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    The Deadly Self-Pity Of The Police

    By: Samir Chopra

    In 1997, as a graduate teaching fellow, I began teaching two introductory classes in philosophy at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Many of my students were training for careers in criminology and law enforcement. Some hoped to join the FBI, yet others, the New York City police force. And, as I had been told (warned?) some of my students were serving NYPD officers, perhaps hoping to become detectives, gain added educational qualifications and so on. In my first semester, I did not meet any of these worthies.

    A few weeks into my second semester, soon after I had finished teaching for the night, a student walked up to me, asked me a couple of questions about the material I had just covered and then introduced himself. He was a serving officer in the NYPD, working in a Brooklyn precinct. We chatted for a bit, and then as I headed out to the subway station to take a train home, he accompanied me. At the station he indicated he could wave me through with his card, but feeling uneasy, I politely declined and said I would use a subway token instead. Shortly thereafter we said goodnight. From that night on, after the end of class, he would sometimes accompany me to the station; we would chat about his educational plans and of course, his work at the precinct.

    1997 was the year that Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, had been assaulted and sodomized with a broken-off broom handle by the NYPD after being arrested outside Club Rendezvous in East Flatbush. That incident had sparked angry demonstrations and the same old calls for reform of the NYPD, for an inquiry into race relations in New York City. (Incredibly enough, the officers who assaulted Louima would go on to serve time.)  That fall, that incident was something my new 'friend' returned to again and again. It made him 'unhappy.'

    Not because he felt for Louima. Not because he sympathized with a man who had been beaten and raped by the police. Not because he felt for the mothers of the black and Latino men who had been shot dead or assaulted by the NYPD. Not because he thought that communities of color were unjustly targeted by the police. None of that that bothered him. What bothered him was something else altogether. Now, the people of the borough didn't 'respect the police'. They were 'disrespectful.' They walked by the precinct waving broom handles at the police, shouting angry slogans, reminding the police of the night that another  broom handle had been used to commit sexual assault on someone like them. It was so 'hurtful' to see that kind of contempt, that kind of language directed at policemen, who were after all, only trying to 'do their jobs.'

    I was talking to a man who seemed curiously consumed by self-pity. He was not happy his profession was being maligned, but he didn't seem to think it had anything to do with the way his colleagues–other than a few bad apples, who he wanted to disown all too quickly–behaved with the communities they policed. The police were the real victims here, unfairly made to bear the brunt of a community's wrath. Louima might have suffered one night, but all the agitators and demonstrators–sometimes folks who didn't even live in Brooklyn!–were now making life oh-so-difficult for the rest of the police, forced to deal with this daily reminder of their brutality.

    What makes policemen really dangerous, I think, is that their implements of destruction do not end with the deadly firearms that they discharge so easily and so carelessly. They carry around too, a toxic mix of self-pity, righteousness, and resentment at a deliberately obtuse world. When they walk the streets, they do not see a 'community' around them; they see the sullen, non-compliant subjects of their policing. They are convinced of the rightness of their actions; if they are ever subjected to critique then it must be flawed, infected with an ignorance of the nature of police work. They are mystified and angry. They seek to bring 'these people' law and order; why don't they encounter more welcoming behavior? My 'friend' was caught up in this mystery. He could not fathom how the folks who said the police were 'pigs' could not separate out the good from the bad, how they could not exercise a discrimination finer than the one they put on display.

    In this attitude, urban police forces in America today are very much like occupying and colonial forces elsewhere: they are puzzled why the occupied are not more grateful for the benefactions of the armed forces that stride through their neighborhoods, stopping and frisking, getting young men up against the wall, stamping out 'disorder', showing by their body language and their voices that they are armed and dangerous and will not tolerate dissent in any form. And just like those forces the police  ask again and again: Why do they make us hurt them so? Why do they make us do the things we do?

    Is there anything more deadly than self-pity, the conviction that you have been sinned against, and the right to use arms?

    Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com

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    18 responses to “The Deadly Self-Pity Of The Police”

    1. Tomatisblog.wordpress.com Avatar
      Tomatisblog.wordpress.com

      I suspect that cops in the US are in fact subject to rather fewer restraints on their use of deadly force than those members of the US armed forces operationally deployed overseas, at least the ones engaged in foot patrols. It seems unlikely to me that a soldier who choked to death an unarmed Afhgan in broad daylight in Kabul and was filmed doing it would be given a pass by the military justice system. Same goes for what happened in Ferguson.

