gracchusdixit

When I was a kid growing up in Chicago, it was taken for granted that the local cops were crooked and would close ranks to protect their own the moment there was even the slightest threat of public scrutiny or reform.  There was no talk of “heroes” back then.  The police were looked upon as a necessary evil—useful to have around when “they” got restless.

“They,” of course, were the city’s African-American citizens, who were expected to content themselves with shoddy public housing and paltry public assistance in place of integrated neighborhoods, decent education, and equal opportunity in the workplace.  Needless to say, this sulfurous bargain broke down from time to time, whereupon the boys—they were all “boys” in those days—with their badges, clubs, and guns were called in to “do their duty,” which was to make sure that white Chicagoans suffered no more inconvenience than was absolutely unavoidable.

Today, half a century later, remarkably little seems to have changed.

In the space of as many months, the nation has seen—quite literally seen—four lurid examples of police brutality against black Americans.  In Los Angeles, a 51 year-old woman was thrown to the ground and straddled by a member of the highway patrol, who proceeded to smash her head against the pavement for trying to cross a highway.  In New York City, an unarmed man was surrounded by half a dozen police officers for selling cigarettes on a street corner, wrestled to the sidewalk, handcuffed, and choked to death.  In St. Louis, a shoplifter, who may or may not have had a knife but was apparently demented, was gunned down by two cops, who leapt out of their car with pistols drawn and fired off twelve rounds in less than 20 seconds.  And in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, an unarmed 18-year-old was shot six times, two of those shots striking him in the top of the head as he tumbled to his knees and toppled forward.

As everyone knows by now, the last of these incidents sparked a wave of protest, to which the local police responded with a display of force so excessive that it would have been right at home on the streets of Beijing, Kiev or Cairo.  Some people blame this on the fact that police departments across the country have in recent years been steadily “militarized” in both training and equipment.

It is worse than that.  It is the thinking of the entire country that has been militarized.

Whenever we encounter a problem, we now declare a “war”.  We have declared a War on Terror, a War on Crime, a War on Drugs, even a War on Cancer, not to mention a dozen other maladies whose names few of us can even pronounce.  Physicians no longer treat illness; they “fight” it.  Patients no longer recover or succumb; they “win” or “lose” their “battles”.  The metaphor of struggle—of warlike, heroic struggle—is all around us.

The trouble with this metaphor is that it obscures the difference between real war and phony war, between genuine heroes and brass-buttoned pretenders.  Thus it is that everyone who puts on a uniform nowadays—every soldier, sailor, aviator, cop, firefighter, or rescue worker—is instantaneously anointed a hero in his own eyes and in ours.  Since the day we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, we have been called upon to “support our troops”.  Now, we are expected to support all our other “warring heroes” with equal fervor and as little thought.

This adulation of the heroic sounds innocent enough until you remember the questions it leaves hanging—the questions of behavior and responsibility.   The truth of the matter is that few of us have the physical or moral courage it takes to act in a genuinely “heroic” way—and even fewer of us ever actually do.  Real heroes are as rare, and as perishable, as perfect snowflakes.  This is no less true of soldiers and police officers than it is of everyone else.

There is no doubt that war is a dangerous business, and so, at times, is police work.  However, the mere fact that danger is involved does not constitute heroism.  Coal miners face more danger, more routinely than cops, and every year far more of them “die in the line of duty”.  Yet we do not call them “heroes”.

Nor is there any doubt that war can be a dirty business, and so, all too often, can police work.  When cops gun down or strangle unarmed citizens, when they turn their weapons against one class of citizens to protect another, when they lie and conspire and conceal to shield one another, they do not deserve our respect or thanks; they do not deserve our support; and they certainly do not deserve to be called “heroes”.