Let the message go forth from this time and place, police in America are no longer trusted, and no longer trustworthy. They need to be watched, literally, every moment they are on duty. Big Brother, in the form of tiny but effective cameras, must watch, literally, their every interaction with the public.
Item: Charles Kondek, 45, a 17-year veteran of the Tarpon Springs, Florida police department, was shot and killed Dec. 21 by a fugitive trying to evade a warrant. Marco Antonio Parilla, Jr., 23, was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder. The dead policeman previously served on the New York City Police Dept. for five years.
Police are not perfect, their errors must be discovered and must be either corrected or punished, depending on their severity. But the Big Brother camera makes two assumptions:
One, no civilian government and no police department can be trusted to discover or punish misbehavior by the police.
Two, the lack of complete clarity in situations such as Ferguson, in which a camera would have clarified exactly what happened, are the rule, not the exception — so much the rule that every policeman in the country — policeman like the murdered Charles Kondek of Tarpon Springs, Florida — must wear a camera.
The first assumption makes it clear: No police department, individual policeman or grand jury is to be trusted to say or to investigate what happened; the Big Brother camera is necessary. The second assumption exploits this exception to make a new rule: Violence against police is implicitly sanctioned, since police brutality is, in fact, not the exception, but the rule.
Item: A. J. DeAndrea, a 21-year veteran of the Arvada, Colorado Police Dept., was a unit leader at the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, locating and removing students and staff while searching for the gunmen; was a team leader in the Granby bulldozer rampage in 2004; helped rescue hostages in the Platte Canyon High School shooting in 2006; rescued a fellow police officer in another shooting incident; and evacuated students in the Youth With a Mission shooting in 2007; according to Colorado Attorney General John Suthers as reported by the Denver Post.
The cases of the dead policeman Charles Kondek and of the heroic policeman A. J. DeAndrea are but random instances of the risks and the life-saving acts that police across America take day in and day out.What motivation is there for the best of the potential police recruits to step up to these life-threatening risks if the message has gone forth, via Big Brother cameras, that they will not be trusted?
Protests against misbehavior, fatal and otherwise, by police are in order, guaranteed by the Constitution. Protests are potential goads to corrective action when corrective action is needed. Protests against unclarity, such as in Ferguson, in which assumptions of police misbehavior are made, assumptions contravened by the findings of a grand jury, are, under the Constitution, also protected. But protected behavior is not necessarily wise behavior. Protests that convey a clear message — all the police are sufficiently unprofessional so as to need a Big Brother camera — degrade the police and create an atmosphere in which an apparently mentally ill man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, can, by his own statements, murder two police in New York in revenge. That gunman is responsible for his action. That gunman also acts within an environment — an environment not of anti-the-cop who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, or anti-the-cop who killed Eric Garner in New York, but anti-all-the-cops. That’s the message from many of the protests: Police around the country are prejudiced against black people. Police are universally to be suspected, in need of Big Brother cameras. Don’t be surprised when a mentally ill man gets the message.
Don’t be surprised that when New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio instructs his biracial son to assume that he will be treated prejudicially by any and every policeman, the message will go forth that police around the country — including the likes of the dead Charles Kondek and the heroic A. J. DeAndrea — are not to be trusted.
Police departments around the country have gotten the message. In Pittsburgh, police won’t use single-manned vehicles while under an FBI alert about threats to kill police officers and white civilians, reports the Wall Street Journal. What an unnecessary waste of resources! What a compromise of community safety!
In Phoenix, where police shot a black man in early December, police are monitoring social media for threats and encouraging officers to wait for backup on calls. Enough protesters in Phoenix make the assumption that if a white police officer shoots a black man, the police officer is a criminal and the black man is not. Great thinking — lumping all police officers together as unprofessional. Not judging one police officer or even his entire department individually. Great achievement! Paint a black-and-white picture: Police are brutal all over America! That’s the message behind Big Brother cameras.
Denverites well know the problems that can beset police departments, what with record Denver payouts for unprofessional and sometimes lethal police behavior. No doubt, alongside the dead and living heroes are the bad apples. They need to be viewed and treated not globally but individually — in accordance with the political philosophy behind the law that the citizenry expects them to uphold: Each person is responsible for his own actions.
Be careful with negative generalizations about police in the freest country in the world. Such generalizations will come back to haunt. They already have. That’s bad for everyone.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
