Are You a Perp?

Cops deal day and day out with criminals, learn how to scan the streets looking at everyone, trying to find suspects, spots signs of criminal activity and generally look for anything wrong or out-of-place. Then then return to their cloistered police home base, change into civvies and then hang out with their policeman buddies after hours. A strong bond, an espirit de corps of powerful proportions, is the obvious result. So too is an “us versus them” mentality, a strong distrust of anyone outside their police-grouping and all too often, a review of so many people they meet with a question whether they are on the right or wrong side of the law.

Lots of recruits have public service in mind when they join, but their insular existence, training and peer pressure often produces officers with mistrust of anything “not cop or related to cop.” While divorce rates hover around 50% for the general populations, according to Police-Officer-Pages.com, “Typically, the Police divorce rate is high. On average, the large departments are about 70-80 %.” Wow. Bad and long hours, sleep deprivation, working holidays, danger and high stress… and looking at the world as home for too many people on the wrong side of the law.

Divorce is one negative statistic. “According to the National Center for Women and Policing, 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, whereas families not involved in police work make up 10 percent of domestic violence cases. Another study states that there is a 24 percent domestic violence rate among older and experienced officers. So it's two to four times more common for a police family to experience domestic violence…

“Brain Robertson, who was a police chaplain for over 20 years, said that sometimes police officers don't ask for help because talking about their problems might be seen as a sign of weakness… Robertson said the [negative] numbers [cited above] are similar with officer suicides.” KSL.com (Salt Lake TV), January 17, 2014. Yet these are the people, well-armed, that we ask to enforce our criminal statutes and protect the public at large. When you are pulled over by an officer for a traffic infraction, how do you feel? Nervous? Appropriate for the occasion or a bit more? Think they are looking for evidence of something else as their eyes scan your passenger compartment?

NY Times Journalist, Charles M Blow, asked some tough questions and made some tougher observations in a recent (January 14^th) editorial, which focused on the use of deadly force in connection with a couple of obviously drug-using perpetrators: “If you overwhelmingly see the bad in people, does it diminish your impulse to search for the good? And if part of your job is to patrol ‘high crime’ areas, are you predisposed to lump in some non-criminals with the actual criminals in those areas? Furthermore, are your fears heightened and is your trigger finger made more itchy in those areas because you are more worried about making it home to your family than about the person you encounter making it home to theirs?

“Another line of questioning we must explore involves appropriate use of force. Both men shot and killed by [the officer in question] had taken drugs, but that is not a capital offense in a court of law, if you make it alive to a court of law. Both, reportedly, did not properly comply with police instructions — possibly because of the drug use — but that, too, is not a capital offense, assuming that you make it alive to a courtroom. Is there a better, more responsible approach to noncompliance than the use of deadly force?...

“And why should police officers so often worry about the presence of a gun anyway? This is a question we have to ask ourselves as a nation in love with our firearms. In 2013, Illinois became the last state to allow the concealed carry of firearms. Not that criminals, by definition, care much about laws anyway, but now even more people can legally have concealed guns on them. That has to raise the anxiety of police officers. Furthermore, as the Pew Research Center found last month: ‘For the first time in more than two decades of Pew Research Center surveys, there is more support for gun rights than gun control.’…

“Studies using simulations in 2002 and 2005 showed that people were more likely to shoot unarmed black men, while, in the case of the latter study, letting armed white people slip by. On the other hand, a study published last year found that participants ‘were more likely to feel threatened in scenarios involving black people. But when it came time to shoot, participants were biased in favor of black suspects, taking longer to pull the trigger against them than against armed white or Hispanic suspects.’” Think about it. How would you react under the above parameters, particularly in large urban settings where gangs and lots of criminals can be found?

It takes training, a concerted effort to end that distrusting insularity, greater connectivity to the communities being protected, and wise supervisors able to spot and deal with overly-tensed-stressed officers before problems arise. Finally, we need to deal with a society that allows guns into almost every nook and cranny of our lives… and still thinks guns are a solution rather than a huge problem for all of us. Cops today have assault weapons, even armored vehicles, and deploy dehumanizing “us vs. them” over-kill, military tactics. And remember, to survive, cops pretty much have learned to look at the outside world as a gaggle of perps. When they first look at you, maybe even after they have engaged with you, they may well think of you as such a perp. How does that make you feel? And if you are black or Hispanic?

        I’m Peter Dekom, and in budget-impair times, we still cannot afford to let issues like this pass.