MORE THOUGHTS inspired by the Mountain City, Tennessee photo-bullying incident: “Why is it acceptable not only that ordinary citizens (particularly members of racial and ethnic minorities) must behave with extreme discretion, and often show humiliating deference, to avoid being abused or arrested when dealing with police, but also that a significant fraction of police are power-abusing bullies with hair-trigger tempers? Call me crazy, but it seems to me that those enforcing the law should be selected for thick skin and the ability to defuse adversarial situations rather than make them worse. Many police behave decently and even admirably, but there are also so many who are hot-headed jerks that it’s obvious that the police culture has systematic management problems.”
Yes, arresting someone because they didn’t show you proper respect is an abuse of power, akin to arresting someone because they didn’t pay a bribe.
UPDATE: Christopher Johnson emails:
As a counter-point to your post of 4:31pm today, in my opinion, many police are hot-headed jerks because they deal with hot-headed jerk citizens on a daily basis as a regular part of their job. Police routinely deal with citizens who are disrespectful and intentionally difficult to deal with because many people don’t like to be told what to, do or how to behave by a person of legal authority. While I certainly don’t condone the actions of this particular police officer, and he should definitely suffer severe repercussions for this sort of abuse of power, I believe that our society puts too much responsibility on police officers as agents of the state because there has been a general trend away from personal responsibility. I also believe that individuals acting in a law enforcement capacity are over-loaded beyond their abilities because the typical police officer has to be armed enforcer of the law, emergency care giver, counselor, and father or mother figure to youth while at the same time making split second life or death judgements. Given all the responsibility that we impose upon the men and women in uniform, I do not find it surprising that many police officers find it difficult to attune their behavior to the diversity of situations that are regularly encountered.
Police officers get lots of training on how to deal with citizens, while citizens get zero training on how to deal with police. The person of authority most people have experience with is their parents, or their boss at work. Growing up, and as a regular part of our daily lives, how often do we deal with someone who has the lawful authority granted by the state to control our physical actions? Not much, if at all, because anyone can verbally assault their parents or boss with little to no legal repercussions. The bottom line is that cops are people too, and the attitude of society that ignores this fact while putting more responsibility on the state, and less on individual citizens, results in an over-stressed police force capable of incidents such as the one at issue in this post.
Cops are people with discretion. Using that discretion to gratify petty personal impulses is an abuse of discretion.
UPDATE: Reader David Rutledge emails:
have been a police officer for 28 years and a police supervisor for 20 of those. No question, the officer was totally off base and should be disciplined. I think there are several factors that come into play here including poor training, inadequate supervision, a poor background investigation (probably), etc. I would bet based on my years of experience that this is not the first time that particular officer has done something like this and his agency is aware of it. Mountain City can’t have that big a department. I work for an agency with 200 sworn officers and as a mid-level manager (lieutenant) who is not even that high in the food chain, I have a good idea of who the potential problems are. I would have a hard time believing that the agency this officer works for was not aware of a propensity to this type of behavior, thus the inadequate supervision issue. I would agree with the reader who expressed a concern about a systematic problem in managing police agencies.
He concludes: “I think the officer in question is part of a much larger problem that has to be addressed or some very ugly things are going to eventually happen.”
Meanwhile, Mike Hendrix emails:
Raymond Chandler said it best, I think, via a homicide captain in The Lady In The Lake. He was discussing some corrupt and violent Bay City cops with Philip Marlowe who had tried to frame him and roughed him up pretty good, which nearly always happened when Marlowe had occasion to visit the place: “Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get — and we get things like this.”
Yeah, the whole law enforcement system could use a revamp. But at the moment, I’d settle for making it clear that harassing photographers is off limits.
