America Desperately Needs Police To Police Police

Do you remember that time as a kid when adults would encourage you to understand what the American Dream actually means, encourage you to dream and inspire you to chase your dreams.  Before we left elementary school, it seemed everybody  bigger than you wanted to know what you wanted to do with your life and would challenge you with coming up with an actual answer.

I was never that shy kid who froze in the face of adults, but the question always did make you freeze a bit.  In your wildest dreams you had probably dreamed of being a super hero or fireman.  You know?  Someone heroic.

A couple of really smart kiss ups and a few rare exceptions to the rule would actually say they want to be their mom or dad who they saw as a hero.  In reality, the conflict of seeing regular people as heroes and heroines is much of the reason we turned Saturday television into super-hero cartoons and other images for young people to be inspired by.

A couple of courageous dreamers like myself actually had the gumption to say that we would like to be the President of the United States of America- but that answer only lasted for as long as that job remained honorable and respectable and not so regularly criticized by the media that covered them.


Don't you remember when big people asked you what you wanted to do with your life and saying "a police officer" was an admirable answer and an easy way to get big people out of your face?

To dream of being a president is now close to the same category of being a cop in the balance of love versus loathing for each otherwise respectable life endeavor.

I wasn't exactly born back during the "Officer Friendly" era, but I was still influenced by the impact of the message of community policing; or the calming comedy genius of the Andy Griffith Show and how his uniform never made you concerned or angry towards the guy with the gun.

It might just be a part of my imagination sparked by the insistence that we dream so much, but I recall every super hero show starting with the same trumpeting music and a declaration of their mission being something about Truth, Justice and the American way.

I can't even say those words aloud without wanting to poke my chest to the wind and fasten my fists at my waist side.  Policing was the only real equivalent to being a super hero, and smart kids who realized that big people kind of laughed when you said you were going to be Shazaam when you grew up, started using the "I'm going to be a cop" answer as a more respectable default.

Not anymore.

Anymore, someone who tells me they want to be a police officer instantly makes me wonder who they know in their family that inspired such a choice.  Anymore, I want to ask them exactly what they hope to do in policing in the fear that they are joining a job with diminished respect and increased volatility as a result.

Anymore, I wonder how an institution that most regular people depend on in times of trouble, has now become an institution that is universally agreed to be exponentially better than their reputation.

So how do people that are mostly doing the kind of work that everyone needs and very few have the courage to do, become the figures of disdain and disapproval?

That answer is as easy as produce.

One bad squash can ruin the entire batch of .....squashes.

Produce you ask yourself?

Absolutely.  

For as long as we've grown fruits and vegetables for human consumption, we've known that one bad piece of produce can ruin the entire batch.  Although this example is usually described with the use of apples, it is no less true of the rest of the produce department.  If you don't get rid of the bad one's, they will spoil everything else.

Police actually get on television and admit that no organization, including police, can claim to be free of bad apples.  If that is an accepted truth just as we accept that most- maybe 99% of police- are actually good, than why don't we have more situations of those 99% of good cops throwing out the bad apples or admitting when they've found one?

What we do know is that the institution of policing is AUTOMATICALLY predisposed to blacken the life of ANY person that they kill under the natural protocol of PROTECTING THEIR OWN. What we do know is that Corey Jones- the drummer recently killed roadside in Florida by a plain cloths police officer who did not announce himself- had a gun.

I could use this moment to criticize the value of more guns in a nation with less clarity about when they should be deployed, but I will save that for later. Right now I need to know why we know about his gun?  Unless his gun had something to do with his death, its presence should have remained an investigative secret.

It is not a secret, but the police report from the officer who killed Jones is.

How can we really have 99% good police and damn near 0% of whistle blowing from police? What does whistle blowing look like?  A police killing in which we don't already reveal the excuse for the cops behavior before we take a fair and balanced examination into the death and why it happened. Will there ever be cops who do their job exactly the same regardless of who commits a crime?  When that finally happens, it will be the first.

Florida allows George Zimmerman acts.  Is there one person in the world who thinks Corey Jones would not be on trial for murder if he used his Floridian rights to protect himself at that moment and also came out alive?

If police readily admitted the crimes of their brethren,
would we need to pay for chest cams?

Shouldn't the people who are paid to solve crimes finally uncover a few crimes among their own?  Would it not be an element of credibility for cops to expose their bad apples instead of instantly protecting them as a buy product of how they do business, forcing the community to sniff out their malfeasance?

In the spirit of Truth, Justice and the American way, this is wrong.  Until police police police, they will retain the smell of their own produce, for the spirit of truth demands justice be served to corrupt cops as well as those who serve to protect them.