It's dangerous to be a cop.
It's a cop's job to deal with people on some of the worst days of their lives. And a lot of people in this country have guns. If you've got a gun on the worst day of your life you might use it. No one argues that being a cop isn't sometimes a very difficult job.
When most people make a mistake in their work it's usually fairly inconsequential. I might get an email from someone pointing out an error in grammar or fact; when a cop makes a mistake someone might die. Worst than that, a cop can do everything perfectly and someone might die anyway. That's a hard thing to accept in a society that loves to expiate communal sin via scapegoats, but it's true.
So you would think that we'd be pretty particular about the sort of people we'd entrust with enforcing our laws. We'd want talented people to be police officers. We'd want them to be intelligent, empathetic individuals with a highly developed sense of fairness and the ability to relate to all kinds of people, especially those who initially seem very different from themselves. We'd want them to be especially attuned to the problems of the mentally ill. We'd want them to have an ethic of service.
You'd think we'd give them batteries of tests to ensure their temperamental fitness, provide the best training and equipment, and offer them wages commensurate with the specialized skill set they'd need to develop to protect and serve. If we genuinely valued police officers, their academies would reject far more applicants than they accept. Maybe it would be as difficult to become a police officer as it would to become a lawyer or a pilot.
But that's not how the world works. We value lawyers more than cops, and there are lots of jobs in the financial sector that pay people very well to manipulate numbers. And we can all shake our heads and say that it's a shame that backup quarterbacks make millions for holding clipboards while cops and soldiers and firefighters and teachers have trouble maintaining what the movies and TV present as a middle-class lifestyle. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for a police officer in the U.S. is $61, 270 a year. The average annual salary for an officer in Arkansas is $37,330; only Mississippi pays its police less.)
There's a myth that the market pays people what they're worth, but that's demonstrably not true. There's a difference between what you're worth and what you can leverage. No CEO is worth 300 times what an average employee is paid. We could get along just fine without the NFL. No one would suggest we could get along just fine without the police.
Still, we don't really value cops. We feel guilty about that, so we pay a lot of lip service to the idea of policing as a noble endeavor taken on by selfless people.
Most of us are glad to see them when we need them. Over the past 20 years I've had a few interactions with the police, and they've been polite, helpful and reassuring. They've always done their job well, they've always comported themselves with dignity. I liked them.
But it's human nature not to think much about them when you don't need them. I read about what they do in the newspaper. And every so often I see them do disturbing things on video.
When this happens, some of us want to support the cop no matter what. Because we understand how difficult the job is, and because we wouldn't want to be faced with making the tough choices cops have to sometimes make. Maybe the cop believed the unarmed suspect had a weapon, maybe there was something that happened out of the frame that caused the cop to behave in a certain way.
Others of us tend to mistrust the police. And if you are black or poor or a recent immigrant to this country, your suspicions might be reasonable. If the police act like an occupying army in your neighborhood, it's hard not to regard them as the enemy.
I know some cops are racist. I know some cops are just bad people. But most aren't. And I don't think cops shoot unarmed people or use excessive force because they're racist or because they're bad people. I think they do it for the same reason you or I might do it were we in their situation: because they're scared.
And they have good reason to be scared. They are policing a violent nation. There are a lot of guns out there in the hands of people who are desperate and unhinged and who might be as scared of the police as the police are of them. It's not hard to understand how things can go wrong.
People will make mistakes. Police will make mistakes. Had we the will, we would do better by the police so they could do better by us. We could attract better people to the profession, we could give them more and better training. We could pay them better and hold them to a higher standard. We could do more to weed out the bullies who seek the power and status of the job. We could do more to mitigate the toxic aspects of police culture, the us-against-them mentality that enforces blue codes of silence. We would do what we could to make our society less fearful.
But we won't do any of that. We will continue to put bumper stickers on our cars and post hot takes on social media. And shake our heads at the latest viral atrocity.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 06/25/2017