Originally Posted by
AMC
Several years ago a Lieutenant in my department came up with a 'pledge' that all officers were encouraged to recite together out loud. It was big not only on the issue of biased policing....it included overt and direct calls to not tolerate, and to confront, bias on the part of members of the public. I pointed out how grotesquely inappropriate the language of the pledge was in this regard, and that it was essentially calling for us to be Thought Police.
Fast forward a few years to now, and our soon to be adopted revised Use of Force policy. During the discussions and planning at the Training Division about the implementation of this policy, I pointed out how these changing priorities were the result of, and were causing, Moral Confusion. The Moral Calculus that has been part of our civilization for several centuries (i.e. Innocent life takes priority over the life of the criminal whose actions have caused the risk) is no longer 'valid'. The new calculus states that every life must be weighed equally from a law enforcement perspective....including the violent criminal actors. The fact that this makes Law Enforcement Use of Deadly force inherently immoral in all cases, and makes its use essentially 'criminal', is not in my opinion an unintended consequence.
During our brainstorming of various scenarios of how these policy changes would play out, there was widespread acknowledgement that these policies necessarily mean that we let some innocent people die, in order to avoid the use of deadly force. My fellow use of force instructors were, I'm ashamed to say, okay with that. That is just considered the new way we do business. There's a great deal of "Get on board or get left behind!" talk in these discussions. Getting on the reform train is seen as key to promotion....and that is becoming the entire point of a career in my agency.
This attitude is also, I fear, the result of the endless attacks on Law Enforcement throughout the last few years. I often hear talk about how LE has lost the public's trust. I'm here to tell you that cops don't at all trust the public in a lot of places anymore either. Which one do you think is a greater threat to a free society?
We are on a road to some bad shit, my friends. Unless the good people of our nation who just want to be left alone, get off their asses and get involved...and pretty damn quick...this is gonna spiral out of anybodys ability to control it. My 2 cents.