What can I do?
Not
quite six months ago, a reader named Tracy posed that question to me and I, in
turn, posed it to you. Tracy, a 55-year-old white woman from Austin, said she
was sick of hearing about unarmed African-American men being injured or killed
by police. “What can be done?” she asked. “What can I do? I’m sincere in this
question. I want to DO something. What can that be?”
Well
Bob has some ideas. In an email, he describes himself as a “retired
professional firefighter from a metropolitan area” whose 20 years as a
paramedic often required him to work closely with police.
“I
witnessed many cases of police brutality,” he writes. “A stressed patient or
family member would call 911 for medical assistance. We would respond as well
as the PD. A situation that required a calm and caring presence and an
ambulance ride to a care center or psych ward would end up in a physical altercation
with mace and cuffs.”
Bob
says he and his partner would talk about what they had seen on the way back to
the station, “but knew better than to alert our superiors or file complaints
because we did not dare open a rift with the local PD. We (and paramedics on
other shifts) needed PD backup on potentially dangerous calls. So we all kept
quiet.”
Based
on that experience, Bob has two suggestions. One is that we should push for
more thorough screening of police applicants. “We need cops to DEFUSE
situations,” he writes, “not escalate. We need cops with people skills. No more
bullies. Very intense psych examinations should be part of police applicant
training.”
Bob’s
other suggestion? Require that non-sworn civilians be part of any investigation
of police brutality. Just as you would never assign a seven-year-old to solve
the mystery of the broken cookie jar, he thinks it makes little sense to ask
police to investigate their own.
“Do
we really think cops will give an unbiased and honest effort when investigating
other cops? NO! It is always the same old game. Make the investigation last for
months until it is back page news. Discount or do not document damaging
statements. Intimidate convincing witnesses. Conveniently forget to note
damaging facts. When all else fails, lie or plant evidence to close cases.”
From
where I sit, both of Bob’s suggestions have merit, but as we approach the first
anniversary of the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice with no one yet held
accountable, his second carries particular resonance. Even granting the need
for thoroughness, it strains credulity to believe it takes the better part of a
year — and counting — to decide whether to prosecute Cleveland Police Officer
Timothy Loehmann, especially given the surveillance video that shows Loehmann
shooting the boy, who had been holding a realistic-looking toy gun, within two
seconds after the patrol car skids to a stop in front of him.
Would
the decision on prosecution proceed at such a leisurely pace had it been
Loehmann who was shot? Would the prosecutor be agonizing like Hamlet almost a
year later?
You
know the answer as well as I do.
The
impulse to cut cops some slack — “Hey, he was only doing his job” — is
understandable. It is also wrong and, more to the point, shortsighted.
One
of the most important weapons in a cop’s arsenal is his authority. But
authority presupposes legitimacy and trust. How much of either can a police
officer — or a police force or the institution of policing itself — command
when they operate under such a blatantly different set of rules? A requirement
that outside eyes be involved in investigations of serious allegations of
police misconduct would go a long way toward rectifying that.
At
the very least, it’s a conversation we are long overdue to have. BY LEONARD
PITTS JR.
