We don’t appreciate people in law enforcement enough, and it seems that Ferguson, MO, demonstrates that all too well. Police officers are somewhat like the parental figures in grown-up society, and we are known to treat them with that same degree of grudging tolerance, with occasional outbursts of outright hatred because they try to keep us in line. We know that we need police officers, but when they do their job, we cringe. The people in Ferguson are shown and heard on news media in acts of civil disobedience and justifying it because an officer shot a suspect who died of his wounds. I’m including a link to an article which, I think, describes the incident in the most neutral and thorough terms from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0
It seems that police officers are often treated like domestic workers: they clean up messes nobody else wants to handle, and they’re looked down upon for doing that job. Really, think about the last time you greeted and asked after the well-being of your workplace’s domestic staff, who clean your break room’s gunky sinks and wipe poo and other indescribable fluids off your toilet seats. Don’t you usually just “leave them to their job” and ignore them unless the sink still looks a bit grimy? Now ask yourself when you ever greeted a police officer and thanked him or her for going into filthy crack houses to stay the hand of a tanked-up addict holding a weapon from hurting his wife and kids, or standing in a row of ten or so officers against 50 riled up citizens who want to burn down the town’s beloved businesses?
These folks do a tough job that no average person would or could do. They train to run into the line of fire, stand between two sides in a domestic abuse standoff, negotiate in dangerous situations and take matters to task when they get out of hand. They run themselves ragged guarding our civility and trying to keep the peace, but the only time we remember them is when they pull us over for speeding and we cuss them for giving us a ticket. We don’t mind the misbehavior, just getting caught.
And even though Ferguson seems to want it to be so, the race card doesn’t even figure into what happens when an officer makes an arrest: the officer is wrong, even when it’s Satan himself getting handcuffed, because somebody always jumps in and plays the joker card of police brutality. Maybe we need robotic law enforcement like in Robocop to calm things down.
Sure we could go on about how unfortunate it was that the dead man in the Ferguson case, Michael Brown, wound up being shot after an alleged robbery, or we could talk about karma, fate, the hand of God, misuse of power, Jean Valjean and Javert or any such story to make facts sound more palatable, but human free will is tough to deal with, and cops are human beings tasked with a great responsibility to try to balance that free will for the good of all. It is impossible for people not to misbehave, and it is impossible for officers of the law not to have outcomes like this on occasion. They try to avoid it, but it will happen. What we might want to do is remember that crime and justice are two parts of our existence that don’t always come out the way we want them to, and the best we can do is let police officers do what they must do and behave ourselves.
And occasionally thank them for their service.
And say hello and “How are you?” to your office domestic staff.
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