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.
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