A young, left-leaning law professor from a very liberal family decides to become a cop. Where’s that gonna go? Why, into the 2021 book “Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City” by Rosa Brooks.
When her mom learns her daughter is signing up as a reserve police officer with DC Metro, she is horrified: …”her memories of being tear-gassed by police at 1960s anti-war marches remained fresh. ‘The police are the enemy,’ she informed me. “They are not on our side.’”
Following left-wing script, she hates guns but somehow manages to qualify with her issued Glock 17, “But when I got home from each patrol shift, the first thing I’d do was take my gun out of its holster and put it away in its locked metal box. And each time the heavy lid snapped closed, I’d feel a small wave of relief. It was like slamming the lid on a dangerous viper.”
I’ll give her this: she at least tries to understand the Job, and in many ways succeeds. She writes, “Activists critical of policing complain, with some justification, that police effectively become occupying forces in poor urban neighborhoods…But over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand – police go where people ask them to go.”
Toward the end of the book Brooks writes, “…in both older and more recent studies, police officers tend to rate the opportunity to help people as t he single largest factor in choosing their job; pay, power and authority are near the bottom of the list.” She adds, “The vast majority of the police officers I met in my time with MPD were decent, well-intentioned men and women.”
Professor Brooks and I have opposing views on many things related to criminal justice, but we are in agreement on that last quote.
Semi- off topic. I have read and agree with that the mandate for badge cams is the biggest self-own ever by leftists. For every documentation of police misconduct there are about 100,000 documentations of police dealing with belligerent a**holes. The best videos are the subset of “Do you know who I am.” But the Left has seemingly not learned their lesson as the recent demand for ICE badge cams demonstrates.
Sorry; I haven’t a clue what you are talking about.
Are you for, or against, badge cams?
What exactly are they?
If you are, why are you criticising the ‘leftists’ for wanting them?
What does the ‘subset of “Do you know who I am” ‘ refer to?
njk
I will leave for Richard to say whether he is for or against badge cams.
Badge cams are generally like “Go-Pros” worn on the chest of police officers and are generally supposed to be activated when they begin an interaction with a citizen, such as pulling someone over or approaching a suspect. Different departments have different rules for when they are activated. Most include a constant monitoring feature that allows capture of the 30 seconds prior to the activation of the badge cam.
The leftists want them because they believe they will document police misbehavior or, more charitably, to encourage better police behavior, knowing that everything is being recorded.
I don’t think it is so much a criticism of “leftists” for demanding badge cams, so much as it is an observation that badge cams far more often support the police version of events when police are accused of improper behavior. This is why Richard (and I) consider the demand for badge cams to be a “self-own”–because the video often shows that the police behaved well and their critics were the misbehaving parties. Another irony is that badge cam usage has been historically limited in part due to budgetary restrictions–but insisting that police have badge cams usually requires additional police funding, something that is anathema to “leftists”.
The “Do you know who I am” videos are those typified by arrogant, self-important scofflaws who think they are so important or connected to persons of power that police dare not ticket them or charge them with crimes that apply to “common” people. The badge cam videos often show the “suspects” to be rude people who possess a genuine ignorance of the laws that apply to all of us, including them. For example, the mayor who thinks he’s entitled to speed and is affronted by an officer who dared to pull him over.
Most of the officers I know don’t mind the cameras a bit. But the left will never admit this…
Well, yeah, if you’re inclined towards destruction, disorder and disruption, then the police aren’t on your side. But, that’s QED and mom doesn’t seem to grasp the concept.
While rereading a Walter Jon Williams book, one of his characters realizes that the reason a group of …beings, doesn’t recognize an issue is that they don’t have a frame of reference. That is, they live in a mental world of their own and have neither direct experience with or know someone who recognizes reality. This effectively enables them to deny/fail to recognize reality.
This may be the root cause of many of those who are clueless about how the world works. If there’s a difference it also covers those wish to transform society. At least those without a lust for power.
Agreed on the boomerang effect of BWC’s. I’m surprised we’re not seeing more demand for BWC’s in other occupations like teaching and health care. If people can judge my actions based on last night’s “The Rookie”, we should judge health treatment based on “Gray’s Anatomy”.
John Converse, you are so very much correct. As a retired physician I have a low tolerance for most medical shows, as the major characters so often commit malpractice or profound ethical lapses in the name of their own internal sense of justice or based on horribly simplistic misunderstandings of medical science. Even the best and most entertaining police dramas have the main characters commonly surrendering their weapons to a criminal who has a gun to a hostage’s head or standing face-to-face with a criminal, both with cocked and pointed handguns as if that were a “Mexican standoff”. I remind myself that most screenwriters have no actual knowledge of police procedure, the dynamics of a lethal confrontation or the actual practice of medicine. Unfortunately, the same is true of much of the lay public as they try to make sense of dramatic news events wherein they severely underestimate the depth of their own ignorance regarding the matters at hand.
PS: Body Worn Cameras in medical settings would be a severe infringement of both privacy and patient dignity. BWCs would offer little in the field of teaching in my view. After 20+ years of teaching medicine, I strain to recall even one interaction with a student or resident that was sufficiently adversarial to cause a video of the event to be of interest. Ditto for medical practice.
Police have a much, much higher rate of “disagreement” with their “customers”–it’s the nature of the job. But, your point about the inability of lay persons to properly understand and judge police or medical actions based on a TV-based comprehension of the jobs is right on!
The way things are going, I think the Left is writing their own epitaph. They object to law and order. They favor unauthorized aliens consuming social resources to include industrial scale fraud while resisting assimilation. They believe everything they want is a “right” even if those “rights” demand products and services from others. Last I checked, that is exploitation which is the very thing they shout they are victims of.
Independent journalists are making an enormous amount of hay these days on social media and streaming services while legacy news sources, like the Washington Post, are dying in their own feces.
The tide is turning.