snapped at me asking where I came from and lived, and I pointed to the building right beside us. He apologized and asked that I walk on the other side of the street. I obliged and told him it was no trouble. A lone motorcycle cop was talking to 3 guys at the corner at the end of the block, but I'm not sure what all that was about. It looked tense, but under control. The guys were keeping their hands folded across their stomachs and not moving an inch, you could tell they were being extra careful not to appear threatening or ambiguous. The motorcycle cop was cool as could be.

I am guessing they witnessed something, but the bike cop wasn't convinced they weren't involved? Dunno. But I'm glad motorcycle cop was around too. And it was still 3 large muscular men vs two cops.

 

Fwiw, DC cops are orders of magnitude cooler than VA cops.