My Take on the Police Debate

OK, so, as most of you know if you've read any of my previous posts, I don't have the most positive opinion on laws and police.  Also, unless you've been living under a rock, you likely know that there's been serious civil unrest following the murder of three black individuals in the past few months by police and a civilian "watch group."  I've been staying quiet, reading, listening, and otherwise trying to come to a cogent understanding of the situation and the feelings surrounding it.

Today, though, I spent a few minutes on Facebook (and I do mean seriously less than five minutes), and I saw probably 30 posts about Black Lives Matter, or all lives matter, or defund the police, or support our cops, blah, blah, blah, and I can't stay quiet any longer.

Here's the thing: all of these movements (with maybe the exception of the original intention behind Black Lives Matter) are designed specifically to divide us and make us argue on social media.  All of us want the same thing: to feel safe in our own home area and to not be harassed, beaten, or killed by any violent person, including a police officer.

I'm a white male.  Relatively young, somewhat attractive, and easy going most of the time.  For those reasons, I have only had to deal with police harassment once in my life.

That's actually a good story to illustrate a few of my points, though, so I think I should tell it now.

I lived a few years in California, and at the end of that adventure, I paid for my sister and mother-in-law to fly out to help us pack and drive back.  My wife and mother-in-law tag-teamed the driving in one of our vehicles, and I drove the other with my sister playing navigator and otherwise being there to keep me awake with conversation as she didn't have her license at the time.  I'm a fairly unlucky person, and so I spend a lot of time worrying about being pulled over for speeding.  Thus, I don't speed much at all, especially in areas that I'm unfamiliar with.  Most especially in Oklahoma because when I was younger my father told me a story of how he almost spent a night in jail after being pulled over for speeding in Oklahoma.

That sets the stage.  Here's the story.  I was driving through Oklahoma with my cruise control set to the speed limit because I was super concerned about getting pulled over.  It was sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 at night, so it was dark in January and traffic was fairly light, but not really late and there were still plenty of other vehicles on the highway.  I was driving a four year old white Ford Focus that hadn't been washed in a while (CA was in a drought and I could get fined for washing my car in my driveway) that was packed full of crap since I was moving cross country.  I mean completely full.  My back seat and hatch space were filled from floor to ceiling.  Suddenly I see flashing lights in my mirrors, and I pulled over.

I sat there with my hands on the wheel, watching the driver side mirror for the officer to approach my window.  Just as I was starting to think he wasn't coming, he appeared in the passenger side window and shined his light directly into my face.  That scared me pretty bad and I jumped, and shook for basically the remainder of the encounter.  I slowly moved my hand to the window control, his flashlight following my movement, and rolled down the passenger window.  He asked me to exit the vehicle, and at this point I didn't even know why I had been pulled over.  I opened my door as he was coming around the front the car, hand on his hip, and I shut the door, leaving my sister alone in the vehicle.  He asked for my license and registration, so I had to ask my sister to get the registration card out of the glove compartment.  She handed it to him shortly after I handed him my license.  He took them both, then asked me to come back to his cruiser.

So I'm loaded into the cruiser, still completely unsure why I've been pulled over.  I know I wasn't speeding, and my car was still running so I could see from the cruiser that I didn't have a tail light out.  I was at a loss.  He started punching my information into his computer, then asked if I knew why he pulled me over.  I could hardly speak, but I mumbled a halfhearted, "No."  He told me, and I quote, "A few miles back I saw your tire drive over the white line on the right side of the road.  It's dangerous to drift into the shoulder; there could be parked cars or other hazards."  I was literally speechless.  He then started asking me where I was coming from, and where I was going, and why I was out so late at night so far from home, and a ton of other questions that, in retrospect, were interrogation questions.  At the time I was too scared to do anything but answer as much as I could even though I was scared out of my mind that I was going to be put in jail for driving over a white line. After interrogating me for about ten to fifteen minutes, I guess he figured there was nothing he could charge me for, so he wrote me a warning for unsafe driving, then opened the door and let me leave his cruiser.  He drove off before I was back in my car.

The entire time I knew that what was happening was illegal.  He had no cause to stop me, no cause to have me exit the vehicle, and absolutely no cause to load me into his cruiser and interrogate me, but I was too scared to speak up because my wife was somewhere ahead of me on the highway expecting to meet me shortly at a motel, and my sister was in the front seat of my car unable to drive herself anywhere if I got arrested.  To top things off, when the officer put his hand on his hip as I was exiting my vehicle, I was a bit afraid for my life.

Once he left, I was angry.  I didn't get his name, or his badge number, or anything, so I couldn't report him.  He only pulled me over to harass me because I had a California plate on my car and it was loaded top to bottom.  He was fishing for drugs or cash and I'm honestly surprised he didn't ask to search my vehicle; maybe the dog sitting on top of the pile in the back seat dissuaded him.  All I know is that the entire encounter was completely unwarranted and I spent twenty minutes in fear for no reason other than a cop who was trying to make some cash by busting me for drugs.

