Shortly after the 24 May massacre of fourth-grade students and teachers in Uvalde, and a little later after Texas Governor Greg Abbott lauded the local police officers for prompt, brave, and decisive action, we learned that a federal Border Patrol officer led the charge and shot the killer after his one-hour-plus rampage. Local officers had their reason why they did not act and federal officers did. As a Texas Department of Safety official told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on 26 May, “the [local] law enforcement officers at the school were reluctant to engage the gunman because ‘they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed’.”
The clear message from officers: police safety matters more than public safety; the lives of police officers matter more than the lives of citizens, including elementary-school-age children. The massacre at Uvalde is not a unique example of police priorities evident in slow, confused, or ineffective responses to civilians in danger. Such responses prompted guidance 20 years ago that police should confront a shooter immediately, without waiting for special assistance, as the best way to save lives in present danger.
By contrast, an aggressive Las Cruces officer killed Sra. Amelia Baca, a 75-year-old Hispanic grandmother suffering from dementia. The yet-unidentified officer disregarded more than 70 hours of de-escalation training and acted with unrestrained anger because Sra. Baca failed to comply with his profane commands (five times: “drop the fucking knives”) shouted in English at a confused woman who knew no English. Yet Mayor Pro Tem and District 1 Councilor Kasandra Gandara said that she “fully supports the police.”
Given such political support, with its implied endorsement of even gross misconduct, police do not take advice or direction seriously; policies on paper do not translate into practices in the field. Their non-enforcement reflects weak police leadership. For all the recent talk about transparency and accountability, no one, including the Chief of Police, tries to bring police officers and the police department under control. Police officers do as they please; rely on “blue privilege” to excuse them from the consequences of their misconduct; expect politicians to stall, stifle, or scrap efforts at reform; or depend on a public divided in their views of the police to drag out the controversy to a draw.
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“Blue privilege” is not without some justification. One of the primary responsibilities of government at every level—local, county, state, national—is public safety, including misdemeanor or felonious conduct, traffic control, rescue operations, guard or escort duty, etc. Dangerous situations and episodes are rare occurrences but ever-present possibilities which require officers to put themselves at risk to do what they are expected and trained to do. Until they get into “combat,” no one can know who will be brave and who will be craven. Most courts disallow a police defense based on subjective fear but allow it if objectively warranted by the facts. Since many encounters may be confused or confusing, develop rapidly, and demand prompt actions which, in hindsight, may seem not the right ones, officers commonly get the benefit of the doubt—“blue privilege.”
The problem with “blue privilege” is that its limits, if any, often depend on political perspective. The divide is the usual one: one side sees the role of the police as primarily if not exclusively, to enforce “law and order,” and sees them always as “the good guys” and those whom they pursue as “the bad guys.” The other side sees many roles for the police to ensure service in diverse situations, a few potentially violent, most of requiring little or no enforcement. Another way to see the gap: confrontation and domination versus de-escalation and negotiation. The result is that the former see the police as essentially military and their conduct, protected by “blue privilege,” largely beyond challenge; the latter see the police as guardians whose conduct has only limited privilege, can come under public scrutiny, and is not above the law.
The traditional view of the police favors militarism, a view reinforced by the sale of used military equipment to police forces. Accordingly, training emphasizes loyalty to the force and one’s partner, violent or violence-prone situations, and military-style responses: overwhelming force or firepower. Thus, someone fleeing arrest or disobeying an order can be chokeholded or shot to death, even when the legal violations are minor and there is no danger to the person, others, or police.
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Anyone thinking about reforming the police in Las Cruces must first think about police officers as members of society, as people who share the attitudes, beliefs, and conduct of the general culture. Their roles and responsibilities reflect, often enlarge or distort, society’s cultural propensities; citizens must accept that they reflect the city’s propensities writ large. Society assigns them their roles and responsibilities; in justice and fairness, it cannot suddenly treat them as scapegoats.
The second thing is that police officers are no better or faster at changing lifelong attitudes, beliefs, and conduct than others are. Indeed, for them, unlike other members of society, they are impeded by their commitment to their profession and its customs. They aspired and trained to become police officers and then serve. They cannot easily redefine their life-long commitment to their profession, transform their attitudes, change their beliefs, and amend their conduct in adjusting to changes in established customs of conduct—or as easily as society can redefine them in order to reform police roles and responsibilities. In decency, society must make some allowance for “cultural lag.”
An issue taking these two things together. If society is racist, the police are racist; if society renounces, or pretends to renounce, racism, police officers face the challenge of renouncing lifelong dispositions to think, feel, and act in previously sanctioned or at least tolerated ways about race and members of a race. Their challenge is great. Those Christians doubting the difficulty of such a challenge should remind themselves that antisemitism, though long publicly condemned, remains widespread in word and deed.
Conclusion: if society wants reasonable, effective, and enduring reforms of police departments, it must think about how the transition can be achieved with due respect for police officers facing public criticism and personal difficulties. It is neither pleasant to have one’s life work reviled nor painless to have to adjust to professional and associated personal changes for an uncertain future.
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So much for consideration; now for expectations. They are standards and should be high because of the importance of public safety, the primary police responsibility.
