A Bad Apple Or An Infested Barrel?
A closer look at the profession of law enforcement and a realistic look at what we ask of them.
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The tragedy of each and every fatal shooting that takes place in this nation is usually highjacked by a particular agenda looking to shape a corresponding narrative. Whether or not we agree with a particular narrative is determined by the experiences that have helped to shape our lived realities. It’s as complex as it is unpredictable. And when the victims are our children or loved ones we’re righteously angry with law enforcement, whether police or prosecutors, for not having done more to have locked these perpetrators up beforehand. We might even find ourselves saying things like, if only they would’ve done their jobs our loved ones would still be with us!
On the other hand, when the tragedy in our lives is that of racism and police brutality, for the many failings of a justice system — frequently too systematically dysfunctional to produce anything even remotely close to what we ourselves would consider justice —we often find ourselves too overwhelmed with disparate and contradictory information to rightly know what we should do. Should we donate, call our congresswoman, attend a protest, become more informed through books, blogs, or the latest podcast. Or, should we just block it out and carryon as though this were all someone else’s problem to address?
And then there’s the question of how we should feel and respond when the tragedy happens to fall on the community and family of a police officer who is actually living up to and exceeding our collective expectation for what law enforcement should be like.
I’m referring to the recent tragedy that claimed the life of the young, rookie officer Jason Rivera of the NYPD.
Jason Rivera former NYPD Source:Apex.warmongering.co.uk
We have all probably seen or heard of the aforementioned officer who was killed in the line of duty while responding to a routine domestic disturbance call.
This unfortunate tragedy has come about at a time when law enforcement finds itself in a crisis of messaging, given the recent and ongoing challenges of policing communities that don’t trust in police, criminal justice, or the narrative that prisons are a righteous solution to the pervasive presence of criminality in out lives.
There are some who are treating this tragedy as a godsend of an opportunity to take our attention away from the brutality, false arrests and wrongful convictions, the recidivism that many describe as a "revolving door,” and not to mention the systemic racism that is still very much prevalent in our system and society at large. But this tragedy affords us an even greater opportunity to not only appreciate the dedication and sacrifice of a fallen officer, it also affords us the chance to examine not only what law enforcement should look like, or whether or not our expectations are properly aligned with the reality of their capabilities.
In a recent opinion piece by columnist Kathleen Parker on the tragedy being felt by the loss of officer Jason Rivera, she wrote that, “[e]very now and then, an individual or occasion comes along to remind us of the many reasons to love this country. Jason Rivera was one of those individuals, and his funeral Friday was one of those occasions.”
As I read her words I felt compelled to sit with a sentiment being conveyed, for several moments, before I could read any further. I admit that I didn’t and still don’t agree with her having used this tragedy to ridicule those who have so brazenly opened the discussion on whether or not policing in its current form needs to be “be funded”. But, Parker’s comments help bring us to the necessary question of how to bring policing from the archaic tyranny of brutality, impunity, and the “ongoing criminal enterprise” — as former DA Kari Brandenburg once described to Albuquerque Police Department — to the much needed notion of “ protect and serve”.
We need police officers. Preferably more police officers like Jason Rivera. Men and women who find nobility in serving their communities are as rare as they are valuable, a rarity that we should encourage because it makes our nation that much better. But, when I listened to Rivera’s bereft widow verbally indicting Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for his “go-easy-on-criminals policy,” I couldn’t help but imagine politicians and police union representatives in this grieving widow’s living room feeding her these lines — so easy to agree with, giving the very real pain she is living. And maybe I am wrong and Dominique Rivera has always been a supporter of crime bills that have never made our communities safer or better. Maybe she has always supported things like LWOP, the death penalty, and mass incarceration. If she does, of course, that would be her provocative given the constitutional rights afforded to her by this great nation. But regardless, it’s important to never build policy under the strain of overwhelming emotions, and there is nothing more overwhelming than her current reality in loss.
