The following blog was inspired on May 24th
thanks to a discussion I became part of on a thread on Facebook. A woman had
posted her distress over someone stealing her car. She mentioned she was going
to call the police, despite not being overly trusting of them. Cue one person
that had to chime in with “See, you don’t like cops, but who do you call when
you need help? The cops.”
I decided to engage in the conversation, and brought
many of the points I’ll be talking about in this blog. The woman responding was
entrenched in her original argument, her responses became circular and thankfully,
the moderator ended up closing off comments. However, thanks to this woman I
was finally able to craft the perfect way to defuse those who claim you can’t
seek police reform and still ask for their help when needed. So, if you feel
that serious police reform is needed, and you post about an incident where you
needed police assistance, and someone pulls that line on you, there’s several
ways you can defeat their argument. And here it is.
It’s not police as a whole that you distrust, it is
the bad apples that manage to paint police as a whole in a bad light. It really
is high time that we find a way to remove these folks from service before the
overall image of police is damaged to a point no one trust them as a whole.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is the
loopholes that allow an officer with a history of use of excessive force and
other rules violations to essentially gypsy from department to department.
There was, for example, a case that made national news in Ohio a few years ago where
a man was shot in the back by an officer who’d transferred from another
department in another state. This officer had a long record of use of force
violations and questionable shooting incidents. He’d also been fired from a
third department for those exact reasons.
You could also mention your fears about the
equipment that departments have been able to acquire. For example: There’s no
reason that a city with a rather small population should have a fleet of
military SUV’s that the department will most likely never use, and will sit in
a garage collecting dust. While these vehicles may make for some cool and
intimidating photo shoots, they have no practical use for this department. Not
to mention it was your tax dollars that most likely paid for this vehicle. And
when they mention some unique setting in which the vehicle will be needed, simply
reply that the odds of such an event actually occurring are rather remote, so
remote that it still does not justify the purchase of said vehicle.
Over the last several years, it feels that
departments have placed diplomacy aside and instead feel the need to intimidate
instead. Yes, granted, there are cases where crowds are unruly and drastic matters
need to be put in place. However, showing up at protest you know the odds are
that it won’t become violent, and your department opts to show up dressed in
tactical gear, you’ve already turned up the heat and by the actions of the
department, inflamed tensions. It is almost like the department has shown up
looking for a fight.
No one wants to engage an angry person. People tend
to take insults to heart. However, police in these cases must set personal
feelings aside and simply allow someone to vent. And for those that think this
is a wild and impractical idea, allow me to use an incident that happened in
Toronto, Canada back in 2015 as an example.
A man, angry at life in general, pulled a knife on
a cop, and threatened him. The officer sat on a nearby desk and engaged the man
in conversation. No one ended up getting shot, no one was tased and most
importantly, no one died. The officer, without any use of force, was able to actually
get the man calmed to the point where the man gave the cop the knife and
surrender to police. I have to admit, I
was amazed at the poise of the officer to never once lose his cool and how he
was able to defuse the situation. Feel free to use that as example if you ever
engage someone really entrenched in their if you don’t support cops, don’t call
them if you need them argument.
As you can see with the example, force doesn’t
always need to be the first option. And that is part of the problem people seem
to have. A frustration over the fact that we’ve seen countless Body Wore Camera
footage where a police officer engages a person and the officer is already at
an eleven as far as their emotions go. No calming voice, just get on the ground
or I’ll shoot you. And that in many cases, is only going to make a bad situation
worse. Why is it police in other countries can defuse a situation with words
and we can’t? Is it our training methods? Is it our desire to prove were the
alpha dog in the situation? Could it be that were already so stressed as a
culture, we don’t know how to react without overreacting?
And it doesn’t have to be in an internet thread
that you use the above talking points. You could use them with a friend or
family member that sees your calls for police reform as an attack on police
themselves. It should not have the death of George Floyd to spark change. Change
should have not just started with Eric Canter. It should have started when Bull
Connor turned firehoses on children as young as six years old who used their
voice to protest. To think that serious reform is not needed is simply not
accepting that facts before you. Seeking police reform, and rooting out police
officers that are more Hollywood cliches than actual cops should not be a
controversial topic. When you present the argument that it is in the best
interest of police to root out these cops, and to no longer purchase surplus
military equipment as a tool to instill fear in the citizens, you’ll seen the
relationship between the community police improve to heights you could not
imagine right now. And how knows, once someone sets emotion aside in favor of
intellect, they’ll see the issue as well. And an adversary will become an ally.
