The police – thoughts
So, I’ve had a number of interactions with the police. More, I would say, than the average person, by a fair amount.
On the positive side of the ledger, my next door neighbor growing up was a police officer – as far as I know, he never fired his weapon at anyone and he retired from the force with honors – despite policing Washington, DC, one of the rougher cities out there at the time. It’s difficult for me to imagine him a white supremacist, or him enacting or condoning violence. Without knowing exactly how I know this, I have this belief that he was a good cop.
Another example I would cite is the car artist Speedycop – I’ve never met him in person but we have a lot of friends in common and we have conversed. Whenever I think of him, I think of the scene in Pirates Of The Carribean where James Norrington says “This is a beautiful sword. I would expect the man who made it to show the same care and devotion in every aspect of his life”. It may not be rational, but the beautiful and carefully executed artwork of Speedycop makes me suspect he is a good cop, and my interactions with him reinforce that belief.
On the other side of that equation, I’ve had police lie in reports about me, I’ve had police utterly convinced I was high even as I explained to them that I was experiencing a transient manic episode – I at one point begged them to take my blood in the hopes that analyzing it would reveal what was going wrong hormonally that I was experiencing semi-blackout mania. They tested for drugs, but no extra blood was taken for research purposes. I will say on the positive side of that that one police officer was clearly planning on beating me and another cop relocated me to his cruiser in order to separate me from that individual.
I’ve never been beaten by the cops, but once they came to my door in long beach, accused me of being a squatter, and *threatend* to beat me. They’ve aimed guns at me numerous times. If I were black, I’d already be dead.
Anyway, the point is, I don’t want to live in a world completely without police, but I think a world in which the police were better trained and less well armed would certainly be a better one. They shouldn’t be *able* to tear gas nonviolent protesters for weeks on end, because they *shouldn’t have that much tear gas*. Clearly they’ve been getting too many tax dollars. They shouldn’t have quasi-miliary equipment, and they should have a *lot* of training in de-esclation.
One valid point that the police have made is that you don’t i.e. blame all doctors for one bad doctor, or all plumbers for one bad plumber. On the other paw, the police are different. Plumbers don’t generally kill people with no consequences, for example.
I really don’t know what the right answers are. But something badly needs to change.
September 7th, 2020 at 12:28 am
See, the thing with bad cops is, cops love to say “The law is the law. No excuses.” Okey dokey, I’m fine with that. But if you are a cop, and you know about a bad cop – and you do nothing – you are a bad cop. Because the law is the law and you’re here to enforce it. The other thing is, being a cop is a seriously shitty job. It is. You deal with the most lying, full of shit, ropiest, sleazy segment of the population, day in and day out. That’s your job. Stoping crime, taking reports on it, intervening in houses full of stoned stupid peole who all live under the same roof but have decided to starting beating the shit out of each other. It wears away at your humanity. And when it starts making you mean and violent and the abyss starts to stare back into you, it is time to hang it up and take up knitting and golf. But they don’t And many can’t. What we need are ter limits and LOTS more funding for the waste collectors who stand between us and criminals. YMMV