I’ve said before on Quora that good cops hate bad cops far more than citizens hate bad cops. Bad cops make everyone’s job harder. They bring disrepute on an otherwise noble line of work. I worked with four who wound up in prison, and I have no sympathy for them at all.
One cop at my former agency was a sexual predator. He was long gone before I came to work there, but his name was still well known. I was frequently reminded of his exploits by citizens who taunted me with “you’re all just like ______” (very distinctive name).
There is an old axiom about “attaboys” and “awshits.” It usually refers to your workplace. You can accumulate a pile of “attaboys” for great work, but get one “awshit” for something that wasn’t so great, and it negates all of the attaboys. An organization’s public image is like that. People forget the good works you do, and remember the bad ones.
One of the great frustrations is when the story the public “knows” is not what is or was actually happening. I knew cops who were misbehaving, but were doing it with the knowledge and tacit blessing of their supervisors. Their political standing protected them. Cops who were on the bad end of the political continuum were vilified, no matter what they did.
The story can also be shaped by bad reporting, or bad information given to the press. This is one of the ways that bad cops can be protected from harm. The police department controls the information that goes to the press, and can spin that any way it sees fit. Few reporters will cross the public information office at a law enforcement agency, because their phone calls don’t get returned after that. The press learns to take what is given them and like it.
A few months back, I was talking to an editor at a news organization whose name you would recognize. He calls on me from time to time to get my take on one police issue or another. We were discussing some cop who had done something bad, and he was upset that other cops weren’t condemning him. I asked him, “Are there folks in your line of work who embarrass you?” He readily admitted there were. I told him, “Don’t think it’s any different in policing. However, when one of your colleagues screws up, do you go out of your way to condemn him?” He admitted he didn’t. If you criticize someone else in your line of work, it suggests you don’t do whatever they did, and maybe even that you don’t do anything wrong at all. Then, one day, you screw up, and everyone remembers how unkind you were about the other guy.
Law enforcement is something of a fraternity. Cops are assumed by other cops to be good guys until there is evidence to the contrary. Every cop in the U.S. and most places elsewhere hurts because five cops in Dallas died last night. Every cop in the U.S. and most places elsewhere feels the injury when a cop does something to disgrace the badge.
But cops also know that actions the public might regard as disgraceful might be just an unsavory part of the job. Much of the world made Officer Darren Wilson out to be a monster after he killed Michael Brown (and many of them still do), but most of the cops knew it was probably self-defense. The evidence showed that the cops were right. That doesn’t always happen, but cops know that most shootings happen because the cop thought he had a good reason to shoot, even if he had less than a second to consider that decision. They know it’s difficult, and sometimes the decision comes out wrong. They wish they could make the public understand, but they will never understand until they have done the job. There is no substitute for the experience.
Read other answers by Tim Dees on Quora:
- What percentage of times do police officers not show up to testify in traffic court?
- What really happened to Michael Brown and Darren Wilson?
- What do police officers think of what this ex-Baltimore police officer has to say about violence against citizens?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2fbN0F6
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