There’s a meme floating around Facebook regarding law enforcement.
It reads in part, “the real problem is we now have an entire generation of spoiled, entitled brats, who believe rules and laws don’t apply to them and parents who refuse to be parents and hold their ‘little kiddos’ accountable for their behavior.”
I usually respond with “and we’ve given them badges and guns.” It’s not often taken well.
One poster went on to say “Most of our society thinks they are entitled and the rules don’t apply to them, parents don’t hold their children responsible for anything – this IS the big problem.” She’s making my point for me.
Cops are rarely held seriously or personally accountable when they screw up. They rarely do jail time, and they rarely personally pay any financial penalties. The flash-banged toddler is a perfect example. The one deputy who’s in trouble is charged over lying on the affidavit. No one was held responsible for burning the child, except the taxpayers.
There was a time when folks went out of their way to help cops, because they trusted them, and felt safe. Now we’ve raised up a couple of generations of special snowflakes who were told they were wonderful and hitting is bad, so when someone doesn’t do what the cop says, the officer’s first response is to go to guns. That’s wrong.
A cop on a forum put it this way:
The Taser generation as they are also called. They have been so ingrained not to fight in schools etc., that they will not go hands on with bad guys. When the Taser fails, and they won’t fight or don’t know how to because they were never allowed, then they have one last backup and that’s a firearm.
Sobering thought: An entire generation of cops from the suburbs who have never fought anyone in any real capacity outside of a training environment being put out into the real world with a bunch of people whose pecking order depends on who can fight and who can’t.
Yep. Those worlds are going to collide.
I think he’s got a great point. I think we’re now reaping the harvest of a couple of generations of kids with helicopter parents who were constantly told “Hitting is bad. Don’t fight. We’ll make it fair.” Lenore Skenazy of Free Range Kids has hundreds of stories about how this attitude of “protection at all costs” has permeated our society, and what happens when parents challenge it, and it’s scary. She commented, “I’ve been mulling the connection between “helicoptered” kids and the rigid political correctness enforced on campus — because no one ever learned how to roll with the punches, since they were kept “protected” from “bullying” and such, they can’t tell the difference between a jerk and a threat.”
Parents have been told for years that the world is a scary place, and it’s getting worse (it’s not), and now the kids that those parents have had are turning into the cops and policy-makers and civil authorities and infecting others with their paranoia.
But the problem is that when those people who have been told “We have to be fair, and we have to obey, and hitting and fighting are bad” run up against the people who grew up having to fight—sometimes literally—for food, the former doesn’t know how to handle the latter. Our kids have been taught for years now to never ever get into a fight. If they do, both parties will be thrown out of school, the cops will be called, and the children will be labeled as violent. These kids then grow up and become cops and after getting into a fight with the suspect, and the Taser fails, what’s left? They skip right past multiple steps on the use-of-force continuum, and go to lethal force. Then they end up killing people who weren’t really a threat, and more often than not, they get away with it.
It is extremely difficult in most cases to charge a police officer criminally over a bad shoot or other official misconduct. Far too often, officers are allowed to plead “officer safety.” Even back in the early 90s when I went through the police academy, officer safety was pushed in a huge way. “Your first duty is to make sure you go home at the end of your shift.” But is it?
These lines were never uttered on Adam-12 or Dragnet, but they well could have been, and I think officers need to hear them now.
We know exactly how many cops have died this year, and how. But we don’t know with any degree of certainty how many citizens cops have shot or killed, because there’s no law that requires an agency to keep those records. That’s unconscionable. That’s no way to run things.
We have a pretty good guess at least for 2015, only because civilians and the media have taken the initiative to look into it. But really, isn’t this something that should be required for law enforcement agencies to report? The Department of Justice is required to report it, so shouldn’t local agencies be required to report it? Shouldn’t there be consistent standards for what needs to be reported? There aren’t. Then again, the entire Uniform Crime Reporting program—the one that gives us our national crime statistics—is voluntary too, so should we really expect more on use-of-force reports?
When I was an MP, back when MPs still did garrison law enforcement duties (most of which has been turned over to DOD police officers now), one of the things our drill sergeants and instructors stressed was being as squared away as possible. That meant our uniforms had to look better, and our boots had to be shinier, and we had to get it right, no matter what we were doing. Because if we were going to tell other people they were doing something wrong, we had to be right.
That’s not a bad standard to set for yourself. I tried to follow it as an MP and later as a civilian cop. Didn’t always make it. But I tried to. And I tried to hold my fellow MPs to the same high standard. I think that’s one place where law enforcement is really failing. The “thin blue line” oftentimes becomes the blue wall of silence when it comes time to discipline their own. Watch almost any video of an out-of-control cop, and you’ll see some in the background, not doing anything to stop the one who’s giving them all a black eye. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the us-vs-them mentality that grows from calling everything a “War on Something” and making our cops look like soldiers.
When you give someone the authority to restrict freedom and kill people, you need to hold them to a higher standard than the average citizen. Wanting that doesn’t make me anti-cop. Or at least it shouldn’t.
So support your local police. Hold them to a higher standard.
Share your thoughts!