Night after night, demonstrators pour into the streets of cities across America to ventilate their frustration with out-of-control police violence against citizens, with no end in sight.
And there shouldn’t be an end to the demonstrations. There should be no letup until the system gets off its dead ass and does something.
This isn’t about just Michael Brown or just Eric Garner or just Tamir Rice or ________ (fill in blank). What people are protesting is the complete failure of the political system and criminal justice system to deal with a policing system that has completely broken down.
We don’t even know how many civilians are killed by cops in America every year, because no one collects or keeps those statistics. The closest thing we have to a body count is data from voluntary reports to the FBI from local police departments. That number, which surely is incomplete, is in the hundreds. Every year.
Cops themselves aren’t helping the situation. They’re aggravating it — with police unions that fight any discipline of police officers, no matter how egregious their conduct, and with an attitude toward the people they victimize that went beyond snarky and became downright ugly last week when spokespeople for cop unions (1) demand punishment of NFL players for expressing sympathy with Ferguson protesters, and (2) blamed Eric Garner for his death because — get this — he was overweight.
The most charitable thing you can say about this is these cop unions are making all cops look stupid, insensitive, and tone-deaf to public concerns. An ordinary citizen observing this with amazement can’t be faulted for thinking maybe we should fire all the cops and start over with a clean slate. That’s taking it too far, of course, but the decent cops who do their job professionally and well need to understand the jerks in their ranks are taking down the whole profession and tarring everyone who wears a badge.
Where I’m going with this is, it’s the good cops who should be our first line of defense against bad cops. We need them now, more than we’ve ever needed them, to protect us. Not only from criminals, but from some of their own brethren. Given massive institutional failures in police management (which includes hiring, training, supervision, and discipline), in civilian oversight (which effectively doesn’t exist), and in the criminal justice system (recent events speak for themselves), the good cops — and there are many — are all we have left. It’s now up to them to demand change from below.
The Blue Wall of Silence must become a Blue Shout Out for Reforms. If things don’t change, and soon, there won’t be a shred of public respect left for the police, good and bad alike.