Are You Like These Cops?

Tom Beaver: If your response to this is, "Yeah, but -- " just stop right there. Read the entire story first.

Then if you still want to say, "Yeah, but — ," there's a very good chance that if you were those cops you would have done the same thing.

A good chance that you, too, would have assaulted two people over nothing. One of them an old woman. That you would have terrified, humiliated, enraged and injured two people over nothing. And then made excuses for it.

These horrifying things don't happen in society unless there are individuals willing to be the ones doing it.

If our first response to a terrible act is to find excuses for it, I think we should ask ourselves why that is. Maybe ask ourselves, "If I could have only one public comment on this circumstance, what would I want it to be? If the entire nation could have only one comment on it, what would I want THAT to be?"

Steve Bailey: Can't even visualize any thing happening to my self so wrong

Tom Beaver: I try to put myself in these mind of these cops. What I think is that they must be very fired up with righteous indignation, rage, disgust. A conviction that black people in general are such a problem that normal rules of law enforcement, morality and common sense don't apply. A conviction that they are acting on behalf of millions of people who feel the same way. Fury that they have to risk their lives for a kind of people they loathe. Fury at seeing fellow officers called murderers, even when they are. Spite towards those who want to limit police authority and discretion -- "You don't want me to use violence? Well here's some violence. What are you going to do about it?" And mixed in with all that, a certainty that deep-down what they really want is to help and protect the world. An honest confusion -- "I know I'm one of the good guys, but some of this stuff I'm doing, is it really what a good guy does?" Somehow their training and policies, their leaders and culture, are not helping them to grapple with all of this and come out the other side with the right decisions, the right ideas, the right kind of courage. Individual cops are guilty when they commit these hateful, arrogant crimes, but the law enforcement agencies and the leadership are guilty, too, for not requiring and helping cops to do better. And some of us are guilty, too, for taking the wrong side each time these issues come up.

[ Image: Pasted Graphic 157.tiff ]