The Responsibility of Law Enforcement in Public Discourse
It
appears now that it is impossible to discuss any topic of even the
slightest relevance without expecting a wild backlash from random
assholes carrying unduly strong opinions. One has a hard time concluding
that it is wise to speak substantively about anything at all these
days; the best course of action is to either remain silent or to ramble
on about the banal and the unimportant, except in the company of the
closest of friends and family who might be able to shoulder the weight
of what has been threatening to burst out of you in the wrong places all
week. The opportunity to unburden oneself of ideas has become a rare
thing indeed, and every private interaction is a tacit confessional of
matters that once fit comfortably in the public domain. After all, one
never knows whether something that is said out loud will inadvertently
trigger hazardous opprobrium from people who are suddenly ready to
castrate your children (I don’t have children) and choke your dog (over
your dead body you’ll come near my dog).
I
was thinking of this unfortunate state of affairs after reading a
couple of headlines in my news aggregator today concerning the Missouri
journalist who exaggerated his experience during a routine traffic stop
last week. The original article was simply a crotchety old man’s take on
what his own traffic stop (for failure to signal) would have felt like
had he been a minority. Keep in mind, this was right after the Castile
verdict, and he too had been pulled over for a trivial infraction. This
journalist was cranky and it showed. But it was, after all, a bullshit
stop; there was no traffic around him and he put nobody at risk. So the
journalist wrote a brief public interest piece on how the stop made him
think about minorities in the same situations, and how they may perceive
the officers’ actions in a totally different light — including one of
fear. In other words, he used his personal aggravation at having been
stopped for a silly reason and parlayed it into a piece about police
practices more broadly.
The
sheriff was eager to demonstrate how his deputies had done everything
right during the stop, so he released the dashcam footage and wrote a
biting response to the journalist’s article. As you might expect, most
people vigorously “sided” with the sheriff. By and large, both the
sheriff and the public wildly misconstrued some of the journalist’s
points, erroneously taking them to be expressions of what he was
actually feeling rather than his musings of what it would have felt like
for a minority in the same situation. People went, as we say in the
biz, apeshit. “Fake news!” they
were crying. “He’s a dirty rotten liar!” others proclaimed. The
reaction from police blogs was unadulterated outrage. And after Fox News
and the New York Post picked up on the exchange, it became an all-out
online massacre of both the journalist and the paper — despite that the
managing editor had issued a rueful response in which he apologized
profusely for publishing the piece.
But here’s the critical thing: that public support for the sheriff? He was going to get it no matter what the video showed. We have a majority of people (particularly conservatives) who think that everything went as it was supposed to go in the Philando Castile pull-over — and
that man is dead now. Really, what are our public perceptions worth
when it comes to these dashcam videos? What was this sheriff hoping to
prove other than the truism that a vast swath of people are going to
side with his deputies regardless of what the videotape shows? What was
the point of this sheriff’s public display of indignation, other than to
prod the public into skewering, and ruining, this 84-year-old man’s
life and career? Even if it’s not what the sheriff meant to have happen,
it is damn well what he could have and should have expected to happen
in today’s climate of vicious overreaction.
One
thing was clear from the vast, incestuous response among the invariably
pro-cop crowd: if you merely perceive your interactions with the police
in a less-than-favorable way, no matter how inconsequential your
opinion and your status, we will rip you to shreds.
This
story really ground at my nerves, to the point that I felt compelled to
write the sheriff (and copy the paper). Afterward I was compelled to
post my letter, because I am maddened by the one-sided public response
so far. But that brought me around to the issue I discussed in my
opening paragraphs, namely, fear of approaching a potentially explosive
subject and being torn apart for it.
Put
simply, the calculus prior to writing the letter as well as this
opening was: if I say what I want to say, I will piss off group A. But
if I accommodate the feelings of group A, then I will piss off group B.
And on and on, back and forth. These are not empty fears; the potential
repercussions include being stalked, doxxed, slandered, or worse. How
many interesting things have gone unsaid at this point for fear of
frivolous but devastating public reprisals, personal attacks, and
threats?
