Comin’ to Grips and Feelin’ Heartless: Isn’t There Another Way to Be Police?

Broken Lizard's Super Troopers

Now I'm on my way, back to the station to check out
So I can go home, relax, take a drink and think about
my abrupt change, out of the clean, to the corrupt
Look into the eye of the pig, I'm all fucked up
No longer can I determine, who's the criminal
from the innocent man down…

Cypress Hill, “Looking Through the Eye of a Pig”

Though not everybody has the attitude of a rapper when it comes to police officers, most of us can recall an interaction with an officer that left us nervous, shaken, angry, or humiliated. Some of us, especially those in marginalized communities (from which many rappers come), can recall being treated disrespectfully at best, brutally at worst. Some of us won’t recall anything, because we’ll be dead. People like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Milwaukee’s own Dontre Hamilton who was shot 14 times, and others who I can’t even remember because that’s how common it is now. Local fellow Derek Williams wasn’t shot and killed, but he died in police custody because of a respiratory issue that cops ignored, even when he kept saying he couldn’t breathe. In Milwaukee in 2012, four officers were charged with illegally cavity-searching suspects. My husband and I refer to these guys as “The Milwaukee Butt Bandits,” because something so horrifying has to become comical. These incidents all occurred in the past five years.

If you think this isn’t a race issue, you should have your head examined, because ALL these citizens were black, and none of the cops were. I, a white woman, have had fairly pleasant interactions with Milwaukee police. I’ve never been harassed or gotten a ticket. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel deep discomfort and apprehension every time I see someone with a badge or a police car rolling along. As a kid in Battle Creek, Michigan, police officers gave us a hard time constantly, and when I and a friend needed help with a stalker, we found law enforcement totally unhelpful. My nervousness at the presence of a police officer is ironic though, is it not? It should make me feel safe. I should see a policeman go by and think Whew, so glad he’s around! But I don’t. Instead I think, Oh Christ what did I do wrong?

Whether or not we’ve committed a crime, we get the sense that any officer we come across is set to accuse us, that cops see us all as criminals. Judging from some of their actions this isn’t so far-fetched. In general, our relationship with police is characterized by fear and resentment. We fear arrest and harassment. They fear violent resistance. We resent the oppression we feel. They resent what must seem to them as a flagrant disrespect for the risks they take on a daily basis. This fear and resentment is compounded into terror and hatred when a community is distressed.

Arming our officers like military, and training them as one would an army, likely exacerbates this issue. Calling it a “war on drugs” is part of this. It is for the purpose of that so-called war that the National Defense Authorization Act was implemented in 1990. “The idea was that if the U.S. wanted its police to act like drug warriors, it should equip them like warriors, which it has—to the tune of around $4.3 billion in equipment,” reports Newsweek. Midwest police got things like Humvees, combat fatigues, night-vision scopes, M-16s, all kinds of destructive goodies.

But this might mean that police see themselves as soldiers at war, and citizens as potential enemies. Soldiers in Nam couldn’t tell Viet Cong from anyone else after all, hence My Lai and the like. We the people by the same token, feel like we’re in occupied territory. You know how Afghanis just love American soldiers roaming the neighborhood? That’s how we feel about police. And if you live in the equivalent of a war zone, (and if it’s a war on drugs, and there are drugs in your hood, then you do), violence and brutality are bound to happen. A British writer for The Economist writes, “Too many (police) see their job as to wage war on criminals; too many poor neighborhoods see the police as an occupying army. The police need more training and less weaponry: for a start, the Pentagon should stop handing out military kit to neighborhood cops.”

I won’t go into the fact that the “war on drugs” is really a war on the poor, and a convenient way to obtain slave labor by putting scads of brown people in prison. That’s another blog post. But both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in the wake of recent riots, have criticized the militarization of police, and called for reform in both the way police are equipped, and the way they are trained. This includes the normalization of body-worn cameras which Clinton said "will improve transparency and accountability; it will help protect good people on both sides of the lens."

I’m into the body camera idea. Illinois has recently banned the filming of officers on the job, and that perplexes me. I’m not sure privacy applies to a public employee on the job, and after all, the suspects are on tape too. Wouldn’t that be useful in court when trying to convict someone? My worry is that the reason cops wouldn’t want a body-worn camera is because some suspects are innocent, and they want them to go to jail anyway. I’d like someone, anyone, to prove this suspicion false. Or this worse one, that this hinders their ability to kick the asses they want to kick. Both bad reasons for not having cameras. I just think this could be a great opportunity for a good cop to be a data-collector, to gather information about people and places that might be useful in addressing crime. It would be like wearing wire that could see, and you could record the faces of the people you were hoping to protect as well. You could study a neighborhood in crisis from afar, and learn about its needs.

Obama’s plan for police reform, as described on whitehouse.gov also includes “creating a new task force to promote expansion of the community-oriented policing model, which encourages strong relationships between law enforcement and the communities that they serve as a proven method of fighting crime.” This part excites me, because as vague as it is, it might mean something better than just firing cops or shaming them into not being so racist. What if being a cop didn’t just mean going around and catching and cuffing people? What if it meant spending time with them, getting to know them, talking to them? What if instead of seeing a cop and feeling nervous and angry, you felt safe and comfortable, because you knew his name and that you both like Call of Duty and cheese curds?

It’s true, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says in The Atlantic, that cops are not social workers. “To ask, at this late date,” he writes, “why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It's avoidance. It's a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.” We tend to avoid really solving the issues of poverty, segregation, unemployment, urban decay and segregation, which would involve funding things like education, social programs, public transportation and infrastructure. It’s easier (though not at all cheaper) to solve it by throwing the whole lot in jail. By putting military-grade weapons in the hands of police and telling them to go clean it up. Timothy Silard for The Huffington Post puts it nicely: “We must find the courage to commit to, and demand from our elected officials, the deep criminal justice reforms that will replace over policing and over incarceration with jobs, health care, good schools, mental health and drug treatment, and crime prevention programs.”

But what if cops were more like teachers, or bus drivers, or social workers? If we aren’t going to fund those people, why not let cops do more of what those people do? (They all got Cs in high school too, right? Just kidding.) The New York chapter of the National Association of Social Work is mulling over this relationship, as is a small organization right here in Milwaukee called Safe & Sound. Right now, they aren’t looking at changing the police themselves, but I think cops can get great ideas here. I’d like to see cops empowered to educate, counsel, transport people. Help them with their house stuff and their gardens. Hang out in the park with them – maybe teach them a game or two, or ref a game of ball. Is this not possible? Because if it was, I bet there would be less fear between us. And who knows – maybe less crime too?