So, what's the point of my story?  First, this may be my only encounter like this with the police, but it's not an uncommon encounter for some people.  There are whole communities that are so heavily policed that the people living there are regularly harassed by the police in ways similar to what happened to me, or worse.  I can only imagine what it must feel like to regularly be stopped by police and have to fear for one's life every time an encounter like that occurs, but there are entire segments of our population that deal with that as just another part of their life.  It's horrendous to think about, and I wanted to share my story because it was a major reason for a large change of my perspectives between 2014 and now, and I hope others can relate to my experience and rethink their positions as well.

More importantly, I wanted to share this story to deal with the defunding the police non-sense that I keep hearing about.  If you didn't get it from the above, or any of my prior posts railing against police brutality, I'm not a fan of bad policing.  That being said, I think defunding the police is a terrible idea.  That cop pulled me over because he thought he could bust me for drugs, maybe get a bit of cash from me in a civil asset forfeiture.  I was extremely lucky because he only wrote me a warning, which I mostly attribute to the fact that I was a young white male and completely scared into absolute compliance.  Most people in that situation would have been written a citation and charged a fine.  Had that happened, I would have had no recourse but to pay the fine, because I certainly would not be driving back to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania a month later to attend court, and the officer knew I was an easy target for a quick buck when he pulled me over.  Plenty of people get pulled over every day because their government mandated stickers aren't showing the right date, or because they have a light out that they didn't know about, or because they were driving slightly faster than some arbitrary speed limit, etc., and they are given absurd citations that they are required to pay on threat of jail time if they don't.  If we "defund" the police, I am certain that this kind of harassment for money will only increase, and the country will see a massive spike in minor citations to pay for the police departments that will not be disbanded.

That doesn't even bring civil asset forfeiture into the equation, which would likely also increase.

Some people say that defunding the police would mean disbanding them, like in Minneapolis, and hiring private police.  In the short term, that would probably be great, but, in a matter of only a few years, those private police will just take the place of the current police and it'll be like nothing changed at all.  That doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it back a few years.

I think that most people don't want complete anarchy, so completely eliminating police and security isn't really on the table for most people, so I'm not even going to talk about it.

That leaves fixing the situation we have now, not burning it down and thinking that it won't rise back up stronger than before.  To that, I don't by any stretch have all the answers, but I do have some suggestions.

First, police unions need to either be completely disbanded, or they need to have a few teeth removed.  I heard on a podcast last week that 25-30% of all police complaints are filed against 1% of all officers.  If an officer is getting multiple complaints of brutality, harassment, etc., filed against him/her, I don't see any reason that officer should be able to remain on the force.  Unions, though, protect exactly this type of officer.  If those officers were able to be fired, I believe we'd see a significant reduction in police brutality.  Hopefully it would also reduce the likelihood of other officers committing offences as well as they'd fear for losing their jobs.  I have another quick story to illustrate this point.  Someone I worked with in California told me about a cop he knew that was involved in one too many shooting incidents, so they had to pull him from street duty.  He didn't lose his job; he was just put on the chopper.  The guy apparently decided during one chase to open the chopper door, draw his weapon, and shoot at the vehicle from the air, endangering countless innocent civilians as he was firing his weapon into traffic.  He was put at a desk after that, but still didn't lose his job, let alone spend any time in prison for reckless endangerment.  I don't need to tell you that if I randomly fired my gun in Southern California, I'd spend years in prison.

Second, we need to consider that not all police officers need to carry guns.  I don't know exactly how this would look, but I really don't think there's a ton of reason for all officers to carry deadly force.  Police should be taught more how to de-escalate situations to reduce the likelihood of needing to use deadly force.

Third, we need to remove all the excess military gear from local police municipalities.  When I lived across the river from where I live now, my local police department had an armored personnel carrier.  I can't describe how boring my county is adequately in words, but I can say that there is absolutely no reason any police force in this county needs an armored vehicle.  I can't even believe I have to articulate that; that's how absurd it is to me.  Frankly, I don't believe any police force needs any kind of armored vehicle.  We're not in a war zone, and having weapons of war increases the likelihood that those on the force might think we are.

