I’m going to be honest. I don’t know many police officers, and I have never had a truly negative experience with them. When I needed them, I called them, and they helped me. I mean, there was that one run in where someone who must have had a fight with his spouse before he went on duty gleefully broke my TWENTY-TWO YEAR streak with no moving violations to give me a ticket for not stopping fully at stop sign…which, by the way, I did. But in December, when I needed them in Elizabeth, they were prompt, kind, helpful, and treated both my husband and me with respect.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not like I didn’t DESERVE any moving violations over that 22 years. Two years before, a NJSP gave me a pass on Thanksgiving BECAUSE he didn’t want to break the streak. My tendency to cry immediately upon seeing red flashing lights probably got me out of more than a few of them. Being a waitress in town generally got me out of a few of them. And being a white girl probably got me out of a bunch of them. Let’s face it – if I were a white guy, I’d probably have lots of tickets.
If I was black – male or female – I might be dead.
It’s been difficult for me to get on board with the ACAB movement. How can we say that all of anything is bad or good? We’ve been proven wrong repeatedly. Pit bulls are often considered dangerous. I have YET to meet a dangerous pit bull. And I’ve met plenty – does that mean there are none? I’m sure someone is training their pit to be dangerous – but they are the exception, right?
Here’s the difference. When I talk to someone about pit bulls, they acknowledge that there are some people out there that train their pit bulls to be vicious. They don’t deny that a pit bull ever bit anyone.
Remember the Catholic Church? For years, a boy would come forward – claim to have been molested – and the priest would be “reassigned.” They never defrocked (or whatever you call it) him, they never publicly acknowledged their mistake, and sometimes, they didn’t even stop the guy from being around kids.
For years, this went on – and then, all of a sudden, there was an explosion. So many priests exposed and called out – and the church embarrassed.
THAT is why we are not able to say, “not all cops are bad.” Because those priests – not the ones that molested kids, but the ones that covered it up – they were JUST AS BAD. They didn’t acknowledge the trauma or pain their clergy had caused, and they summarily dismissed the pain of their victims.
When a cop does something wrong, it is almost impossible to get any other cop to condemn him. You rarely see a police department come out and publicly condemn a cop that’s killed a black man. Remember Rodney King (If you don’t, look him up – the video is on YouTube). We WATCHED as four cops ripped a man from his truck and beat him to within an inch of his life. We WATCHED it. Over and over again, they showed that film on TV. To this day, I cannot imagine what was going through that jury’s mind that they acquitted those four cops.
That’s what I’m taking about, though. Yeah, sometimes they get fired. In extreme cases, like George Floyd, they might even get charged. In real life, though, they are not vilified as much as they should be – not by each other, not by the force. For crying out loud– in the past year or so, how many people have been shot in their own homes? Come on, people.
I am told that this could be dangerous for cops. If you rat out a fellow officer, when you’re in trouble in a potential danger situation, particularly with black people, you might not get the backup you need. So, it is better to keep your mouth shut. You want to protect yourself.
How incredibly screwed up is that? You aren’t going to stand up for justice out of fear that your fellow officer WON’T DO THEIR JOB. And you want us to believe not all cops are bad.
The Blue Line is a real thing. In a way, it has to be. These people have to trust each other in some shitty situations. At the same time, there is loyalty, and there is blind loyalty – and the second is more of what we see when we look at the police. The blue line is unbroken, no matter what.
In the same breath, if you want us to believe not all cops are bad, why aren’t more cops standing up against systemic racism? When a cop IS fired or charged, immediately, they are kicked off the line, and it closes up again. “That officer is not one of us,” they say. “That officer is different.”
If that’s true, why is it happening so often?
You know what I think? I think that, like the Catholic Church, the police force is afraid of the backlash if they open up and say “you know what? We have a lot of bad cops on the force – and we do not train our police nearly well enough in how to stand up for what’s right. We need to change that.” But that’s exactly what needs to be done.
We don’t need to fund more “training.” We don’t need to teach police officers diversity training, the right way to talk to suspects, how to deescalate a situation, or what they should or shouldn’t do or say. They are not stupid – they know this already.
What they need to learn is how to trust black people the way they trust white people. They need to learn how their own implicit bias creates a situation that is exacerbated by society’s racism. What they NEED is to bring black people from the community to the table and give them a voice in how to fix this. You don’t throw more money and more sensitivity training webinars no one will attend anyway at a problem you refuse to acknowledge.
What they need to learn is that their responsibility to the community is more important than their responsibility to the “blue line.” As someone said to me, “Cops that don’t call out dirty cops are dirty cops.” Someone else said to me – “It’s like cockroaches – for everyone you see, there are a bunch you don’t see hiding in the walls.” They need to learn that their accountability lies in their actual commitment to “protect and serve” – the community, NOT each other.
If you’ve been a police officer for any length of time, you know you don’t hold a suspect down for ten minutes with your knee on his neck.
It’s not just suspects. It’s people walking to work, people driving home from the mall, people IN THEIR OWN HOMES. It’s a disregard for the fact that these are human beings that deserve the same respect as white citizens.
There has always been a blind loyalty in some professions. Getting a doctor or lawyer to testify against another is difficult at best.
But if you want to be considered legitimate, it has to be done. By keeping quiet, they are as complicit in the actions of their fellow officers as silent white citizens are complicit in institutional racism.
Stand up.
Call out the dirty cops.
Call out the people in your family and community that support systemic racism.
Acknowledge the problems in your own profession.
Until then, ACAB.
Don’t take my word for it – look it up.
Love,
Li