Nick Gillespie|
You've probably already heard
about the work-stoppage that members of
the New York Police Department are apparently staging (as Scott Shackford noted here yesterday, that's not clearly a
bad thing). That's one sign that New York's Finest—and police around the
country—are reacting extremely negatively to a wave of criticism in the wake of
a series of controversial deaths and related legal proceedings.
That cops bristle at outrage
directed at them is understandable (all the more so in the wake of the
ambush-killing of two NYPD members by a deranged gunman). But it still isn't
acceptable, especially if it leads law enforcement to publicly disparage
elected leaders, as the NYPD did when members turned their backs on Mayor Bill
de Blasio at the funeral of Rafael Ramos and heckled him at a swearing-in service
on Monday.
In a new Daily Beast column, I recall that Harry
Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in 1951 not because of personality or even
policy clashes (though there were loads of those), but "because he
wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.” NYPD Commissioner Bill
Bratton has echoed those sentiments, saying it was wrong of police to
disrespect the mayor at Ramos' funeral "he is the mayor of New York [and]
he was there representing the citizens of New York to express their remorse and
their regret at that death.”
The NYPD—and cops more
generally—have a public relations problem in the wake of the Michael Brown,
Eric Garner, and a long string of other cases. Acting like a bunch of
high-school jocks protesting a ban on keg parties isn’t exactly going to win
over many hearts and minds. It’s exactly the inability of the cops who killed
Garner to restrain themselves that bothered so may of us who watched the video
of the encounter. The same goes for the hysterical overreaction and escalation
of force used against protesters in Ferguson over the summer.
Yes, cops are under stress and
tension (though their jobs are far less dangerous than normally supposed). But
they are trained to rise above mere emotional responses; that’s one of the
reasons they are given a state-sanctioned monopoly on force. Yet even after the
funeral protest, de Blasio was booed and heckled while addressing a new class
of recruits as well....
It's precisely the highly
emotional and unrestrained responses by police in tough situations (Ferguson,
Eric Garner, etc.) that make people worry that cops are governed not by
rationality and training but aggression and impulse. The stunts the NYPD is
pulling underscore those fears, as do wild claims by spokesmen that Bill de
Blasio has "blood on his hands" for the killing of Officers Ramos and
Liu at the hands of a nutcase.
Until police learn to accept
that criticism of specific policies and actions doesn't constitute a mortal
insult, they will continue to have problems maintaining public support. Yes,
there may be a few professional anti-cop activists who are always ready to
blame the police for all the sins of the world, but the overwhelming majority
supports law enforcement when it functions with a proper respect for civil
liberties and the rule of law.
Bratton and de Blasio are
sitting down with representatives of the rank and file to repair relations,
which The New York Post and others note range far beyond issues of race to
union contracts and the like. The widely acclaimed leader of the NYPD during
the 1990s under Rudy Giuliani and of the Los Angeles Police Department in this
century, Bratton is in a particularly strong position to make cops understand
that they are in fact held to a higher standard than regular citizens and even
most public-sector employees. And that change will start with them, not the
body politic.
As Bratton and the NYPD start
talking among themselves, the commissioner will do well to paraphrase another
Trumanism: “The buck stops here.” The police cannot ultimately control public
opinion unilaterally. What they can do, though, is acknowledge that a change in
their attitudes, behavior, policies, and willingness to engage in discussions
about how people see them can help them win back the public trust.
Nick Gillespie is the editor in
chief of Reason.com and Reason TV and the co-author of The Declaration of
Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, just
out in paperback.
