There's a good editorial in
The Washington Post this morning. It's inspired by the traffic stop of Lt. Nazario in Virginia, but it applies to the treatment of George Floyd too, short of his death.
The Washington Post, 13 April 2021 -
"Arrogance and entitlement are the diseases in American policing"
I'd remove the word 'the' from the title, but otherwise I think it's spot on.
The Washington Post said:
Racism is a certainty in many instances of police abuse of power. That’s the point that the Black Lives Matter movement has been making.
The Washington Post said:
But the comorbidity in this ongoing and disturbing American pattern is a culture of arrogance, entitlement and impunity that taints too many police departments and eclipses the good and brave officers who do put their lives on the line every day. Regardless of race.
I love her use of the word "comorbidity" here. I like the acknowledgement that there are police officers who take risks on behalf of other people, simultaneous with the characterization of some (many?) officers' arrogance and sense of entitlement, and that they behave with impunity, as a culture.
The Washington Post said:
The department runs toy drives and officer-friendly school programs. Officers do cultural diversity training and help Cub Scouts earn merit badges for finger printing. They present themselves as the good guys.
But in a gas station, alone with a Black and Latino man in a new car, these same officers enrobed themselves in an authoritarian superiority that made them demand total obedience, submission and blind compliance from an innocent man — a military officer in uniform — as if they were wartime checkpoint guards.
When I first heard about this incident on the radio, the reporter mentioned that the victim was an Army officer, but it was later that I realized he was
in uniform at the time. Clearly, these officers - and God knows how many others - could give a [toss] if a person they're interacting with serves their country. What are the odds these very same police officers have a "These colors don't run" American flag bumper-sticker on their hypermasculine pickup truck? (That's me editorializing, not the author of this article.
)
The Washington Post said:
“You received an order! Obey it!” an increasingly hysterical Officer Joe Gutierrez barked when Nazario asked him what was going on that night.
I like the use of the word 'hysterical.' A good summation of a guy so accustomed to simply demanding obedience - his own word, in this case, not mine - that he doesn't know what to do when someone even tries to calmly talk to him.
The Washing Post said:
The only things the police officers were guarding? Their own egos.
Someone mentioned, maybe in another thread, that the Army officer's vehicle had tinted windows and the temporary license plate may have been difficult to see. Which I totally believe. I totally believe that these police officers walked up to this car, now parked under the bright lights of a gas station, saw the temporary license for the first time, and felt embarrassed that they'd pulled this guy over for no reason. Maybe it was at that point they also realized that the driver was in uniform. And they simply could not back down and apologize for the confusion.
The Washington Post said:
Videos — both from police body cameras and Nazario’s personal mobile phone — show a respectful, calm driver in his military fatigues, raising his hands so the officers can see them as he repeatedly asks a question that every American has the right to ask: “What’s going on?”
The officers had their guns pointed at Nazario. And they escalated, threatened and bullied rather than simply answering his question.
"Escalated, threatened, and bullied, rather than simply _____________." I imagine you could copy-paste that into the complaint form for police officer misconduct, and only occasionally have to cross it out and write in something else.
The Washington Post said:
[...]it happened in a quiet town in a nation where violent crime is radically, sharply down, falling 71 percent in the between 1993 and 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet even as our country becomes safer, bored officers looking for action in small towns are getting more funding, equipment, latitude and entitlement.
That’s what the Defund Police movement is about. Not taking away all the money and letting anarchy reign. Rather, critics of American policing suggest prohibiting the purchase of surplus military equipment and moving some funding to social programs that can take the burden off police departments.
Not so much to do with this editorial, perhaps indirectly, but this paragraph reminded me of something someone said on a podcast a while back. I can't remember who it was, it might have been W. Kamau Bell. It was something like, "If anyone thinks 'defund the police' means 'get rid of all the police', that just tells me they haven't Googled it." I think at some point a continuing misunderstanding of slogans like "Black lives matter" and "Defund the police" has to be understood as willful, dismissive, and perhaps deliberately confrontational. That is, the ideas these slogans represent are relatively simple and straightforward (to understand, not to implement
), and explanations of the ideas are readily available to anyone who wants them and have been for quite some time now.
