Bad Cops, Police Reform, And Wrong Directions

 The time is long past when policing, especially in large urban areas in the U.S., was a white, often Irish mans' profession. Many decades have past of concerted effort to create diversity in the hiring and promotion of police. Cops, especially in large U.S. cities, are more racially, ethnically and gender diverse than ever.

There are bad cops out there. Simplistic narratives about policing and who are the bad cops most often is not about weeding out bad cops as much as it is about validating biased narratives. The idea that police in general are a bunch of racist white men looking to harm nonwhites lives in the minds of many in the media and others that profit from race baiting and creating racial divisiveness. 

In all professions there are bad elements. Bad doctors that ruin lives. Bad dentists that drill into perfectly good teeth out of greed, ensuring that healthy teeth will never be as sound a they were before the dentist did what never should have been done. There are bad teachers, bad priests, bad rabbis, bad ministers, bad in every profession. In police work, bad cops, just like good cops, come in all races, religions, genders and ethnicities. 

There are over a million law enforcement officers in the United States. Armed with guns, there will be bad cops and deputies that gravely harm others. But the alternative, not having police at all because some are rotten is as idiotic as saying there should be no doctors because of the rotten doctors that destroy lives. Cops that properly serve and protect by active patrol reduce crime and violence and thereby save lives, to say nothing of police that save lives by individual acts of heroism. 

Some in the ivory tower of academia, an elitist world full of arrogance and privilege, reach their own biased conclusions under the cover of scholarship about what is the problem with policing. It is not productive that from their ranks the discussion about better policing is often led.

Cops are not children. If they lack moral codes by the time they are in their twenties, the time most people join police departments, no amount of training will make them better human beings. 

Bad cops are not a product of deficient training. Bad cops are a product of whatever made them morally deficient by the time they entered the police training academies. An ethical person without any police training that learns everything while on the job will still be a better cop than a morally, ethically deficient highly trained officer that goes through extensive training in a police academy with many hours of follow up training. 

Bad people in all professions must be screened out. This is no easy matter. It is a discussion that must not be limited to police. The bad apples of many professions cause great harm. 

Simplistic narratives about police reform accomplish nothing. Weeding out bad cops and not hiring them in the first place requires a far lengthier discussion than what a short blog or video can present.

The  notion that bad cops can be determined by the amount of complaints leveled against an officer is untrue. If two cops work in the same city, with one cop doing as little as possible, while the other cop properly patrols and does the job he or she is paid for, the working cop will receive complaints the lazy cop will never receive because the lazy, do nothing cop risked nothing, and never did anything more than take up space. A cop working a high crime area has a greater chance of receiving more complaints than a cop working a low crime area. Good cops that do their jobs conscientiously can still fall prey to fabricated, malicious false allegations. Vindictive supervisors, criminals and others with ill intent are known to make complaints against cops they want to punish. 

The Soviet Union and other communist regimes were known for making false complaints against people. Since when did the number of complaints all of a sudden make a person guilty? Especially because complaints are easily fabricated. It matters when it comes to police under the new expectation that accusations, no matter how false and malicious, are in and of themselves proof of guilt. When it comes to cops, if the number of allegations is the new standard for what determines a good cop from bad, then every officer working a high crime area will do as absolutely little as possible so there is never a complaint made. That kind of policing might protect the officer from vindictive allegations, but it will certainly not protect the public. The public is not only hurt from bad cops, but also from disengaged cops.  

Screening out bad cops will not be accomplished by simplistic interventions reminiscent of the Soviet Union. False allegations multiplied by any number does not all of a sudden become a positive. 

Police departments do not need violent cops, cops that cannot control themselves, thin skinned cops,  timid cops, or lazy cops that harm the public through their inaction. 

The police reform that is needed is still off the radar. Police should not be used by politicians and police brass to generate meaningless numbers. Police work must return to its basic mission of serve and protect through patrol. Patrol, especially in high crime urban areas, must include cops doing the only real community policing that ever existed - cops walking assigned beats where they become integral parts of the neighborhoods they serve. Working cops must stop supporting on their backs legions of  bureaucrats, paper pushers, upper brass and others that believe themselves exempt from policing and work by virtue of their rank.  

The nature of policing needs to be better. This means serve and protect through active patrol as the core mission, which includes patrol by foot in many areas. 

Good cops will thrive in environments that are professional, free of nonsense number games, cronyism, political patronage, and politics. Bad cops thrive in environments that promote cronyism and shoddy police work.