So criticizes the police, however mildly, is bashing the police?
You are suggesting that we should idolize the police and never question them.
That is a stupid idea. Police departments can go wrong. I saw it in Houston during the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were several instances of excessive force and officers panicking. There were a lot of complaints, especially from the black community. One case, an officer went to investigate some activity in a warehouse that was closed. A guy came at him with a screwdriver. He shot him a couple of times and the guy feel at his feet. He then unloaded 3 more clips into him. A couple of months later, some kids from Louisiana were speeding in a van. This was during Boom Time and Houston was rightly famous for having the worst traffic in the country. There was a chase, the van was finally stopped and the driver wound up dead. The officer's story was the kid came out of the van with a gun and the officer had no choice. But the evidence didn't match the story. For one, the gun found at the scene has vanished from the evidence room a couple of years before. For another, the angle of the entry wound would have meant the officer would have had to've been well over 7 feet tall if he fired from a normal position. Finally, a piece of the boys skull was found in the palm of his hand. The grand jury no-billed that one, too.
That raised a furor. Lee Brown was brought in to reform the department. He introduced community policing, the first in the country. The number of complaints went way down. So did shootings that made no sense. Things changed.
When a PD takes the viewpoint of "us against them" and "them" is pretty much anybody who isn't in the department, things get ugly. Grand juries tend to favor the officer anyway, so a no-bill isn't a slam dunk. The idea that one should never criticize a police department is not a very good one. When their reports don't match the evidence, when their story is a constantly evolving one, when they refuse to be transparent, that should raise red flags. The Ferguson PD had all kinds of red flags popping up. They were following exactly the same pattern as every other PD that had gotten too confrontational with the public.
This problem is not a race issue at its heart. Although it looks like the race angle was needed to gain attention. Police officers shoot way too many people, most of whom have mental health issues. Instead of defusing the situation, their first instinct is to escalate. And the threshold for shooting people is way too low. This is a structural problem that needs to be addressed.
If you don't see the problem with a police union announcing that they are going to war, well... |
