Likewise, as Politico reports, the growing public attention to police behavior has produced a new caution about use of force and warrantless harassment of ordinary people: “Seventy-six percent … also say they are now more reluctant to use force when appropriate because of the attention to the incidents, while 72 percent said they are more reluctant to stop and question someone they believe seems suspicious.”
The way those questions are phrased may make this sound like a negative development, but I’d suggest the opposite.
It’s a good thing that police are thinking about ways they can resolve escalating encounters without resorting to force. If we’ve learned anything these past few years, it’s that too may police departments have excessively lax use of force guidelines.
Likewise, it’s a good thing that police are less likely to stop and question people just because they “look suspicious.” That kind of policing — and in practice, it’s more “stop and frisk” than “stop and question” — has long been shown to be ineffective in reducing crime but very effective at making people distrust the cops. It’s also blatantly unconstitutional.
So that’s the good news. Unfortunately, the rest of Pew’s findings are less positive. Perhaps most notably, officers’ perspective on whether major police brutality cases point to a larger problem (spoiler: they do) is the inverse of the broader public’s view. Politico explains: “Two-thirds … of law enforcement officials surveyed also said they believe the deaths are isolated incidents, while 31 percent said they signal larger problems. Among the general public, those numbers are flipped.”
Large subsets of the police population believe that “in certain areas of the city” — which, if we’re honest, is typically code for poor and minority neighborhoods — it is best to default to aggression instead of courtesy: “(A) narrow majority (56 percent) agree that in certain areas of the city it is more useful for an officer to be aggressive than to be courteous. And 44 percent agree that some people can only be brought to reason the hard, physical way.”
Courtesy should always be the default in public servants.
Furthermore, few officers are willing to assume good intentions in people who protest in favor of greater police accountability: “The survey found that police officers doubt the intentions of the protesters who have led demonstrations in response to the killings. Sixty-eight percent of officers surveyed said protesters are “to a great extent” motivated by “anti-police bias,” according to Pew.
That finding is perhaps the most troubling. As we saw above, police seem to understand that their departments need better accountability measures. Is it really so hard to believe that many members of the broader public would feel the same?
And second, as Rare’s Jack Hunter once argued, criticizing the way law enforcement presently functions is not the same as being “anti-police.”
“Criticizing overgrown and unnecessary, society-damaging bureaucracies” is not anti-cop, he wrote, any more than it’s “anti-teacher” to criticize problems in our public education system. In fact, people who take the time to protest and criticize are demonstrating just how much they care about having positive, safe, accountable policing that rightly garners community respect.
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