In
this case, I was caught snugly between being honest about my
frustration with the sheriff’s overreaction and being fair in my
attempts to understand where he (and his supporters) might be coming
from in feeling erroneously portrayed, and thus unfairly persecuted. But
unfortunately, I have no great way of accommodating this latter group. I
find it rather stunning that the class of individuals who have the
greatest amount of sheer power and authority over our day-to-day
lives — the police — can feel persecuted
because of mild, impotent criticism. And I found those people howling
in favor of the sheriff to be exercising mindless capitulation to police
power. No, the cops didn’t use their guns or their batons or their
tasers in this case; instead, this sheriff used his state authority and
sway over public opinion to silence a journalist and make a managing
editor grovel. This was, in my estimation, quite banal evil — the
absolute worst kind of evil.
You can call that an overreaction on my part, but I don’t think it is.
Feel free to brush up on the controversy by reading the original article by the journalist, the managing editor’s response, and the sheriff’s response;
I won’t give you a play-by-play beyond what I already have noted. Below
is the letter that I sent, and I hope I don’t receive too many death
threats as a result of publishing it here. I might end up in the same
boat as Ol’ Clark, after all…
“Dear Sheriff,
I
use a news aggregator to see the day’s main headlines. Recently, Google
has changed its layout to the point of unreadability, which has
compelled me to rely on Bing news (the horror!) for the past few days.
I’ve noticed that this aggregator generally features more Fox News
articles, which are light on actual news and heavy on invective against
“liberals” and anything that might conceivably be perceived as liberal.
Put differently, such articles are very heavy on political disdain. Today, I saw the following headline in the aggregator:
“Sheriff exposes liberal columnist’s traffic stop tale for lie that it is” (Fox News)
And then there was the New York Post’s slight tweak to the above headline, interesting in and of itself:
“Sheriff exposes white, liberal columnist’s traffic stop tale for the lie that it is.” (NY Post)
Now,
I realize that you were terribly incensed and uncontrollably compelled
to publicly remedy the wrong of a doddering old journalist’s perception
of his encounter with your deputies, but I would like you to consider
for just a moment what you have wrought. Examine the two headlines above
and what they contribute to the conversation we’re all having about
police practices, political divisiveness, and other such issues.
I
am not saying that you were wrong to be a little annoyed with “Ol’
Clark’s” article. I’m not saying your deputies were in the wrong during
the course of the stop. I am saying that perhaps you abrogated some of
your responsibility by making a giant stink out of the issue rather than
just talking to the journalist and trying to work through the feelings
he expressed in his article. Instead, you have created fodder for an
outrage machine that has (admittedly) twisted your response into yet
another grounds for political divisiveness. I’m not saying you didn’t
have a right to respond as you did. I am saying that a person in your position of authority has a responsibility to think more carefully about the consequences of your public actions and use just a bit more discretion.
It’s
certainly not your fault that we’re living in a political and media
climate in which the above headlines become possible. I am saying that
we do, in fact, live in such a climate, and it serves the interest of
everyone in roles of public authority to act a bit more judiciously than
you did in this situation.
There
is no real question that police officers have a tough job. On the other
hand, you did sign up for it, and you wield enormous power over the
citizens of your jurisdiction as well as over public perception. And yet
despite the latter fact, we are often exposed to a deep-seated
sensitivity on the part of police officers. In a sense, to some
observers it feels as though we’re not simply required to obey you and
respect you during encounters; we are expected to treat you with kid
gloves even when writing about our perceptions of our encounters with
you. Your response to Clark’s article is a case in point, and to be
honest, it’s just a bit much.
You
clearly took some of the article out of context and in the wrong
spirit. I will be the first to acknowledge that the article was not
well-written. But those portions that you took particular offense at
were obviously intended to express how a minority might feel in a
similar circumstance — not how
was Clark himself was feeling (eg, feeling in danger or that the deputy
had his hands at the ready to shoot). The article was a little
over-the-top and could have been expressed more clearly, yet its intent
was obvious to me as a casual observer. Instead, you took the article as
a direct assault on the way the officers handled the stop. That was
patently not the point of the article — the article was about perceptions
and was an attempt to put oneself in the shoes of another — and your
overreaction was not commensurate with the ideas expressed. In fact,
your response was completely tone deaf and only made the feelings
underlying the perceptions even more raw.
