Cops... Which One are You???

Warriors or Guardians... By Dave Smith for Police Magazine

Over the years I have tried to keep this column from being in any way political, and focus on issues that help the reader stay healthy, strong, and safe. The problem is that few things having anything to do with law enforcement today are NOT political. Whether the issue is use of force, crime statistics, or budgets, one can be accused of damn near anything, in a political sense, just by commenting on the problem.

Social justice warriors clamor for "procedural justice" wherein the officer is supposed to take into account the social injustices of the past when enforcing the laws of today. The fact that one racial or ethnic group is over-representing in a crime statistic becomes "de facto" proof that the system is rigged against that group; and to attempt to argue any other sociological cause is to have malice in your heart. The same problems I examined in Sociology class back in the early 1970s still exist in spite of society's "surefire" remedies that were applied back then. Even worse, rather than re-examine those social remedies and their failures, we are simply going to continue them and act as if they're only now being initiated.

One of the big mistakes of the past is the fantasy that law enforcement causes criminality and that if only we can change the police we can stop poverty, crime, gangs, etc. Recently, a Presidential Committee was formed to "fix" law enforcement following the support among the powers that be for the "hands up, don't shoot" myth. The result was a hodgepodge of societal complaints about the law enforcement community, with the impressive title of "21st Century Policing."

 If you haven't read it you better Google that immediately and get reading because everything you believe about law enforcement and its relationship with the community is about to affected. The first recommendation in this self-referential report is that the culture of policing needs to change. We need to become "guardians instead of warriors" because we have been teaching cops to be soldiers instead of protectors.

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