No More Cops?

You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.

It’s an old saying. Noel Coward used it in a play in the 1930’s. Some credit it to Desiderius Erasmus, a philosopher who lived in the 1400’s.

Over the centuries, it has been used for a lot of things. Women, of course. Husbands as well. Lawyers, bankers, politicians, military leaders, Even the bacteria in our stomachs. You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Literally.

So, it should come as no surprise that I am using that tired old saying yet again, this time for police.

Yep, cops. We can’t live with them, and we can’t live without them.

Now, I am not a cop. Let me be very clear about that.

None of my close friends are cops, no one in my family is a cop either.

So, who am I to be talking about the problem our society is having with police, or why the spark of protest against police abuse is spreading across the nation like wildfire, and why the “de-fund the police” movement is oh, so right and oh, so wrong at the very same time?

Well, here are my credentials.

I covered police as a reporter for years. I went out on drug raids with police teams, covered riots that police were trying to contain, talking to both sides. I have also been at more homicide scenes than most police officers will ever see.

I have been to natural disasters where police are working hard to keep people safe, knocked on the same doors detectives have knocked on looking for the same witnesses. And - oh yes - the U.S. Army, in its wisdom, decided to put me in an MP reserve unit where I got to go to summer camp and patrol the streets with civilian officers.

So, what’s my great insight into this national problem?

In one way, it’s simple. In another, it is nearly overwhelmingly complex.

First, the simple.

Imagine that you would never get a speeding ticket in your life. Would you go speeding down the road? Of course, you would.

Imagine that you would never be arrested for driving drunk. Or never be stopped by a cop and arrested for getting into a fight with someone.  Let’s say that, no matter what you did while on duty, you would almost never be charged with anything. 

Now let’s say complaints about your behavior by civilians were mostly ignored. And, even if you killed someone on the job, you would be protected with a special “limited” immunity, and that even if you were fired you could go to another department and get another job without anyone knowing about your background.

Finally, let’s say you spent a lot of your time at work alone - no one else to see what you did - or with a partner who knows that you have their back, and they have to protect yours.

How do you think that would work?

Yes, police are a victim of their own success. Every privilege they have acquired has come because society has decided its need to be protected from the scary unknown is more important than a few people getting abused, especially if those people are poorer, live in “bad” neighborhoods or are the wrong ethnic group.

How about the other side?

Well, if you are in danger, have been in an accident and are bleeding badly or if your mother has fallen and can’t get up, who do you call? If you go to the theater at night and have to walk three blocks to get to your car, who do you want to see on the street.

If you are a real idiot and go speeding at 90 miles an hour down a big multi-lane highway in a car that doesn’t have the proper suspension, bad tires or don’t look far enough ahead to know when to change lanes, who do you need on the side of the road to stop you? The same police highway patrol officer who has seen a dozen mangled bodies pulled out of wrecked cars.

Now, to stay with that highway patrol officer for a moment, consider this. They sometimes park where you can’t see them, radar active and just waiting to catch speeders. Other times, they park right there in the median where everyone notices them.

Believe it or not, the whole road slows down for a bit. It is called deterrence, which is one of the most important and hard to evaluate things police officers do.

They stop crimes by just being there. Or, in some cases, they shift crimes. You can’t stop drug sales on every corner of the city or rural town, but you can make sure it happens somewhere else.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem with police and the defunding movement. Police really enforce the often unwritten desires of the government which hires them. And, that government - like a creaking old ship sailing along a stormy path - eventually follows the course that we as a society demand.

Easy to say, but it needs some explanation.

Police aren’t told where to work by civilians. The mayor or the councilman doesn’t demand that an officer be assigned to a certain neighborhood or not to give parking tickets at a church fundraiser on a Summer weekend.

But, if people living near a school complain enough to their elected officials about kids parking on their streets despite the no parking signs, sooner or later someone will go out and write 10 or 20 parking tickets. It’s a lot easier than having the school board raise taxes to build a parking lot to meet the needs of the high school.

Some neighborhoods are safer than others for a lot of reasons, and police have a lot of different jobs to do every day. Still, response times are determined by how many officers are available, and how many officers are available depends on how many are assigned to a particular area.

That usually comes up every year at budget time. Interesting negotiations when the county executive has to figure out how many parks to open or close, how much money goes to keeping roads and bridges maintained, how many courtrooms will have to be added to meet the needs of civil cases…well, you get the idea. The pecking order usually favors the establishment, which is why it is the establishment. It establishes things.

So, there is a good conservative argument to be made that if police officers decided they would no longer tolerate bad actions by bad cops, there would be less social strife to deal with. You could also argue that five  highway crew members would be more effective and a lot cheaper than three police officers assigned to sit on the road with their flashing lights on because a construction crew is working and no one wants a distracted driver hitting them.

Heck, those highway workers could be at two sites instead of one. Look at the money we would save.

But you can’t keep any police department at its current level  and at the same time hire paramedics and highway crews, town code enforcement agents and the dozens of other people needed to fill the various jobs police do - jobs which do not really require law enforcement training and the power of life and death over the people they meet.

Besides, if someone really gives that traffic enforcement officer a hard time and ignores their directions to stop, all they have to do is remember the license plate number. Then, they could call a cop - one of the many who would be freed from a lot of other things so they can deal with real crimes and real emergencies.

That could work for everyone.