Unintended consequences and police tribal culture#
The recent article Dear Jessica, I’ve Seen Officers Misbehaving. And I Failed To Speak Up inspired me to share something I noticed while volunteering as a police office in a metropolitan police force back in the 90’s. The approach to policing that we now have isolates police officers from the rest of the community. It is a natural and should be expected consequence of the majority of their interactions being with ‘bad’ people or confrontations of authority versus miscreant. In many cases, they get abuse from every level of society. This inevitably leads to an Us vs Them mentality. When your life depends on your fellow officer and almost everyone you interact with seems to be arrayed against you, what else should we, the public, expect from good people who have stepped up to serve?
We need to figure out how to keep police officers from being isolated from the communities they protect. We, the public, bear a large part of the shame that we now suffer due to abuses of power that have become common practice. We expect the police to protect us from violence. I’ve met so many people that consider it beneath them to protect others while clearly expecting police officers to do it without a second thought.