Crimes, and various problematic situations, occur, and I doubt there is any country on earth that does not use a police force to respond, intervene, and investigate. And this is right and proper. It is, or should be, orderly and efficient. In theory, people who become police officers are trained for this work, like I'm trained for my work, and many or most people are trained for the work they do.
But we have problems. If you remember the story of Philando Castile from 2016, Castile was driving with his family (wife or girlfriend, and child) in the upper midwest, he was stopped by police for something like a tail light that was out, he told the officer he had a legal firearm in the car, and he moved slowly to get it from his glove compartment, reassuring the officer he just wanted it somewhere where the officer could see it, so the officer would not have to worry about it. But the officer freaked out, started shrieking, and shot Castile dead, in front of Castile's family. Castile was African-American. The officer later tried to excuse himself, saying he had not been trained thoroughly enough. (How much training does a police officer need to deal with someone with a broken tail light, and who is being 100% cooperative?) This is someone authorized by the state to intervene in any situation, carrying a gun, and who says he had not been trained enough. If there's a flimsier story, I don't want to know what it is. Although the open question is whether the fault was with the inadequately trained officer, and his lack of composure, or with the state or municipality that authorized him, armed him, but didn't train him enough.
We could of course ask, trained enough for what? Derek Chauvin, and some unrelated police officer in NYC (the officer who killed Eric Garner), applied so much pressure, for such a long time, to the necks of suspects that they killed them. It's true that they were in some way trained to be police officers, but they weren't trained to be doctors. Is that their excuse? How should they know that cutting off someone's circulation and breathing would cause the death of the person? What are they, doctors? This is assuming, of course, that they were not trained not to kneel on people's necks, and not to ignore those people's complaints that they couldn't breathe. (That complaint was recorded in the cases of both Garner and George Floyd.)
The fact is that there's evidence that the problem has nothing to do with training or the inadequacy of it. 'A complete mess': CDC report names police violence 'major cause' of deaths but omits critical data (msn.com) Do these police officers know they're racist, and would they admit it? Maybe. Maybe not. The data say they are, and either they don't know it, or they won't admit it. But whatever training they get apparently isn't enough to overcome their racism, and their possible gross lack of insight. We've had our own version of it right here in BP. And nobody involved was unaware of it then.
A couple or so years ago, there was a story from somewhere in NY about police being called to intervene because some nine year old (African-American) girl wouldn't obey her mother, who called the police. If you know about this incident, and if you saw the video of this nine year old girl being manhandled by police into their cruiser, and was calling for help from her mother -- her mother! the one who called the police! -- then you know that if we all accept that police have an important role in society, it isn't to intervene in situations like that, with parents who don't know how to deal with nine year olds. A social worker or someone? Much more likely. But not the police.
We need to restructure the police. And adequately train them, if there's any truth to their excuse that they're not adequately trained. Maybe we need better human beings as police officers. Maybe we need to pay enough to get the kinds of people we ought to have. (Like we ought to pay a lot better for good teachers, the results of whose work will be forever critically important to us as a society.) But "defund" the police? As in not have any? No. When there's a car accident, or a 7-11 is being robbed, we're not going to call a social worker to intervene there.
No comments:
Post a Comment