The recent killings of two Brooklyn police officers could not have happened at a worse time. Of course, there is no "good" time for the death of law enforcement officers. But I think everyone reading this knows what I'm talking about. At a time when the country needs to promote better relationships between minority communities and law enforcement officers, the killings, which were committed by a mentally disturbed individual in the name of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, have further divided Americans in their opinions on the role of police in American society.
In recent months, I have given a lot of thought to this very topic. As someone who has been fortunate enough to never have been stopped by law enforcement or had to report something to them, growing up, my image of the police had been colored largely by TV shows and movies. From college on, that image slowly became modified by a healthy diet of news reports, opinion pieces, and studies that exposed me to a more mature (read: complicated) view of law enforcement. More recently, I have come into contact with many clients who have had interactions with the police, and it would be fair to say that I have developed a better understanding of some of the problematic ways in which some law enforcement officers react in certain situations.
The role of law enforcement in this country cannot be boiled down to a simplistic statement about all cops being pigs or all people who belong to a certain demographic being thugs against whom the police have a right to use force. As Jon Stewart so eloquently stated, "You can have great regard for law enforcement and still want them held to high standards." To me, at least, it is precisely because there are "good" cops that greater accountability in the system should be something that everyone can support. I don't think I am pathetically naive to believe that a properly implemented reform providing for greater accountability would reward "good" cops and stop "bad" cops from denigrating the entire profession.
But back to the role of law enforcement in the U.S.
I hadn't really thought about how harmful the media's one-sided portrayals of cops can be when not everyone in American society has first-hand experience of interacting with law enforcement on a regular basis--and your racial and/or socioeconomic background rather than your actions may determine whether you have such an experience or not. On TV, cops are generally treated as heroes or as "the good guys." Cops are rarely "bad" characters, and when they are, they tend not to be a member of the regular cast or recurring characters that the viewers have come to love. When regular cast members get into trouble on the job by being involved in the death of a civilian, it almost always turns out to be either an unfortunate series of coincidences that make a cop "look guilty" when he or she is completely blameless, an unfortunate accident that could not have likely been avoided by a normal human being, or a justified (if tragic) act that was made to save a life. The story line generally goes like this: 1) the good cop (or law enforcement officer) causes a civilian death in the line of duty; 2) there is doubt cast on the acts of the good cop; 3) the good cop's colleagues stick by them and do everything permitted within their professional obligations to establish his or her innocence; and 4) the good cop's acts are shown to be justified under the law with very little room to doubt whether the cop's decision was inevitable. Story lines depicting any type of police abuse seem to have similar patterns as well.
Take Detective Elliot Stabler (played by Christopher Meloni) from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). From the first season of the long-running series, Stabler is portrayed as having anger issues, particularly against child abusers and other "perps." At the same time, Stabler is a very loving (if at times bordering on the very mildly controlling) husband and father, as well as an extremely dedicated partner to the one and only Detective (later Sargent) Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay). Over the course of the series, Stabler is consistently treated as a beloved character who lives with the demons of his deep-seated rage. He is depicted as being flawed, but the viewers were meant to love him, root for him, and be saddened by his departure from the series after twelve seasons in 2011. So, every time Stabler would slam a suspect against a wall or otherwise inflict pain on a suspect when law enforcement officers are not legally supposed to take such actions, the viewers do not see a cop acting inappropriately but a good cop doing whatever it takes to put away a bad guy and/or save an innocent victim. And trust me, I was pretty attached to his character, too.
It's not as if Stabler hasn't made a mistake or been in trouble. But when he has, the episode would generally be resolved either with a revelation that his actions did not contribute to the bad result or with him having done everything he could to correct an old mistake that was reasonable for a human being to make. An example of the first scenario can be seen in season eight, when Stabler is involved in the death of a suspect he was placing under arrest ("Dependent"). Essentially, Stabler takes down a suspect who had tried to take a swing at him, and all of a sudden, the suspect stops breathing. Stabler tries to perform CPR, but the suspect is dead. Unfortunately for Stabler, a witness from afar took a video of the incident on the phone, and Stabler appears to have used excessive force. Ultimately, it is revealed that the suspect had an unusual heart condition and that Stabler is not responsible for his death. The good cop who was caught up in a bad situation that was not his fault is exonerated. There is order in the (TV) world.
Stabler is placed in the second scenario in the eleventh season, when he realizes that a man he helped put away a decade ago was likely innocent ("Unstable"). Stabler and the others manage to take the real perpetrator into custody, but he appears to commit suicide while in the bathroom. I say "appears" because the context implies that the detective who was helping SVU with the case (special guest star Wentworth Miller, of Prison Break fame) threw him out of the window but there is no way to know for certain. How does this concern Stabler? Stabler had gone to see the innocent man he had helped put away and told him that he was getting out. Now that the real perpetrator had died before going to court, the innocent man, who was there partly because of Stabler's mistake, had no way of being exonerated. Stabler feels bad, but he did everything he could once he realized the mistake. It's not entirely clear how reasonable or inevitable Stabler's initial mistake in believing that the innocent man was guilty was, but the story is presented in a way so as to suggest that anyone could have made that mistake without any fault. Oh well. At least he tried to fix it. The law in unfair.
