Uncritical Defense of Police Is Toxic Brew

Defenders of law enforcement officers and agencies who do not propose any changes from the current situation are creating a toxic brew for the nation. The situation they are upholding is the continued use of excessive force by police officers and the support of those abusive officers by other officers. The unwillingness to object to or even lie about abusive behavior by fellow officers goes by such terms as: "The Blue Code," "The Blue Shield," "The Wall of Silence," or "The Thin Blue Line." When officers lie to protect an officer in a criminal court trial, the word for that is "testilying." Those officers who would conceal or willfully lie about improper behavior by fellow officers are not good officers.

When South Charleston, S.C. police officer Michael Slager picked up part of a Taser and carried it back to the fleeing man he had fatally shot to plant it near his body, there was another officer present. Officer Slager was probably very confident that the other officer would not report his planting of evidence. When a Cincinatti, Ohio campus officer shot a motorist to death and claimed he was being dragged by the car, another officer on the scene backed up his story. Although briefly placed on administrative leave, the observing officer has not been charged with obstruction of justice or lying about a material fact in a fatal shooting. A video clearly shows that the shooting  officer was not being dragged.

Another attempt to deflect critical examination of law enforcement misbehavior  -- toward African-Americans in this instance -- was the attempt by a police official who tried to counter the "Black Lives Matter" movement by replacing it with the slogan of "All lives matter." The trouble with this substitute slogan is that it doesn't have a focus, as does "Black Lives Matter," which has a focus on bringing attention to and changing police behavior toward African-Americans  A further problem with this substitute slogan is that it is not indicative of U.S. practice. If we as a nation really believed that ":All lives matter," we wouldn't have caused about two million excess Vietnamese deaths in the long war in Vietnam. If we believed in the new slogan we wouldn't have tortured terrorism suspects, causing the deaths of some of them. If we really believed that "All lives matter," we wouldn't have ended the lives of a million or more Iraqi dead, attributable to the war we started.* If U.S. citizens really believed that "All lives matter," this nation, with between four to five percent of the world's population, wouldn't possess over forty percent of the world's firearms.

*Estimates of Iraqi dead attributable to the U.S. war in Iraq have usually been low balled -- claimed to be 150,000 or less. In my estimation the most reliable estimates are those done by the John Hopkins-Bloomberg survey teams and the recent estimate done by Physicians for Social Responsibility. The second JHB survey, done well before the major fighting in Iraq had ended, arrived at a median figure of +600,000. The JHB survey teams used standard social survey methodology in their work; also, survey members did not go into areas where their lives would have been in the most peril, such as Ambar Province. Thus, this median figure may be an under-estimate.

The estimate of over one million excess deaths in the Iraq War, done by Physicians for Social Responsibility, came out relatively recently, and it represents the work of trained professionals, done over a long period of time.

ADDENDUMS:
*Confidence in Police Polling
A survey of 17,000 New York City residents, ordered by the police commissioner and conducted in May and ;June of 2014, found that 49% of Hispanics held a "somewhat" or "very" negative view of the police, compared with just 17% of whites. A second survey involving a third of New York City's 35,000 officers, revealed that 75% of white officers said they expected fair treatment from their supervisors, compared with half of Latino officers and a third of African-American officers. (Source: Ken Auletta, "Fixing Broken Windows," The New Yorker, September 7, 2015.)

*Broken Windows and Stop-And-Frisk Theory
Former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly defended stop-and-frisk as an essential crime-fighting tool, noting that the police department had twenty-three million citizen contacts and answered twelve million calls per year. He emphasized that there was perhaps "one frisk every two weeks per patrol officer." Josmer Trufillo, a co-founder of New Yorkers Against Bratton -- NYC police commissioner -- contends that broken-windows theory and stop-and-frisk :"have the same ideology." He says: "Broken-windows invites the N.Y.P.D. to go on a fishing expedition." Other critics identify both approaches as racial profiling. (Source: Same as above.)    
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