Fourth, we need to eliminate qualified immunity.  People should be able to sue police officers who harass them or injure them unjustly.  Yesterday one of my coworkers told me a story about how she had just picked up her vehicle from a police station as it had been stolen, and on her way home was pulled over because she was driving a stolen vehicle.  I can understand getting pulled over in that case; what I can't understand is that her elderly father was ripped from the vehicle and cuffed after she had shown proof that the vehicle was hers.  When the four responding vehicles finally left and the officer that cuffed her father released him from the handcuffs, he casually remarked that they should, "be glad I didn't shoot you in the face for mouthing off."  She reported him to his superiors, and he had to take, get this, three days off.  Of course, as soon as he came back from his leave, he started following her around and pulled her over, just to yell at her for having him suspended for three days.  She couldn't sue him for harassing her, though, because he always made sure to right her a ticket, thus qualifying for immunity because he had "reason" to pull her over.  This kind of behavior needs to stop, and the only way to do that is to hold the officers personally accountable by opening up the ability to sue them for harassment like this.

The last one I feel strongly enough about to mention here is the complete elimination of "no-knock" raids.  Any person involved in such a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment needs to be put in prison.  That goes double if they kill someone in the raid, and triple if the person killed was completely innocent.  I don't need to elaborate on this further; there are too many examples to cite.

I hope I didn't bore everyone, and I hope my stories were illustrative.  Thank you for reading this far if you made it.

Quarantine Talks: Opening Up

Well, this month we've seen most of the country reopen...mostly.

This has been year, hasn't it?

Two weeks ago we had our first meal in a restaurant since March.  It was, well, strange to say the least.  On the one hand, it felt so banal and at the same time so profound.  It was normal, but also not, and the clashing of those two feelings made me really question the whole idea of what normal is anymore.

Let's start with the weird:

We had to wait outside until our table was ready.  It was fine on that particular day because the weather was phenomenal, but that is often not the case in this area, so I don't see that being a great permanent solution.  I've heard some places are setting up so people can wait in their cars and get a text when their tables are ready, but I don't necessarily see how that's ideal, either.  I suppose it's better than sitting in the rain, but it just seems strange that these are the things we have to consider now.

Once inside, we had to wear our masks until we were at our table.  Seems pointless to me, since the most likely place for someone to catch the virus is in close quarters over a longer period of time, so wearing the mask while I walk past two or three occupied tables seemed unnecessary.  What's worse, once at the table, we are quickly given drinks, then food not long after, so the masks came off fairly quickly once we sat down and didn't go back on until we were ready to leave.

I guess to mitigate the risk of the fact that there's a long period of time where people are sitting at a table without masks on, the restaurant has closed more than half of their tables and there were no groups sitting directly beside each other.  I get the point, but, given this social distancing, and the fact that I'm taking the mask off as soon as I get to my table, I'm confused as to why bother forcing us to wear the masks at all.  I could go on and on about masks, but I already did that in my last post.  I'll probably add more on that later, because my feelings on masks continue to evolve as time goes on, but I don't want to get lost there just now.

As a quick aside, the service staff was fully masked.  I could tell our server was uncomfortable in the mask, but he was also genuinely happy just to be back to work.

One more bit of weirdness: The service was fantastically fast.  I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I don't believe we were in our seats for fifteen minutes before food was in front of us.  I'm sure there's a multitude of reasons, including the less than 50% capacity of the restaurant, and the fact that we were getting breakfast, which is generally fairly quick and easy to cook, but it was odd to be done eating within a half an hour of sitting down.  Usually we're just getting food around the point that we were finishing our meals.  We experienced this a week later when we went out for dinner.

That reminds me, when we went out for dinner a week later, the strangest thing was that the entire restaurant was empty.  We went on a Saturday night, right at dinner time.  Prior to the lock down, this restaurant would be full and we'd have had to wait, but when we went this time we were literally the only people in the restaurant.  It was quite disconcerting.

Now to the normal:

At least at breakfast, there were other families at the restaurant, and it was nice to be out and see other people, even if from a distance of at least six feet away at all times.

The entire experience, sans masks and social distancing, was exactly like it always has been.  It felt good to have a part of my life back that I lost in the previous three months.

Here's the thing, though, by the end of the lock down, I kind of stopped missing things like going out and eating at a restaurant.  Maybe if we had gone somewhere and had food that I can't easily cook myself I would have felt differently, but there was nothing I ate that morning for breakfast that I couldn't have cooked at home.  Yeah, I saved the 15 minutes of effort to cook and the 15 minutes later to clean up, but I didn't really gain much in the trade.  It was weird for me and I don't honestly know if I liked it.

We've done a few different "normal" things since our county opened up earlier this month.  We've eaten out (just those two times), gone to the mall (well, to JC Penny because it's closing), gone shopping at various other stores that were closed, etc.  All of these feel somewhat hollow now.  Money is tighter lately because I've been furloughed a few times, so spending money is physically painful to me right now and I haven't felt this way since we lived in California.  I hate wearing this mask everywhere I go.  So many places I've known for years are closing or just failed to reopen.  Most importantly, I've been enjoying just being outside in my own yard with my kid and my dogs.  I don't know.  This COVID thing has really changed the world in more ways than I can wrap my head around.  I think I'll be struggling with it for a long time.