First, civilians should expect police to treat them like fellow citizens, to respect them at all times, even if they are angry or insulting, and, in matters of law, to treat them as innocent until found guilty. If police want to be respected and treated respectfully like other members of the community, they must reciprocate that respect and respectful treatment. Otherwise, without reciprocity, there can be no trust.
Second, civilians should expect police to use methods and measures of enforcement proportionate to the offense. Since they believe that excessive force serves no good purpose, citizens should expect the minimum necessary force, not overwhelming force according to military doctrine, to be the rule in making arrests. If and when civilians are confronted by an officer, they should expect to be safe from abusive, violent, or body-damaging or life-threatening measures, the more so if they are non-hostile or unarmed. Civilians should expect that, especially in localities in which fear of police is the norm, police know that those fleeing them are not necessarily offenders and that disobeying a lawful order to halt rarely justifies a shooting. “Street justice” is not justice.
Third, civilians should expect the police to comply with all laws, police policies, and professional standards, to respect the law, and to regard themselves as equal under the law. They should expect police leadership to enforce those policies and standards. They should expect police to know that the necessity for law enforcement and public safety services does not entitle police to exemptions from the law and that their enforcing the law does not place them above the law. Civilians should expect police to accept and operate accordingly.
Fourth, civilians should expect the police, as public employees whose services are paid for by the public, to be liable to criticism, to be able to explain themselves and their conduct, and thus to be accountable for their conduct according to the same (or higher) standards as civilians are accountable.
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Police as a whole represented by their union often give lip service to these civilian expectations, but do not accept them as operative policies if enacted and then actually enforced. As a result, civilian control of police departments is difficult, if not impossible. Police unions and officers have considerable power in the operation of cities. Simply walking off the job—striking, but not contracting “blue flu,” is illegal—puts great pressure on politicians responsible for city operations to do as the police demand.
A word on police loyalty and collegiality. When something goes wrong, defenders of police often invoke a maxim by mentioning “a few bad apples”; they omit the rest of it: “spoil the barrel.” The maxim has a sting to it: how good are the good apples if they tolerate the bad apples? Which means that all police spoil the barrel by acts not of a professional nature, committed or tolerated. So police loyalty and collegiality make opposition to oversight certain—and signal that, in their eyes, the police come first.
A common proposal to improve oversight and control is a civilian review board. The reason why concerned citizens or groups, not city councils, usually make the proposal is that city councils know the difficulty of trying to change the culture and the collegiality within the police force to serve public safety. For that reason, even if boards have been created, they have soon atrophied because of persistent resistance from the police and, in turn, the politicians and other powers that be.
Yet, in response to the police killing of Sra. Amelia Baca, some Las Cruces groups—NAACP and LULAC—are proposing a civilian review board. Not a chance. First of all, City Council will oppose the proposal. Mayor Ken Miyagishima is and always has been opposed to police reform. No one knows why, but the persistence and intensity of his opposition suggests something suspiciously more than the usual regard for their role and responsibilities. Councilors have no strength to resist Mayor’s quasi-patriotic appeals to support the police. When, in the discussion of “Eight Can’t Wait,” Councilor Johanna Bencomo proposed a civilian review board, Miyagishima rebuked her as if she were a little child; she hastily backed down from her proposal. Although Councilor Kasandra Gandara and Councilor Gabe Vasquez joined her in supporting police reform, all three (and the Mayor) so much wanted a whitewash of the police that they supported a police audit which ruled out at least one detailed case of police misconduct from review.
Second, perversely, the community, especially the more victimized, Hispanic part of it, will resist such a board. It has always given free rein to the police and long tolerated police who routinely use excessive abuse, even sadistic violence. Hispanic councilors reflect this toleration of abuse and violence. For example, none of the four has spoken about the K-9 officer who unleashed his dog on a captured, compliant Hispanic suspect and let the dog shred his arm, while fellow officers enjoyed the show and did not spoil their enjoyment by intervening. Responding to public and political callousness, police have become accustomed to do as they please. Officers and their union not only reject episodic criticism, but also would refuse regular public scrutiny. The Police Chief, who must have their cooperation to provide a degree of public safety, and the City Attorney, who must rely on their assistance in court cases, would support them.
Taking these two considerations together, a civilian review board will not be created or will die stillborn, or will not be supported and will decay in short time. The initiative is well-intentioned but unrealistic in ignoring local attitudes, beliefs, and customs.
An alternative should take a smaller step. I suggest quarterly meetings in Council chambers. City Council members would attend as observers; the City Manager would preside; and the Police Chief would answer unscripted and unscreened questions from the public. Any inability to answer questions for lack of information would require a make-up meeting one week later. His advocacy of transparency and accountability would make it difficult for him to explain why such a public forum would be unsuitable. However, the city leadership’s collective, evasive, and dishonest response to the officer’s killing of Sra. Baca suggests that even this modest step would be one too far. Resistance by City Council, the City Manager, the Police Chief, and the City Attorney would reveal their desire to maintain a status quo however damaging or deadly to Las Cruces citizens.
Can the police be trusted to serve public safety? In Las Cruces, the question seems silly, the answer being so obvious to anyone paying attention. Perhaps the question to ask is whether these city leaders be trusted to serve public safety?
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