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I'm going to start with some background on my position. My SO is a dispatcher for the sherriff's office in a semi-rural county in a midwestern state of the USA. I realize that our experience doesn't align on all fronts with the experience of a minority in a large city, fully acknowledge that, and have spent a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of what that means, and yet I still am bothered by a lot of attitudes.

This is being touched off by a lot of posts which have been boosted onto my timeline on the fediverse. I'm confident in saying that I wasn't seeing these sorts of posts before the last major influx of people coming from Twitter. It makes me uneasy to see the way that platform is being transformed and almost swallowed up by the masses, but that's not the point really. Now, an example of the sort of post I'm talking about was one where the poster was urging people that instead of suggesting to police that they should kill themselves, they should instead tell officers they should quit their jobs if they see them, say, waiting in line for a coffee. There is a lot to unpack here. First off, the idea that people are urging police officers to kill themselves? That's really a thing? I'm sorry but even the milder approach suggested, telling them they should quit their job, is not something that I can get behind.

I get to hear a lot of things at night when we're settling in for bed that are told in confidence, and I'm going to be careful to not give any specifics here so as not to betray that confidence by keeping things very general. Let me gett out of the way that the dispatchers in her office don't just send deputies, but are also responsible for the majority of EMS and fire departments throughout the county. Nevertheless, a deputy is very often the first authority figure on scene in an emergency due to the logistics of getting a cruiser on scene vs a fire truck or ambulance. Seconds can count, and I'm aware of the deputies saving a lot of lives because there was no time to wait.

Now I'm going to try to be fair in my portrayal here and say that the sherriff's office wasn't always a shining beacon. Sherriff is an elected position, for whatever reason, and the previous sherriff left things a mess. Frankly there was rampant corruption. I couldn't begin to guess whether the sherriff was part of it or just bad at his job, but in any event the turnover in the current sherriff's first year in office was illuminating as he savagely weeded the ranks. I believe he's a good man. I don't agree with all of his politics, but from what I can see his politics are not his driving factor, which is as it should be. We're probably very lucky.

Going further, I would characterize the highway patrol as a bunch of assholes who exist only to write traffic citations, and the interactions that the deputies have had with some of the city cops that I have heard about don't paint a great picture of their level of training or professionalism.

All that said, these deputies and a lot of other law enforcement are doing work that you really need someone to do. We've had a number of train derailments in the past year. Who do you suppose is going door to door and getting people to safety if there's a potential hazardous spill? There are certain addicts who have been narcan'ed back to life multiple times, and are alive today only because good people didn't give up on them. The detectives are often battling cases of human trafficking, even in a semi-rural county as I described it, often with victims who are well under the age of consent. Some of them have been rescued, some they were not able to reach in time, but even in those worst case scenarios they have sometimes at least managed to lock up the perrpetrators.

These people are often the first ones you will see on the worst day of your life. My SO has talked a number of people through performing CPR while waiting on emergency services to arrive and thus had a hand in saving actual lives. The deputies sometimes don't know if they are walking in to a suicide after the fact or if they might get there in time to try to talk someone down.

Then there's the drug busts. Now, the department doesn't generally do anything if you have a couple of joints on you or the like. Some cops can and do, I know. But some of the busts have been truly breathtaking. We're talking street values in the hundreds of millions in a few cases, and oftentimes we're also talking about truly dangerous stuff.

I get to hear about the funny calls, too. Although not always completely funny. They have a certain type that they call frequent flyers. These are the people who they have had such frequent interactions with that they know each other by first name now. In one case, a certain person was patrolling their neighborhood in a full ninja suit carrying two honest to goodness real Katanas, hid in the bushes when the deputies arrived and charged at them when they tried to go in to talk to them. This wound up being a tense situation. Spoilers though, while they threatened to shoot him, and were seconds away from having to, he had enough sense about him to stop because he knew the officers on scene and knew that they both meant business and would also treat him with respect in spite of the situation.

At any rate, the point is that things just aren't as simple as we sometimes want them to be. I don't agree with all of the things that police are used for and I certainly don't condone lethal force being applied carelessly. There are certainly a lot of reforms that absolutely have to happen, many of which revolve around not just policing but the justice system at large. But attempts to boild it down to something akin to "defund the police" are reductionist and short sighted in the extreme. I'm actually an anarchist at heart myself but being a pragmatist I also realize that without protection the strong literally always victimize the weak. So even if you see the police in your area as evil, maybe think twice about what might happen if they suddenly weren't there at all.

This should go without saying, but it must also be said. Repeatedly and loudly. We simply can't address a lot of our deeply divisive problems by policing or other means. Unrest in society has root causes. People often get pushed over the edge. We have systemic inequality because capitalism in it's current form is completely broken, and in fact this might be capitalism in it's natural unchecked state. I tend to think most people are less racist at their core than media protrays, but we have a hige issue with social media creating and fostering divisions either by accident or design. Same goes for most of the other ways people express bigotry. We're not going to solve the problems that people are rightly ascribing to misuse of policing without addressing the root causes of systemic poverty, inequality, and a completely broken economy.

There are no Simple Answers

2023-02-11

There are other pressures at work, also

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