Black Lives Matter

There are people wearing police uniforms who are sadists. There are people wearing police uniforms who are racists. They should be fired before they can use excessive force or mistreat citizens of races or colors they hate. The reason they aren’t fired is the content of collective bargaining agreements and the power of police unions. In most cases, the chiefs of police know all too well who the bad actors on their force are and the chiefs would like to fire them. If nothing else, the tenure of every police chief in the country is daily threatened by the next outrageous act by a racist/sadist officer under his or her command. Politicians responsible for negotiating police union contracts need to muscle up.

Most people who show up in a new police academy class are idealists. They truly want to “protect and serve”. They devote their working lives to a difficult and often dangerous line of work because they think they can make a difference. One of the rewards they seek is the thanks of the people whose lives and property they are protecting. The demonization of the policing profession by demonstrators and politicians and pundits renders the profession less attractive to the very sorts of people we want in blue uniforms. The direct result is that police departments have a harder time attracting quality recruits. When standards are lowered to fill the ranks, the chances increase that more sadists and racists will end up in the ranks.

Demonstrations against police and violence toward them does change their behavior. Individual officers become more afraid to interact with the public, more afraid to be charged/sued/pilloried in the media, and less aggressive in their enforcement. That is what happened in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore and Chicago. The result is more crime and more young black and Hispanic males (and innocent bystanders) killed by other young black and Hispanic males.

If Black Lives Matter, we are going about it in a counterproductive fashion.