Quarantine Talks: Working with a Mask

This month marks the start of my official full time back to work in the facility.  I haven't had a work from home day since May 28, and it seems like it will be a long time before I will be allowed one again.

First, let's talk about that.  Most people believe that this pandemic will lead to a revolution in remote work.  That may be true for large office-centered businesses, but my business has actually gone in the opposite direction since the end of the lock down.  I know I talked about this in my last post, but it bears repeating here because rules have become even more stringent since my last post and now I can't even work from home once a week like I could before the pandemic began.  My mother's business is allowing her to continue working from home, but on an exemption because she has underlying conditions, not as part of the rule.  They wanted her to come back to the office once it reopened, and most of their employees did return to the office.  I think there are many organizations that are still stuck in a very late 20th Century mindset.  I've certainly worked for a few, and I know plenty of others who have as well.  Maybe it's because I live in Western Pennsylvania, but I think it likely has more to do with the fact that most companies are run by people who were in their prime in the late 20th Century and aren't well adapted to change to our current environment.  Long story short, though, I don't believe the work from home revolution will be as large as originally expected.

Now, on to the actual reason I wanted to write today: wearing a mask.

It's no longer required by law that I wear a mask anywhere, so this is not an indictment on any government action or official.  I could certainly get into that, but it's a side issue compared to my main point.

I do not have asthma.  I am a fairly healthy person.  I am capable of doing things like running 8-12 miles at a time, and even ran with a mask on my face earlier this year when the weather was much colder.  I say all this to build up some context, because I should be more than capable of wearing a mask all day, or at least more capable than someone who has some underlying health issue like asthma.

My company is requiring every person in the facility to wear a mask at all times, unless they are in an office alone with a closed door.  There's two huge caveats: only those in management have access to an office to themselves with a door that closes, and some of us actually work on the production floor without air conditioning where the temperatures have more than once topped ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the past week.  I am one of those people, along with about twenty other salary employees and roughly three hundred hourly production employees.

Wearing the mask for eight to nine hours a day is really starting to get to me.  First, the obvious: it's incredibly hot.  I've been considering shaving my facial hair because it's disgustingly wet a lot of the time from my hot breath and my face sweating.  I've felt less comfortable with the warmth because I can't feel the fan on my face because of the mask.  It's just unpleasant physically to wear the mask in the heat.

The discomfort alone I could probably deal with and not have to write an whole blog post about it.  The bigger issues are the increased feelings of isolation and anxiety.  I'm not sure exactly why, but wearing the mask increases my heart rate.  It may have something to do with the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide I'm inhaling, or the increased attention I have on my breathing, but, I'm not entirely sure of the full cause.  The point is, wearing the mask increases my heart rate, and anytime my heart rate increases without what my brain considers a reasonable cause (exercise or the like), my sympathetic nervous system activates and tells my brain I'm scared of something.  I spend the day feeling anxious because the mask is making me breathe faster and thus increasing my heart rate.  Then the anxiety increases my heart rate more, and I feel like it's a vicious cycle.  Sometimes I have to go somewhere secluded and just sit for a few minutes with the mask off and breathe the fresh air so I can get myself under control.  It's really debilitating, and it makes me not want to go into work everyday.

The other issue I mentioned in the increase in feelings of isolation.  It would seem odd to say that I feel more isolated now that I'm back to work full time and sitting in a facility with at least three hundred and fifty other people within the same building with me, but that's what I've been feeling.  I think it's related to not spending as much time in anyone's presence, and not seeing their faces.  Everyone is wearing a mask, so I can't see when people are smiling.  I forget and smile at people as I walk past and wave, but remember as I'm doing it that they can't see my smile.  It's funny how something as small as a smile and a wave really make a difference in my day.  On top of that, when I do have to talk to people, the communication is more difficult because I can't see their mouth so it's harder to understand what they're saying.  The masks also make it more difficult to talk because if you move your mouth too much they shift out of place.  The production floor has a lot of machinery operating all of the time, so it's fairly loud all the time, which only adds to the difficulties because people are talking quieter because they're wearing a mask and I can't see their lips moving.  It's frustrating.

I've been feeling more and more depressed about it lately, which is why I wanted to come here and share my feelings.  Working with a mask on is just not pleasant and I'm struggling with it.  On top of all the other hardships at work going on right now because we're in the middle of a pandemic and it's wreaking havoc on our company's financial situation, I also have to deal with wearing a mask, and it's making me not want to go into work anymore.  Every day I feel beat down within minutes of entering the facility, and I just hate feeling this way.  I don't really have a good coping mechanism, so I'm hoping that putting this into words will help somewhat.