It's been a long time since I thought about Mr. Bannister.
He was my next-door neighbor when we lived in Southern California when I was in middle school. When my dad was often away, doing stuff he never talked about in Southeast Asia.
I was friends with his two sons, Todd, who was about my age, and Rick, who was a year younger. I don't remember his wife's name, though she was blonde and freckled, like the rest of them. And Mr. Bannister--Bruce Bannister, if I'm remembering right (I'm sure about the Bruce, about 85 percent on the Bannister)--wore his hair in a crewcut that made him look like a young Jack Nicklaus.
He was a good neighbor. Our families sometimes went camping together in Death Valley. The only time I ever tried to surf was when he took us boys to Seal Beach. (Todd and Rick were pretty good at it.)
Mr. Bannister was a cop; he worked down the freeway in Los Angeles.
Funny thing is, I never really thought about the work he did. Maybe in those days I didn't think much about how adults spent their days, I just accepted that my father was overseas a lot. Sometimes I'd see Mr. Bannister in his uniform and remember he was a policeman, but most of the time he was just my friends' dad. (Thinking back on it, that's probably why I called him Mr. Bannister rather than Officer Bannister.)
I don't know anything about his politics except that one time he made a face when I mentioned Joan Baez. He probably wasn't much different from the other dads in the neighborhood. At the end of the 1960s there was a real sense that the country might be flying apart. There were riots and assassinations. My father believed he drove past hitchhiking members of the Manson Family several times in the weeks before the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders. People a little older than me typically called policemen "pigs" in those days.
Mr. Bannister was the first policeman that I knew, but there were others. When I was a young reporter, I gravitated to writing about crime and criminal investigation. I rented one of my first grownup apartments from a sheriff's deputy; I played on a police department team in a YMCA basketball league, and the chief detective of the Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff's Department even tried to recruit me as an undercover narcotics agent.
I've gotten to know a lot of cops over the years, and I genuinely believe that most of them are conscientious and serious about their work. My most recent dealings with them have been at times I needed them: they were unfailingly polite, professional and more helpful than they strictly had to be.
Like Mr. Bannister, they were good guys.
On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that a lot of people who really want to be cops are the last people who ought to be cops. There's empirical evidence that suggests some of the people who end up in prison at some point aspired to a career in law enforcement.
"They reported being attracted by the uniform, the badge, the gun, the fast police cruiser and, most of all, the thrill of pursuing and catching the 'bad guys,'" clinical psychologist Stanton Samenow, author of Inside The Criminal Mind, wrote on the Psychology Today blog in 2013. "It was the excitement and the ability to wield absolute power over other human beings that attracted them as well as the prospect of being cited as heroes for doing so. None of these individuals whom we studied in our research program actually became policemen because they lacked the self-discipline to obtain the requisite education and training."
But not all who are attracted to law enforcement for "the excitement and the ability to wield absolute power over other human beings" become criminals. At least some of them realize their ambitions.
If you think about it, this makes sense. Some people like to exercise control over other people; whenever they are given authority over others they turn into bullies. Maybe you've seen this dynamic in your work place, maybe there's a guy who delights in bossing the interns around. I remember when I was in high school, there was one friend of mine who kept a blue light in his car--he'd slap it on the top of his vehicle and try to pull over his friends. I don't know anyone who ever fell for it, and I don't know that he ever tried it on someone he didn't know all that well, but it was creepy. He was the one guy we all knew shouldn't be a cop.
(He fooled us. He ended up having a distinguished and scandal-free career as a state policeman. But the blue light stuff wasn't cool.)
And as we all know, there are bad cops.
I don't know what percentage of cops are "bad," but I'd guess there's roughly the same percentage as there are bad journalists or bad orthodontists. All of us are capable of having a bad day, and some of us habitually cut corners and ignore best practices. The problem is, when cops fail to perform to a high standard, people get hurt. People can die.
I imagine it's extraordinarily hard to find people who are well-suited to being police officers. People who are patient and generous, immune to provocation and fearless in the face of belligerence and worse. I sure couldn't do it.
And while it's obvious we don't pay our police officers what they're worth, I'm not sure you could get better applicants by raising monetary incentives. You'd get more and better educated people applying to police academies, but they wouldn't be applying for the right reasons any more than the people who apply because they want to carry a gun and a badge and have people respect their authority.
While we can't say for certain what happened in Missouri, we can't have militarized police behaving like an occupying army waving around their oily toys. I know that we sleep in relatively safety only because rough men stand ready to do what is necessary and unpleasant, but this is still America.
We will have bad cops, but we can't tolerate them. And all this Code Blue nonsense is just that: Bad cops are bad for everyone, including their fellow officers. To the extent they erode the public's trust in the people charged with upholding the law, they make the job more dangerous for good cops. To the degree that they infect law-enforcement culture with their swagger and arrogance, they perpetuate an unfair stereotype. Most cops aren't bad cops. But bad cops are criminals. They don't deserve to be protected by "their brothers."
I don't know whether Mr. Bannister was a good cop or not, because I was just a kid who lived next door to him. But I know he was nice to me and a good father. He was a human being. I think he did the best he knew how to do.
I lost track of him more than 40 years ago. But watching and reading the news coming out of Missouri--and out of Jonesboro, where, through social media, the police chief badgered a reporter into quitting last week--I find a little comfort in my memories of him. He was the first cop I ever knew. And he was nothing like a bully.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 08/24/2014