Civil rights organizations and activists have lobbied for police reform for decades. Recent events, however, have shown to what extent the trust of the American people in their protectors has eroded.
Popular response to simultaneous law enforcement operations in the heartland of Missouri and in the Poconos Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania show just how overdue reforms have become.
The fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer sparked major unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Police use of harsh tactics and excessive force on the protesters only served to harden oppositional attitudes. The town is now preparing for more massive protests expected to erupt when the grand jury comes back with what many expect as a failure to indict the officer involved in the killing of 18-year old Michael Brown.
The shooting of Pennsylvania state troopers by self-styled survivalist revolutionary Eric Frein in the Poconos occurred just a month after Ferguson. An unexpectedly positive response to the elusive culprit’s actions in some quarters highlights the strained relationship between law enforcement and the white population there.
The wide-ranging complaints against the police among African Americans and other minority communities on one hand and among whites on the other are different in some respects, but similarities may surprise you.
By definition, racial profiling affects members of minority communities: African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Arab-Americans, to name a few. However, whites are similarly affected by a much less talked about practice of class profiling. A white university professor living in a suburban middle class neighborhood or a business manager living in a gated community is much less likely than a white resident of a trailer park or white homeless person sleeping on a downtown bench to be stopped on the street, questioned, and searched.
The militarization of police, which started in the aftermath of the Cold War in the 1990’s as a program to transfer surplus military hardware from the U.S. armed forces to police departments nationwide (more than $5 billion in arms having been transferred overall), similarly affects law enforcement’s relationship with Americans of all colors and creeds. The indiscriminate use of automatic weapons and military tactics in home raids of suspected criminals and the deployment of military hardware against protesters only serves to ratchet up the anger of civilians with those who are employed to protect them.
The institution of arrest quotas in a number of city police departments across the country is yet another symptom of the broken relationship between law enforcement and the public it serves. Police officers are basically forced to arrest a certain number of “criminals” to keep their jobs. And if it takes provocation to “create” a criminal, then so be it. Officers who refuse to follow these instructions are frequently disciplined, as was the case with three officers in Normal, IL, who are currently suing the town’s police department for punishing them for failure to meet arrest quotas. There were simply not enough crimes committed in the vicinity to warrant more arrests and these officers refused to detain innocent people. Actions like these, as well as the incarceration of offenders, whose behavior could be easily corrected with less punitive measures, do little to instill the trust of Americans in the nation’s police departments.
The violent response to the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and the support groups for Eric Frein springing up on social media outlets are but the latest symptoms of a growing disconnect between the American people and their guardians.
Contributed by Victor Olevich