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    2. Anon Grad Student Avatar
      Anon Grad Student

      They carry around too, a toxic mix of self-pity, righteousness, and resentment at a deliberately obtuse world. When they walk in the classroom, they do not see a ‘community’ around them; they see the sullen, non-compliant subjects of their research. They are convinced of the rightness of their actions; if they are ever subjected to critique then it must be flawed, infected with an ignorance of the nature of philosophical work. They are mystified and angry. They seek to bring ‘these people’ clear reasoning about the arcane; why don’t they encounter more welcoming behavior? My ‘friend’ was caught up in this mystery.
      This is too easy.

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    3. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Yup. The first thing my Marine friend said when he saw the early pictures of swat police out of Ferguson was: “why are these idiots holding their rifles scopes up to their eyes? you don’t do that unless you are intending to fire.”

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    4. JAB Avatar
      JAB

      Interesting post, thank you. Self-pity, an interest in getting an identity for a “role”, and a refusal to take accountability are features of borderline personality disorder, which is associated with impulsive violence: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11122933
      I don’t know the incidence rate of BPD (there must be some, I just don’t know them) in those who commit domestic violence, but self-pity is certainly used an explanation for domestic violence. The rate of domestic violence from police is shockingly high. http://womenandpolicing.com/violenceFS.asp#notes

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    5. Chris Avatar
      Chris

      Police officers put themselves in danger on a daily basis to help others. I agree that the ideology of self-righteousness, privilege, and camaraderie that often sustains them is flawed, but I don’t begrudge them this too much since this is presumably what helps to get them through the day in such a psychologically-demanding job.
      There are analogies between the ideology of police officers and “colonial occupiers,” but there is also a BIG difference, in my view. The ideology of colonial occupiers was sustaining a project (colonialism) which was itself bad, so the whole enterprise needed to be thrown out root and branch. On the other hand, police work needs to be done by someone, and a person who is fully attuned to all aspects of a community, freed from bias, attuned to moral gray areas, etc., would probably have a hard time doing this. So, some kind of ideology may be a necessary evil in policing.
      The key, then, would be to look for pragmatic ways to reduce the worst harms that result from this, while gradually transforming the ethos of policing in a healthier direction.

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    6. David Wallace Avatar
      David Wallace

      It’s perhaps just worth saying how incredibly surreal this all looks from the other side of the Atlantic. I don’t know much about the British police but I don’t have any reason to think their attitudes are better or worse than their US counterparts. But they hardly ever shoot innocent people because they hardly ever carry guns.
      You can kill someone with a police truncheon, but it doesn’t have the one-step-to-lethality feature of a firearm.
      I know there’s little or nothing to be done about this in the US – as long as civilian gun ownership is so prevalent the police have to be armed too, and 2nd amendment jurisprudence means restricting gun ownership is virtually impossible – but once in a while it’s worth pausing to look at how, at some level, it’s a choice to have a heavily armed populace and a heavily-armed police force, not a law of nature.

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    7. Jonathan Livengood Avatar
      Jonathan Livengood

      “Police officers put themselves in danger on a daily basis to help others.”
      This is either misleading or outright false depending on how you interpret it. The job of police officer (having a yearly fatal injury rate of about 10.6 per 100,000) is less dangerous than all of the following civilian jobs according to the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries for 2013 (http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2013hb.pdf):
      Logging workers (91.3)
      Fishers and related fishing workers (75.0)
      Aircraft pilots (50.6)
      Roofers (38.7)
      Refuse and recyclable material collectors (33.0)
      Mining machine operator (26.9)
      Driver/sales workers and truck drivers (22.0)
      Farmer, rancher, and other agricultural managers (21.8)
      Electrical power-line installers and repairers (21.5)
      Construction laborers (17.7)
      First-line supervisors/managers of construction and extraction (16.1)
      Taxi drivers and chauffeurs (15.7)
      First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, etc. (15.5)
      Maintenance and repair workers, general (14.2)
      Grounds maintenance workers (12.6)
      This is not to say that policing isn’t a more dangerous job than many jobs that people hold. Being a police officer is about 20 times as dangerous as being an educator, for example. But we don’t make excuses for abusive behaviors or psychological oddities among truck drivers or construction workers or garbage collectors or roofers or ANY of these other categories on the grounds that they put themselves in danger on a daily basis.
      I also don’t believe that police officers put themselves in danger in order to help others. In my experience, most police officers are bullies: They put themselves (and others) in danger because they like to have power and to exert force.

