[ op-ed ] Police and community need to share the responsibility

Over the years I have written a number of times about troubling police behavior even here on the more rural end of the Cape. The controversial roughing up of 4th of July celebrants, the proposed use of tasers, DNA swabbing of the inner cheeks of whole male population of one town, the use of surveillance cameras to keep an eye on local teens, the gunpoint accosting by police of a stroller on the bike trail who happened to be black. And so on.

Capewide the last few months there has been a rash of problems: police driving under the influence, police causing automobile acccidents; most notably a police officer in off-duty capacity as assistant coach driving a Little Leaguer to a game in Rohoboth, allegedly DUI, crashing en route but aided by another town’s police to rent a new vehicle to continue on until the frightened kid bolted and sought refuge.

These are not isolated incidents. Police misbehavior would seem to be, while not the rule, a constant, ongoing problem. It shouldn’t be a surprise. Cops are only human. The trouble is in the idea that because their job is to uphold the law the police are inherently more virtuous than most people.

The usual police response to complaints about troubles with one of their own is to circle-the -wagons: Don’t worry, we’re handling it. We’re conducting an internal investigation.

This paper has initiated useful investigation of police secrecy in protecting officers in trouble and of the apparent failure of police to do an adequate job of self-policing.

But the police lack of transparency is only part of the problem. More fundamental is our ambivalence over whether the right hand (we the people) really wants to know what the left hand (the one holding the gun) is doing.

There is a certain element of “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” in our attitude. There’s an element of the classic western “High Noon”–westerns reflect a lot of our attitudes and myths about law enforcement– Hey, Sheriff, we hired you to do this dangerous, tricky job, check the job description. Don’t look at us to help you; just let us know when you’ve dispatched the bad guys.

The police need to start seeing themselves as more accountable to the community. But we citizens need to start caring that they do and insisting on it. We need to let cops know that they work for us civilians and that when there are problems, the buck doesn’t stop with them but with us or our representatives.

There’s something dangerous about a police force that has a problem about that, that wants to be above or beyond the law, or the community, a force unto itself. Much as we lionize it in movies (Dirty Harry, Rambo), that’s an attitude that can lead to abuse.

But there’s something equally dangerous in a community which has no mechanism for opposing such behavior. A police-community coordination board should be an important part of town government. The board’s duties would start with informing applicants that, whatever you learned in school, whatever attitudes you may have picked up o n the job, here are local values you should consider yourself guided by in doing your work.

The emphasis of such a board should not be on punishing the police but rather to ask them to share the responsibility of their difficult work. To relieve Gary Cooper, Dirty Harry and Rambo of some of the burden of the solitary macho lawman.

Division of labor—I’ll handle the plumbing, fix your car, teach your children, you take this gun and keep the bad guys in check– is a great thing, but there are limits.

About 10 years ago, after the aforementioned alleged racial profiling incident on the bike trail, Wellfleet Forum sponsored a community/police meeting with the purpose of bringing about healing over the controversy. And the evening of vigorous discussion was a step in the right direction. But that’s as far as it went. It needed to go a lot farther to create genuine change in the troubled frontier between us and our police.

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