Dominique Rivera Source: Flareon.advance.doc.net
Even more tragic is acknowledging that Rivera’s untimely death was as inevitable as it was unnecessary. It could’ve been prevented. Not with harsher sentences, brutality, presumptions of guilt or pretrial detention, or district attorneys in league with the private prison industry that has figured out how to monetize misery by feeding mass incarceration as though it were an exhibit at the zoo. Rivera’s death and so many deaths like his could simply have been prevented if our elected leaders would long ago have put aside their political differences to address the underline *causes of crime. It’s not as though this information hasn’t always been available to them, because it has, and they have long since known that there is no short term fix to addressing crime. There are only tough decisions that involve budgetary allocations towards our most troubled communities and actual involvement from absolutely everyone.
Criminality isn’t someone else’s problem anymore than other existential threats like climate change, geopolitical conflict, or the next pandemic. We need to recognize that changes need to be made, they are going to be difficult and a expensive, and the sooner we get started the more lives we will save and the less victims we will have moving forward. Confronting crime with militarized police departments and harsher consequences is a lot like trying to fight COVID with bullets, or racism with ignorance. Crime, like pandemics, needs to be confronted with actual evidence guided by common sense and not just the mindless brutality of more arrests and convictions without any thought for what comes next.
This is not a new challenge for this or any other nation. What is new, however, is a growing and collective awareness that policing can no longer be a form of oppression if it is to survive. YouTube, TikTok, and all other social media platforms are inundated with footage that brings into our lives the very real reality of what policing has become — of what happens when police becomes so emboldened that they no longer enforce the law, they become the law.
I’m reminded of something very relevant spoken over six decades ago in a congressional hearing on the topic of Assaults on Law Enforcement. Charles O’Brien, the deputy attorney general of California, gave testimony that was as unexpected as it was off- script:
A major key to conquering this problem is to stop making the policeman the scapegoat for all of societies’s ills. We cannot continue to solve all our problems by passing new criminal laws. The policeman today bares the brunt of the failures of government. Poverty, inequality, disease, ignorance, and the alienation of youth were not caused by the policeman, but he is the agent who most often comes face to face with these problems. He is the one who is called in when the system breaks down.
Unfortunately, elected representatives of that era didn’t pay heed to O’Brien’s advise, and instead opted for crime bills, socio economic policies that further aggravated the growing divide between the haves and have-nots, and mass incarceration — all of which have played critical roles in bringing us to where we are today: a system that has broken down.
As we rightly acknowledge the noble sacrifices of life and limb that so many officers have made for their communities and nation, let us also pledge ourselves to becoming informed and involved in defining realistic expectations when it comes to policing.
Expecting police to stop or otherwise extinguish crime from our communities is not a realistic expectation. Consider that the nationwide average of police officers per 1,000 people is 2.4, then add to this the constitutional freedoms and protections hypothetically afforded to everyone, and you’ll arrive at a clearer understanding of just how impossible the task is that we’ve set for these brave men and women.
Police can and should respond to domestic disturbances, make arrests when laws are broken, serve as deterrents at mask gatherings and protests, investigate criminal activity, and all together be vigilant for the unexpected that could manifest itself in terrorism or a mass shooting (or stabbing). We ask that they risk their lives for us, and they do. And in response to the nobility of their sacrifices we must also acknowledge the criminality is an indictment against society, not police.
We have created a society that socially and economically oppresses those who live in ghettos and barrios. We have segregated these areas as projects of color and poverty, and then have the nerve to be angry when the violence that our policies have instigated bleeds over into our public spaces, schools and other venues like the Capitol itself. We can no longer afford to be ignorant to what we have all contributed to and created. This is not someone else’s problem, it is very much our own. Some of us are born into privilege, others attain it through a combination of hard work and fortuitous circumstances, and either way we reward ourselves by moving our families into safer suburbs and needed communities, there by choosing to ignore the systemic societal failures that we’ve left behind. We do this because it’s what everyone else does: convince ourselves that crime is a circumstance of bad people making bad choices. It’s an easy narrative to follow since it coincides with theories related to free will. But the reality is more complexed than people simply choosing to do bad things. There are addictions to contend with, truth related to the desperation of circumstances, not to mention the secondary outcomes from generations of systemic racism and failed immigration policies that quite literally pushed entire communities into the shadows of criminality.
