Heroism and Hype: Selling the Police in America

An email arrives in my inbox, recommending a website that seeks to explain -- one might say rationalize -- the multiple killings of black men by Cincinnati police over the past few years. Its sender, who feels I should "get my facts straight," takes issue with some of my previous commentaries, wherein I cast a critical eye upon a number of these incidents.

At least five of the sixteen occurred under highly suspicious circumstances, where evidence of imminent danger to the officers appears to have been nonexistent. Yet to my detractor, since I "wasn't there," I couldn't possibly know whether or not the killings were justified. That he too wasn't there, and also has no first-hand knowledge of the incidents, naturally never enters his mind.

Yet another email: this time encouraging me to check out an article that "proves" the validity of racial profiling as a law enforcement tactic. Its sender insists that police are "heroes" in the war on crime, and refers specifically to the heroism of the NYPD in rescue efforts on 9/11.

A few nights before Christmas, my wife and I have some friends over. We exchange holiday gifts, and my best friend -- a professor in Los Angeles -- gives me (as a joke, mind you) the hot new Christmas gift for California consumers: a handsome, well-crafted doll, modeled after a member of the LAPD. Some white guy (naturally) named "Officer West." The muscular, chiseled man-toy is "fully poseable," and comes with toy pepper spray, handcuffs, a flashlight, an automatic pistol, and a baton, the latter for beating up toy versions of Rodney King, I suppose. Officer West dolls are endorsed by the Los Angeles police union and made in China, another nation that places a high premium on efficient law enforcement.

And finally, a few days after Christmas, I read about the opening of the Police Museum in New York City. A thoroughly uncritical celebration of the city's officers, the museum ignores such embarrassments as the Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima incidents, as well as a litany of corruption scandals involving drug dealing, payoffs and bribes.

Nor is there an exhibit to memorialize Operation Pressure Point, a drug sting in which police arrested street dealers of color by the dozens, while merely telling white buyers from the suburbs to turn their cars around and go home.

Nor do the docents discuss the NYPD's historic and sexist attempt to maintain their six foot height requirement for officers: a move that prompted women to sue, since such a requirement was clearly a way to keep the department all-male.

Instead, visitors to the museum are led through a simulator, where they are challenged to "shoot or hold fire" on a make-believe criminal perp, displayed in a video demonstration: one where you sneak up on a guy who spins around and pulls his wallet out of his back pocket, and you shoot him, fearing he had a gun. Then you realize your mistake, and more to the point, you realize how gosh-darned tough it is to be a cop.

Come to think of it, maybe that is the Amadou Diallo portion of the tour. Of course police have been trained not to react so clumsily and average folks have not. So as such the failure of civilians to make the right call can hardly explain, let alone excuse, similar screw-ups by police. But that is not considered.

With so much pro-police sentiment flooding the nation lately, I guess that throwing cold water on the positive mood won't be greeted favorably by most. But the fact is, there are any number of problems with the resurrection of the "heroic cop" image in the public imagination.

First, if we define heroism by the extent to which one puts his life on the line in the course of his work -- and apparently that's the operative definition nowadays -- then there is nothing all that heroic about policing. According to the Department of Labor, the on-the-job fatality rate for police is lower than that for gardeners, electricians, truck drivers, garbage collectors, construction workers, airline pilots, timber cutters, and commercial fisherman. In fact, fishermen have an occupational fatality rate that is fifteen times higher than that for cops, but rarely do we hear those who provide us with an endless supply of mahi-mahi described as heroes.