Somewhere between Atlanta’s no-knock warrant disaster, where an 88-year-old woman was killed in her apparently drug-free home by police, and New York’s 50-shot barrage that resulted in the death of a bridegroom, there seems to be a problem with some of the police.
Is it this?
Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed. An emphasis on “officer safety” and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed. Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.
Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence. On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops. That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today. Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us. On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq. The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.
And if this astounding amplification of firepower is the result of a “fighting a war” attitude, is there anything to be done?
I certainly think that the “War on…” attitude is one factor. People seem to forget that when something becomes a war, then the rules change: in a war, the job is to win. Killing people and blowing up stuff is integral to winning. Collateral damage (civilian casualties) is regrettable, but not always unavoidable (or even undesireable, else we wouldn’t have bombed German and Japanese cities during WWII.) The training requirements for warfare are different than those for policing, and I would dare say that our police are just as ill-equipped for combat ops (urban or otherwise) as our military forces are for law-enforcement duties.
Another (maybe more significant) is that funding has been made available (from the feds) to buy all this fancy high-powered military-type equipment, and what is bought certainly has to be used, right? Simply having a 9mm pistol with a high-capacity magazine (or an M-16) may well lead to an attitude of “shoot everything in sight, and let God sort it out” – or even more likely, a stress-induced overrreaction which leads the officer to hose down the area with a large dose of semi-automatic (or maybe even automatic) lead, hoping to nail the bad guys before they cut him/her in half with their sawed-off Mac-10s (despite the fact that such weaponry is almost never seen in real-live criminal activities.)
I think another factor is that many police depts are operating under a “siege mentality”, feeling under assault not only by the bad guys, but by the judges, the city fathers, the media, the “knee-jerk liberal ACLU touchy-feely types”, and even the citizens they are sworn “To Protect and Serve.”
And, lastly, I think that our (“We the People”) are to blame, for foisting off on our police force the responsibility for protecting us. The policeman’s original job description included investigating crime, and locating/bringing criminals to justice. Preventing crime (or stopping it as it was happening) was an additional duty – but as we choose to abdicate our responsibilities for our own safety, and dump this load on the blue shoulders of our police officers, why should we be surprised that they take a more aggressive stance?
Oh, and don’t even get me started on the non-lethal stuff (e.g. the Tasering incidents, and the use of liquid Mace swabbed into the eyes of non-violent protesters as a form of “pain compliance”), as well as the arbitrary and capricious acts that are the hallmark of the TSA…
~EdT.