It’s easy to judge a car thief, shoplifter, or drug dealer as someone who is inherently bad for doing what they do. We rarely stop to ask ourselves If we would be any different had the color of our skin or life stories been a little bit different. But the time has come for us to confront our narratives related to the crime and inequality that makes victims of us all — directly or indirectly.
Let us honor our heroes without loosing sight of the brutality, corruption, and “ongoing criminal enterprises.” We need to be able to acknowledge one without losing sight of the other.
There are good police officers and we need them, but the bad ones are being protected along with the good and that can’t continue. We can no longer believe that the criminality behind the blue is just a question or a novelly of a few bad apples that will eventually go away on their own.
Rotten Apples Source: Poesie.eldy.org
Former detective Jessie Carter essentially being promoted for the wrongful arrest and detainment of Gisele Estrada for a murder she was in no way involved is no more an instance of a “bad apple,” then the story behind former detective Joseph Franco and the more than 500 cases dismissed by the Bronx district attorney due to his indictment on more than 26 counts of first-degree perjury and other related charges. Departments and unscrupulous politicians alike try to sell us on the narrative that the Derek Chauvin’s of the world, or the aforementioned “old school" detectives are nothing more than a few bad apples that shouldn’t be tracked from the life and limb being put on the line for us everyday by officers like Jason Rivera. They use this analogy in hopes that we’ll forget the wrongful convictions, the racial profiling, the harassment, the abuse of power, the brutality, the corruption, and every other aspect of law enforcement that makes us cringe every time we see or hear about it.
And it’s upsetting to read and informed the columnists like Kathleen Parker openly calling the “defund the police” movement “absurd”. Personally, I’m not one who has ever believed that defunding the police was ever the solution to the systemic failures that brought about the George Floyd’s murder, but I’m also not choosing to be selectively blind to the realities that brought it to mind.
The term “bad apples” is a self serving, convenient, and often uninformed narrative that ignores the original twelfth-century proverb from which the term an idea was born, where we see that a “rotten apple quickly effects its neighbor.”
In other words, a bad apple doesn’t wear a KN95 mask and it infects the other apples around it. I asked a friend who worked in the agricultural business for many years and he told me that the apples themselves emit a ripening agent that can quickly spoil an entire barrel if they are not removed in time. And the sad truth is, Chauvin and officers like him are almost never removed in time.
These “bad apples” lead departments into consent decreed with the Department of Justice, like that of APD (previously described by the outgoing DA Brandenburg as an “ongoing criminal enterprise.”) And they make it impossible for already marginalized communities to trust in the police as a mechanism of protection and service to the community.
Jason Rivera’s Funeral Source: Chanda.stach-kittle.com
Is it tragic that a twenty two year old was fatally shot while fulfilling the mandate of his calling by responding to a domestic disturbance call? Absolutely. But I don’t doubt that officer Rivera’s sacrifice will likewise save countless lives, so long as all of us are angry and determined enough to stand up to the false narratives that have indiscriminately brought us to these cross roads.
There is no shortage of tragedies in our society, which is not to say that they don’t deserve our attention. But beyond the solemn nod of recognition, they deserve our voices and actions as we speak truth to the establishment and pave away towards a tomorrow that embraces democracy, celebrate justice, and never waivers when it comes to hope or love. Like many of you,
I take my hat off to all the men and women who so selflessly serve our community dressed in blue. This is why we must realign our expectations, acknowledging that the police can’t protect us from ourselves. If we want safer, and more inclusive communities where people aren’t pushed into the shadows of criminality then we have to envision and create that society. It’s not enough to just want it, we have to demand it same relentless actions that gave birth to this great nation.
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