Bill applauds the police officers who have finally begun to acknowledge that the problems in their ranks extend beyond just a “few bad apples.”
June 6, 2020
And finally new rule: hooray for the cracks that have finally emerged in the blue wall of silence.
Yes, eternal optimist that I am, I’m gonna look on the bright side of fires and looting in the breakdown of all order in the United States and hail the police chiefs from across the country who knelt and marched with the protesters in Miami-Dade County, in New York City, and Santa Cruz California, and Flint Michigan, and lots of places.
Houston police chief Art Acevedo even said he was outraged at Americans who don’t see a problem. This is new. Wasn’t that long ago police never even admitted they did anything wrong. Police sergeant Howard Banks of Omaha said “It’s all of us versus bad people and bad cops—and we want to get them out of the line of duty and police work…” Well, there I’m gonna have to stop you, because honestly it’s not quite that simple. I mean, forever, we’ve been talking about “bad cops,” you know, “bad apples.” And then the vast majority of cops… good cops.
But the real new rule is you can’t anymore get away with “this is a bad cop and any cops who aren’t actually committing the crime are good.” The ones who watch and do crowd control for atrocities they’re not good either. That has to be the new standard. And it goes for all out of line behavior if your partner is doing something horrendous, you can’t just watch and do nothing, like the husband in a cuck video.
There’s a meme that says “Nobody hates bad cops worse than good cops.” Okay, if you hate them so much turn them in. Because let’s be real, if there wasn’t video of that murder how do you think those other cops would have described that encounter? It would be “We found Mr. Floyd unresponsive, so we administered CPR, blah blah blah, lie lie lie.
“If you see something, say something” has to apply to police, too — you can’t get away with crimes on account of being the people who were supposed to stop crimes.
And speaking of stopping crimes, we were a little slow to get to that in LA this week. I mean, sometimes I feel like we’re getting the worst of both worlds. The abusive part of policing… but without the Law & Order part.
I’ve said many times in discussing the police, “civilization is a mile wide and an inch deep.” So when people say “Cops are all that stands between civilization and chaos,” absolutely, I agree. Cops are the badasses who deal with the dregs in an ugly business. But if cops wanna us to give them a little extra room to be tough because they’ve got a bad dangerous job, then they got to do the bad dangerous job. Which they have also done plenty of this week to be fair. This is tough stuff now.
But it was frustrating watching it on TV last Sunday. Car 54, where were you? It looked like Black Friday, but without cash registers. I did see a guy in Santa Monica turning away looters. But it wasn’t a cop, just a guy invoking a citizen’s doorman. And this young woman. Why? Even under these very difficult circumstances for the police, is she having to do this in a country that is teeming with police forces. One thing America does not lack for is police forces, local cops, state, county, highway, Sheriff’s Department, federal marshals, ATF DEA FBI, DSA. “Oh, we got cops,” but this lady had to step up?
I try to understand as much as I can, without being a cop, that it’s not like the jobs most people have — and it’s not. When a voice on the radio says “Man with machete on 15th and Main,” you have to go to 15th and Main.
And I’m guessing cops rarely get called out to a redneck’s front porch because the guy wants to tell you how well the marriage is going.
It’s a dangerous job, yeah, but I think we lose our battle with police misconduct when, before a bad cop hits the streets, because there’s not enough vetting about who becomes a cop in the first place. I swear to god, I think the root of the problem with bad cops isn’t always racism, it’s high school. “How much of high school did you spend inside a locker?” should be question number one on the psych evaluation.
I’ve known quite a few cops in my day, and others I’ve met for briefer encounters on the side of the road, and they are mostly not that guy. But that guy is who we have to weed out. Instead of LAPD making the psych eval the last step in joining the force, make it the first so meatheads with a chip on their shoulder aren’t given the license to perform urban executions.
Tough guys have to do tough things. Right now it’s easy to spot the toughest police officers, they’re the ones telling their fellow cops “you got to stop this shit.” A crack has been made in the blue wall of silence, please let it break down even further altogether. Or else, we’re going to be in the streets again and again, all the time. And in LA that doesn’t work because, you know, we’re not really a walking town.
