Re ‘For Once, I Would Like to Live in a City Where the Police Just Police’
I have been involved in law enforcement for the past 38 years — 4 years in the United States Air Force, 31 years as a Culver City police officer and the last 5 years as a private investigator.
Over these years I have met many people of all races who have the same feelings that Jessica Gadsden expressed in her June 2 essay, where she said:
“In a perfect world, I’d like to live in a city where the police actually police. But after years of living in large cities, it’s obvious that the police are all about keeping the wealthy and the white safe, while allowing the poor, black and brown, to figure it out for ourselves. I’ve lived in South Los Angeles (formerly—and better—known as ‘South Central’). Neighbors would call the police, and if they responded at all, it was often reluctantly and hours later. In contrast, when suspects fled robberies in nearby Beverly Hills or the Fairfax District, cops would prowl our neighborhoods, guns drawn and at the ready to catch suspects who had dared set foot in the wrong part of town. Yet the murder rate in South Los Angeles continues, unimpeded by law enforcement.”
I also have spent the past 38 years trying to change such attitudes and perceptions about police officers.
I long have believed that any contact a police officer has with a member of a community he serves should be a positive one.
These situations usually are negative in nature, a late night contact on the street or a traffic ticket. If the police officer is professional, courteous and explains the situation, in most instances the person stopped will go away with a positive view of the police.
That person, like most people, will only have one or two contacts with the police in a lifetime. If those contacts were positive, the people will have a positive attitude towards the police in the future.
A Domino Effect
If, however, that contact is negative, the person will view all police activity with skepticism and probably pass that skepticism onto family and friends.
I have always made it a point to educate all police officers who work for me to deal with everyone with dignity and respect. Also, I would demand that police officers working for me would attempt to help and get an answer for anyone who contacted them with a problem.
I would tell the officers that people will come to you with their problems and want your help. Their problem may not be a part of your job or you may not have the answer, but if you spend a few minutes to help them, that one contact will be a positive experience.
That one positive contact may not mean anything to your life or career, but it could affect how thousands of people perceive thousands of police officers across the country.
Whether an experience is positive or negative, it may influence the friends and and relatives of the person, it may influence people who sit on juries, it may influence people who witness police conduct on the street, and those who serve on governing bodies around the country.
Your contact, I told those working for me, whether positive or negative, will affect police officers everywhere.
She Has a Choice, but We Don’t
As Jessica’s husband stated, there is a one in a million chance she would be shot by the police.
But she said she would continue to walk the other way when she saw the police, because you only needed to be shot once to be dead.
The same goes for the police officer on the street. It only would take that one contact with an armed suspect to be shot dead.
The only difference in these two examples is that it is our duty to contact those people we suspect of criminal activity.
We do not have the option of choosing to walk the other way.
How a Department Operates
Jessica is right in her assessment that law enforcement officers target certain areas over others, not always based on criminal activity in that area.
A lot of times it is based on appearances. The homeless or transient population is a good example of this.
The police officers on the street do not choose to contact these groups unless they observe or suspect some criminal activity.
Sometimes, though, they are sometimes directed to do so by local government officials. If the police officer does not perform his duties as directed, he would be subject to discipline, or other negative employment action.
Police officers make mistakes.
There are bad police officers who intentionally commit criminal acts.
The problems arise with the police department management’s refusal to make public the mistake and criminal acts for fear of the liability or poor image it will bring on the department.
These incidents never are addressed.
Therefore, the mistakes are not corrected, and the criminal acts are not exposed.
The mistakes have to be acknowledged so that other police officers can be trained to recognize these mistakes and not replicate them.
Criminal acts have to be acknowledged so that these bad officers are immediately removed from the force and answer for their crimes.
In the early1960s, Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker was asked about his department’s hiring practices after several of his LAPD officer had been fired and subsequently arrested for committing crimes.
Chief Parker stated that one reason bad officers occasionally slip through the hiring process was the city’s hiring restriction:
He could only hire candidates from the human race.
I would say to Jessica that the majority of the police officers in Los Angeles are good professional people.
They would like to work in that city you want to live in, where they just do good police work.
Mr. Smith may be contacted at scsinternationalinvestigations.com