True, Stabler is haunted by the latter case, and he leaves the series as a result of a shooting a teenage girl who started to open fire in the squad room after SVU had captured those who had contributed to the death of her mother, a rape victim who was about to testify in court ("Smoked"). Stabler does not challenge being forced into retirement because of the multiple excessive force complaints and other matters in his jacket. A great cop, who is not flawless, makes the right decision with unavoidable tragic consequences and must give up his job as a result. Stabler's departure from the show sums up how American society teaches people without first-hand experience with law enforcement to view cops: heroes who sometimes makes mistakes (even those that affect the lives of others) but should be forgiven because of how good they are and the serious sacrifices they make. The impression that we are supposed to be given is that cops (in general) are heroes. If the cops are involved with something that results in the death of truly innocent or "innocent-until-proven-guilty" civilians, it just must have been a tragic consequence and cops likely do not bear the blame. Cops are heroes. Cops are the good guys. That's the idea that is marketed to those of us who are fortunate enough to not fall into a demographic that is forced to interact with law enforcement on a regular basis no matter how much of a law-abiding citizen you are.
But why are cops automatically heroes? Why are they the "good guys" when we don't really know what they actually do on a daily basis and what kind of people occupy those positions? The point is not the actual answer to these questions but whether people have thought about them before blindly swallowing the idea of the hero cop.
Recently, I had some interesting insight from my soon-to-be in-laws, who know people who have entered or have wanted to join law enforcement. According to their personal experiences, people who seek to join law enforcement and/or the military (usually the same people) are people who "want to play with guns," and nothing else (like "serve and protect"). Their impression was that it's the people who want to shoot things, etc. who became police officers or went into the military. And they were not referring to just one person. All this was a little shocking to me for several reasons. First, it was difficult for me to believe that a person would take a job that puts one's life on the line just to shoot things up. Second, maybe as a result of being sold on the image of cops always being the good guys (and living in a non-authoritarian country), I saw law enforcement as a noble profession. And finally, although I did not personally know anyone who wanted to become or did become a law enforcement officer, the few people I know who have served or were serving in the military were all highly educated people who took pride in their mission to serve the public.
Maybe by definition, doing a job that puts one's life on the line and that is meant to protect the public is a noble profession. Maybe, like some people suggest, civilians just need to say thank you and not criticize the men and women in law enforcement who already have a difficult job. But is that really the right status that law enforcement agencies should enjoy?
Law enforcement agencies are not, by definition, good or bad. They can be used to perpetrate one of the most egregious atrocities in modern history, or they may serve the proper purpose of serving and protecting the public, including tasks that don't involve shooting guns or taking down perps. In Japan, law enforcement has some serious problems that it needs to work on, but one thing it does seem to do right is community-policing based on the "koban" (police box) system. Growing up in Japan, I viewed policemen as people who helped you with directions or lost and found, perhaps in part because Japan generally has a low crime rate. Cops were good guys because they were there to help, no matter how small the problem seemed to be.
I know it's not fair to compare Japanese law enforcement to American law enforcement. In Japan, most people can't own guns, and you rarely see a police officer with a gun. In the U.S., the question is how to regulate guns without encroaching on individuals' rights to own guns. In Japan, where 98% or so of the population is ethnic Japanese, the criminal justice system is affected by the country's general xenophobia and racial stereotypes, but there is no systematic entrenchment of race and criminal justice that shapes the rest of society. In the multi-ethnic U.S., the criminal justice system cannot be discussed without addressing race.
But despite all these differences, I feel that there are some valuable lessons to be learned from community-policing activities and the attitude that Japanese policemen have towards their communities. We all like hearing stories about cops who help citizens with things that are not traditionally within the purview of law enforcement. It makes us trust cops more, view them as caring about things that may not concern the law but have an effect on people in the community. And wouldn't it be nice if we knew that the people who are supposed to "serve and protect" not only protected the community from criminals but served the community in more personal ways when community members were in trouble?
Many of us expect our cops to be like the detectives on TV, to be forever the "good guys," to care about serving the community and not about the perks of playing with guns and other "toys." But we can't always get what we wish for. Cops are human, and humans come in all varieties--good, bad, and somewhere in between. On the other hand, I am confident that there are many cops who are "good guys" that care about the community and its people. Maybe it's time for each of us to think about why we believe cops to be good or bad or whatever...and accept that none of us are probably 100% right about what we believe.
