I've been watching a lot of crime dramas lately. So this article on how cops really want to police sparked my interest when I saw it earlier today.
It's an interesting read. I was struck in a couple of cases by how much these guys get away with (or claim to) when they take the law into their own hands. Particularly in situations where they appear to be extoring cash for long periods in order to pay it back to victims, or when they pit rivals against each other in fights. It seems like this would surface beyond the street fairly often.
But a lot of what the officers describe actually makes a lot of sense, in terms of being effective in enforcing laws. It's also pretty clear that these are intelligent guys, and many of their arguments actually make a good deal of sense. Certainly, it's clear that they have a different understanding of how the justice system fails than those inside the courtrooms.
The very end of the article (second to last paragraph) put everything into a different perspective for me: if we consider the things police do to be the types of things communities should be doing, is their behavior (even in the worst of cases) all that bad? Sure, they carry the weight of the law behind them but I think it's pretty clear that officers are as much as risk of investigation for abusing those powers as most anybody else. Why don't we think of them more like members of the community, and less like minions of the state?
Good, reasonable cops using clever extra-legal tactics against known scumbags sounds like a good idea. Unfortunately the profession tends to attract more than its fair share of abusive authoritarian assholes.
For a recent example, there's this meathead from our very own Albuquerque who pointlessly attacked a KOB TV crewman who was filming him at the time. Guys like that aren't exactly known for their impartial jurisprudence.
Some of these extra-legal tactics, like taking a suspect's private property and giving it away to whomever they want, are just ripe for abuse. Others, like showing up a dude's workplace and announcing that he needs to pay his girlfriend's hospital bill since he beat the shit out of her, I'm more sympathetic to. But without "innocent until proven guilty" I'm fairly certain we would rapidly degenerate into Russia.
While some of the tactics are interesting, I still don't agree with it. Without any sort of defined boundaries you end up with corruption. The police departments (especially in large cities) are rife with corruption. I've found most police I've dealt with to be bullying, condescending and non-helpful. They shouldn't always look at you like you're committing a crime. They should be approachable unless you really are doing something wrong. Bonnie was dehydrated at a rally downtown and was having trouble not fainting and when I went to the mob of cops, the lady said to me "the organizers didn't order a first aid tent." Excuse me? You're here to serve society and all I'm asking for is a glass of water. You couldn't let me have your little plastic bottle of water so my wife won't die of heat stroke? F*ck off b*tch, in my opinion. Also, with the increased militarization of the police ("call the SWAT team for everything!") and an increasing tendency to tase first and ask questions later makes me respect the cops even less. I do agree that the courts system is broken and too rigid in dealing with different people with different situations and backgrounds, but in my opinion it's better than a bunch of renegade cops running around acting as their own neighborhood dictator. In this case, a few bad apples really have spoiled the bunch for me.