Is this really all because of just a few bad apples?
You’d think that if the police were truly able to police themselves, something would have changed. The retraining, the reports, the reexamination would have made a meaningful difference. And yet.
The focus on individual officers is a distraction.
As is the grotesque efforts to dig through the lives of the victims in search of something, anything, one good reason that explains it all away and proves they actually did deserve to die.
“If only they hadn’t….”
Good cop, bad cop, good apple, bad apple – yes, weed them out. Yes, stop the bleeding. If police departments want to help with that, fine. Or not.
But don’t stop there.
The question we have to face is why this keeps happening, in spite of the retraining.
Why have we created a system where so many police officers feel it’s their right or responsibility to be judge, jury and executioner? Why do so many police officers have an us-versus-them mentality? Why have we allowed police departments to turn into militarized strongholds? Why does the police presence in my neighborhood look completely different from what people see in predominately Black or Latinx communities? Why is there such a disconnect between rhetoric and reality?
There are bad apples, no doubt. What we tend to forget is that, despite what The Osmonds told us, the original truism was that one bad apple does spoil the whole bunch. So when we look at our police departments and we see violent, racist cops, we have to ask: why have so many been allowed to exist so freely for so long?
The answer is that the whole analogy is wrong. It’s not bad cops infecting the good ones; it’s not even that the good ones are willing to turn a blind eye.
It’s that we’ve allowed the institution of the police to develop in such a way that bad apples have found a natural home. Or maybe it’s deeper than that – maybe it’s inherent in any system of control and enforcement. Exacerbated by an overemphasis on property rights. And turbocharged by centuries of racist laws and policies. Maybe we have a structure that works exactly as intended.
We have to look at the whole damn apple farm.
This is not about cops policing themselves. This is a systemic issue. It’s a racial issue. It’s an issue of power, of privilege, of class, of haves versus have-nots, of those of us who can view the current iteration of police as protectors versus those who experience them as predators. It requires addressing broad societal, structural, complicated realities.
Which gets to my second reason for supporting efforts to defund the police.