Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
Ever since Ferguson, I have noticed that in social media, there is a tendency to portray cops as either goose-stepping Nazis or good ole boys, and to lambast them for insensitivity for the public they serve and a trigger-happy mentality. The situation in my beloved Baltimore has only crystallized the sense that the police are beleaguered. On Saturday a brief exchange with a very dear friend revealed to me just how much that categorization genuinely troubles me and I’m afraid that my liberal card may be revoked.
Her comment was along the lines: This is the police’s fault; that arrest was invalid and never should’ve happened
My reaction was a spurt of anger: The arrest was perfectly valid. Said perp had an extensive rap sheet/history and he ran.
-- of course he ran! You would run too if all your life you had been beat up by the police.
-- No. If you run then you have something to hide and he was a known criminal.
Silence for a moment.
We agreed to disagree.
Granted I was married to a cop for almost twenty years. Altho Frank was in the Crime Lab, not patrol, when I was with him, I have, perhaps, a better sense of the day-in-day-out conditions. A cop goes to work and immediately becomes invisible, all people see is the uniform and that is what they react to. The working conditions are usually pretty grungy and gritty. The Wire? Hill Street Blues? CSI? Forget that sugar coating. Think Barney Miller, take out the humor and add a grinding feel of not being valued by the very people you are trying to protect. When I think about being a cop, I remember what a guy once told me during the Vietnam War – he had volunteered for the Marines and he commented “you can’t trust anyone but another Marine, and you f**king hate the Marines.” Being a cop is rather like that at times.
So what happened that night in Baltimore? It was just another ordinary confrontation, no respect on either side. Freddie Gray was probably sullen, defiant, and resentful and thinking “why don’t you get away from me you #$%& and leave me alone”. The cops who faced him were probably belligerent and suspicious, but I bet they thought “don’t you run you #$%&*. If you run I’m going to have to chase you and take you down and then I have to arrest you”. He ran. They chased him, caught him, arrested him, put him in the van. Up to that point it was all just part and parcel of the deadly boring everyday routine. They weren’t out to get him. They weren’t brutalizing him. They were just doing their jobs. But Freddie Gray’s life ended in that van, and that shouldn’t have happened. And the six cops that made decisions that night have lost their jobs. they have lost a lot of other things too as they face charges, as they go back over and over the sequence of events, asking themselves what went wrong when because Freddie Gray shouldn’t have died that night, and he died on their watch in their custody. Yes, Freddy Gray matters. Yes, black lives matter. Yes ALL lives matter. But don’t forget that the police are not the villains or the oppressors, and they matter too.
My friend commented that something has to change and that I think we can all wholeheartedly agree with.
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