JOHN GARVEY
Sometimes, though, I wonder
whether we aren't making the mistake of importing martial attitudes into the
morally more complex work of policing.
When a nation goes to war, it
is a common practice to dehumanize the enemy. When I was a young man and World
War II was still a recent memory, I spent time in Paris and Normandy. I
remember the vehemence with which French people my parents' age spoke about
"les Boches," a disparaging term for Germans.
Americans held similar
attitudes during that war. The U.S. Army produced crude posters about how to
identify "Japs," and even encouraged recycling with phrases like
"Give scrap to kill a Jap."
Perhaps this kind of ethnic
reductionism serves a purpose. When we ask people to make great sacrifices, as
we do in wars, it helps to eliminate moral ambiguity. Wartime propaganda shows
our side as good and the enemy as evil.
Sometimes, though, I wonder
whether we aren't making the mistake of importing martial attitudes into the
morally more complex work of policing. I don't just mean the use of
military-style equipment, but the very idea of police work as a version of war.
President Lyndon Johnson
declared a "war on crime" in 1966. President Richard Nixon declared a
"war on drugs" in 1971. President George W. Bush declared a "war
on terror" after 9/11. And as President Barack Obama winds down an
overseas war, something the Department of Defense calls the "1033
program" is delivering billions in surplus military equipment to local
police departments.
The thing is, the people of
Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Cleveland are not the enemy. A
few are bad actors who belong in jail, but even they are not the enemy. They
are citizens of the same community as the police. They don't wear uniforms that
mark them as lawful combatants. Even when caught red-handed, they are entitled
to due process of law.
This is why I worry about crime
fighters becoming war fighters. It's also why I think African-Americans see
more significance in the recent shootings than most whites do. Warriors take a
different view of the people they are fighting. If we tell our police they are
fighting a war, they are likely to act as soldiers generally do. They will
design quick and dirty ways of identifying and dealing with the enemy.
I'm not sure the recent police
killings exhibit racism of the old-fashioned kind -- a belief in the
inferiority of other people based on their ancestry. But in a world where we
treat policing as war, race combined with youth and social class, maybe dress and
attitude, can be the way police identify the enemy in certain neighborhoods.
And because combatants in war are fair game, the cops will be just a bit
quicker to draw and fire.
We can help the police by
changing their way of thinking about the job. Policing is not war. It is
harder, because it entails a similar risk of death but demands more
deliberation and prudence.
On the battlefield, there are
only two kinds of soldiers -- the quick and the dead. On our city streets, we
ask the men and women who keep us safe to pause over the trigger and make
judgments one person at a time because the people they meet there, even the
ones they suspect of crime, are not the enemy.
---
Garvey is the president of The
Catholic University of America in Washington.
