Questioning the Bad-Apple View of Policing

Burt Likko says:

James K turned me on to a video yesterday about deconstructing superhero narratives. One of the proffered definitions of “superhero” was “a person with enhanced abilities to effect agency.” Well, that’s a cop, right? Cops are delegated the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force — it is cops and soldiers who actually use force in the name of the state. They get to carry guns, they get to decide when to use them. They get to drive the way they want, ostensibly in fulfillment of their duties. They wear special costumes to tell us who they are and to brandish their authority and potential for dispensing violence. They are culturally endowed with respect and a presumption of veracity and trustworthiness arising from further presumptions of special training, special experience, and personal disinterest in the particular situations they become professionally involved with resolving. They are equipped with weapons and armor in ways that most people are not. These may not be “super powers” in the same way that flying or super strength or shooting laser beams out of your eyes would be “super powers” in a comic book universe, but they are enhanced abilities not enjoyed by civilians.

Add into that the strong cultural identification of police and ‘the law.’ For a lot of people, the police are the law. They dispense and enforce law wherever they go. People see police and instantly begin to change their behavior — they slow down their cars, they stand up straighter, they stop talking. They do this out of fear of being observed to be engaged in wrongful conduct. “Law,” of course, equals “good” in the minds of most people most of the time, and cops are not immune from this. So cops are, by definition, a special cadre of people somehow lifted to elite status and empowered to act for the public good. Indeed, the desire to act for the public good is probably why a lot of people want to be cops in the first place: it’s not just a job, it’s a calling, a form of public service.

Add into that the fact that a lot of cops have high school educations and are of average but not above average intelligence. (Clearly, there are some really smart cops out there, no one would dispute that. Also some dim ones.) They are also embedded within a hierarchical culture that borrows elements of command lines from the military. Consequently, we can’t expect them to be deeply introspective and reflective, to drill down into obscure philosophy to understand what makes actions right or wrong, or to spend a lot of time critically evaluating instruction given to them by authority. These people have to be taught a great deal of law, which is sometimes very complex, in ways that they can absorb and understand and enforce. They get told that they are on the side of moral right and justice, that they can act in ways that other people cannot, that they are elite and a special community unto themselves, that their mission is to keep the peace and enforce the law and to separate the bad guys from the good citizens.

Finally, they really do see people behaving badly. The job inherently involves seeing people do bad things and seeing the effects of those bad things on innocent people. A good person wants to help innocents who have been hurt, a good person wants to see bad people who hurt other people punished, restrained, and corrected.

From there, it isn’t difficult to see how some very short steps to some moral short cuts to arriving at a morally good end result can be tempting. Steps that take only a moment or two to execute. Steps that you know are calculated to separate the bad people and the harm they do from the innocent people who did not ask to be hared. Steps that you know are going to be ignored, because they are going to be within that cloak of veracity and trust that you don along with the uniform. So the evidence fell to the floor because you saw the perp drop it. It isn’t going to hurt the case if that evidence gets moved right to the perp’s feet before he comes to. No one will see. Move it, right now, and in a few seconds it’ll be easy for your brother and sister cops to say that they saw the evidence right there by his feet too — and it’s evidence you know he had in the first place, because you saw him drop it. Let’s put this bad guy away: it’s the right thing to do.

A few well-intentioned steps like that and next thing you know, you’re pulling some dirtbag off horseback and beating him up for the helicopter cameras. The superhero has become a supervillain.Report