By LEONARD PITTS
To oppose police brutality is
not to oppose police. No one with a brain stands against police when they do
the dangerous and often dirty job of safeguarding life and property. But no one
with a conscience should stand for them when they assault or kill some unarmed,
unthreatening somebody under color of authority.
Support good cops, oppose bad
ones: You’d think that a self-evident imperative. But it turns out some of us
are unwilling to make the distinction. For them, the valor of the good cops
renders the bad cops immune to criticism.
As you’ve no doubt heard, an
unstable man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley went cop hunting in Brooklyn on Dec. 20.
He randomly shot to death two police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, in
retaliation for the unpunished police killings of two unarmed African-American
men in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island.
What followed was tiresomely
predictable. Erick Erickson of Fox “News” said President Obama and New York
Mayor Bill de Blasio had “all but encouraged retaliation” against police. Rudy
Giuliani accused the president and the mayor of putting forth propaganda that
“everybody should hate the police.” The National Review Online blamed Obama and
de Blasio for creating a “racially charged, rabidly anti-police” atmosphere.
It might be hard to tell from
that superheated rhetoric, but the sin they refer to is as follows: Obama and
de Blasio called for reform as people vigorously protested the Staten Island
and Ferguson killings.
Tempting and easy as it might
be to deconstruct all that right-wing drivel, what should truly trouble us is
the behavior of the police in the wake of the shooting. Meaning those New York
cops who pointedly turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke at Ramos’ and
Liu’s funerals. The NYPD has also engaged in a work slowdown — arrests, tickets
and summonses down sharply over the past two weeks.
With this temper tantrum, this
turning its back on the representative of the people it serves, the NYPD shames
itself, shames its profession and dishonors the memory of its slain men. It
also, paradoxically, makes stronger the case for reform.
What other profession behaves
this way? Do good lawyers see an attack on bad lawyers as an attack on them
all? Are good firefighters threatened by criticism of incompetent ones? Yet
this behavior is routine among police — something to keep in mind when we talk
reform.
It’s all well and good to say
we need body cameras, but that’s just a start. As the cases of Rodney King in
Los Angeles and Eric Garner in Staten Island make apparent, a visual record is
useless if people are unwilling to see what is right in front of them. And yes,
there should also be some state-level mechanism for a special prosecutor in
cases like these, so we are never again asked to believe impartial justice can
be meted out to a given cop by people in the local courthouse who work with him
every day.
But the behavior of New York
cops, their righteous pique at the idea of being questioned by the people they
work for, suggests another needed reform. We must find ways to change police
culture so that it becomes easier for police themselves to police themselves,
to name and shame the brutal or trigger-happy incompetents among them.
Yes, that will be much easier
said than done: In no other job might your life depend tomorrow on the
colleague you stand up against today. But the alternative is this status quo
wherein police are effectively above the law they swear to uphold.
Where bad cops cannot be
questioned, good cops cannot be trusted — and all cops are undermined.
There’s something else that
should not need saying, but does.
Leonard Pitts, Jr., is a
columnist for the Miami Herald.