Whether
it’s accurate or not, whether it’s true or not, there is a distinct
feeling among many in society that police officers are too often abusing
their authority. This perception is exacerbated by the increasing
militarization of our police forces, despite a decades-long general
decrease in crime. Granted, the vast majority of police officers are
great, and respectful of their charge and their duties. But I am always a
bit chagrined when I see an officer on TV saying dismissively, “Sure,
there are a few bad apples” while completely forgetting the rest of that proverb.
This kind of dismissiveness and the wagon-circling that occurs when
officers do in fact behave badly are real problems. This helps
contribute to the hard feelings underlying the types of perception
expressed in Clark’s article. The acquittal in the Castile case is also
weighing on people’s hearts and causing many to wonder to what extent
racial differences play a role in our day-to-day encounters, including
those with police. That was also part of the article’s tone, and you
either missed it or were a bit too blinded by your eagerness to
emphasize the decency of your own force to acknowledge it.
There was another bit of handwashing that you engaged in in your response:
“In
his column Ol’ Clark sings the same tune we hear so often, in that
these “trivial” traffic violations should not be a reason for law
enforcement to stop a vehicle or write a summons. Here is a quick
Political Science refresher: law enforcement is in the Executive Branch
of government, which means they enforce the laws. The Legislative Branch
is responsible for creating and writing the laws. If people have a
problem with what is deemed “trivial” traffic laws, then our friends
down at the Capitol are the ones they need to be complaining to or
about. The job of a law enforcement officer is to enforce laws, no
matter if they are deemed serious or trivial and I can assure you the
deputies at the Boone County Sheriff’s Department are going to enforce
them all.”
You
are whistling past the graveyard here. There is a tacit acknowledgment
in this portion of your response that Clark was not, in fact, putting
anyone at risk for doing something as trivial as not signaling when
there was no surrounding traffic. Your response is, the law is the law,
and if you have a problem then you should try to have the law repealed.
This is complete nonsense. Nobody suggests that the general requirement
to signal should be subject to a blanket repeal. But neither is it
possible for a law to be written that addresses every factual
circumstance or situation, including those times when we make very
trivial mistakes that don’t affect public safety at all. When those
things happen, you do absolutely have the discretion to issue a warning
rather than a ticket, and to pretend that you don’t — and to wash your
hands and blame the legislature — is yet one more reason that people
have raw feelings toward the police. Here’s a political science
refresher for you: prosecutors are also part of the executive branch,
but they too have discretion when it comes to execution of the laws.
They have to have such discretion, for the precise reason that laws
cannot be written to address every factual situation. We are imperfect
people, and when we make a mistake that happens to be a technical
violation of the law but that does not risk the public safety
whatsoever, that’s a perfect candidate for police discretion. (And let’s
not pretend that there aren’t many, many jurisdictions in which the
police function has basically become one primarily of raising revenue
rather than protecting people.)
You
seem often to forget your mission to protect public safety when you
make excuses like the one above in favor of falsely arguing that you
have no choice but to come down with a hammer no matter how appropriate a
fly swatter would be in a given circumstance. You seem to forget what
it’s like to be the one subject to an unduly harsh police action rather
than the one dutifully committing the action. This is also part of the
problem: every time the police refuse to exercise discretion in
circumstances in which it’s plainly called for, it creates more hard
feelings. Your response is, basically “tough luck.” Well, I guess that’s
one response. I’m not sure it’s the most helpful one.
I
say all of these things to perhaps make the meaning that Clark (I
think) was trying to express just a little more clear. We’re frustrated.
You’re frustrated. The best response is perhaps not to throw your
weight around and get an old journalist suspended (if not fired). It’s a
shame that you not only have the power to arrest, but the power to make
a managing editor bow unquestioningly.
Thank
you for taking the time to read this. My apologies that it’s so long. I
do wish you and your deputies all the best in keeping the public safe
and coming home safely to your families as well.
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