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    8. Derek Bowman Avatar
      Derek Bowman

      Anon Grad Student @2 is right. It’s far too easy for professors to take just this sort of attitude toward our students. Fortunately no one usually gets shot as a result, but we shouldn’t pass up this opportunity to rethink our relationship with our students.

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    9. Eric Winsberg Avatar
      Eric Winsberg

      Right, and the large majority of the fatalities among police officers that are tabulated in those statistics are traffic fatalities and other “ordinary” events. The amount that they “put themselves in danger,” in a sense at all related to an explanation of how trigger happy they tend to be, is miniscule.

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    10. Chris Avatar
      Chris

      I did not mean in my comment to indicate that police officers put themselves in danger much more than members of other professions. But, there is a danger there. Most professions with any degree of danger, whether it be firefighting, working with heavy machinery, playing football, deep sea fishing, flying planes, etc., have an ethos that members of the profession tend to embody–a sense of honor or a certain culture that surrounds the work. At least, this is what I would assume. Even college professors, in a less dangerous context, tend to exhibit certain forms of self-righteousness (joking about common student mistakes, criticizing popular culture from their armchairs, etc.). I think these ideologies are coping strategies and my main idea was that we should not expect them to disappear. Rather, we should try to transform them in healthy directions, while accepting that some sense of self-righteousness is going to be part of pretty much any profession.
      Obviously, cases where this self-righteousness leads to the death or injury of innocent people (as often happens in policing) would be top on the list of things that need to be addressed.

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    11. Andrew Gleeson Avatar
      Andrew Gleeson

      But not everyone who is unhappy with the tone of Samir’s original post has to be making excuses for the police. There is a problem of police racism that needs serious attention, and the present shocking cases of death at police hands need thorough investigation. No doubt there are police with a self- righteous attitude. But there will be no progress with these issues if those of us in comfortable academic lives, with no idea of the extraordinarily difficult jobs faced by police officers (whatever the fatality statistics) simply display the same attitude — as anon grad student pointed out.

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    12. MJSM Avatar
      MJSM

      I can’t help but wonder if comments like Chris’ and David Wallace’s (to pick one I disagree with and one I agree with) underestimate the scale of the problem. It is not simply that policing is a dangerous and stressful job (although that is true) or that the police are too reliant are firearms (although that too is true). What we are dealing with is a state that gives it’s police force extraordinary power and the discretion to use it relatively unimpeded among a population of people that have historically been denigrated as less than human. It will take more than simple (although welcome!)reforms to make this right. If nothing else, we need to radically rethink the role of the police force in our society.

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    13. Ed kazarian Avatar
      Ed kazarian

      Samir, tremendous post.
      I’ll say one thing in response to the comments. Chris seems to be assuming that there’s no connection between the project the police are sustaining, which is first and foremost the distribution of private property and the boundaries of legitimate economic activity in the US, and unjust things like the colonial project (and the historical legacy of slavery). In a discussion that’s primarily occasioned by how police officers have historically behaved and continue to behave in communities of color, that’s a whopper of an assumption, and pretty obviously false.

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    14. AB Avatar
      AB

      I second David Wallace on how weird this all is from the other side of the Atlantic. But I actually don’t think it’s about guns. Most European police forces carry guns, but they almost never use them. Racism and inequality and poverty and corruption are hardly unknown in Germany. Yet in an average year the entire German police fires about a hundred rounds and kills about half a dozen people.
      Many politically moderate Americans believe that if Mike Brown really did steal some cigars and start an fight with a cop, that settles the matter. What did he expect, if not a hail of bullets? In Europe this seems pretty odd. Angry young men do stupid things, after all.
      I’d guess kind of self-pity Samir describes is common to cops everywhere. London Met police I know have the same kind of attitude. But the level of hostility, between the police and the citizenry seems to be much higher in the US, as does the readiness of the police to use deadly force. How did this happen?

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    15. Jonathan Livengood Avatar
      Jonathan Livengood

      Chris,
      Sorry if I have misunderstood your comment. I have often had conversations with people where they say that police have an incredibly dangerous job and therefore should be excused when they abuse their powers and/or shield members of their tribe from negative consequences following from abuse of power — like criminal prosecution. When you said that you do not begrudge the police their ideology, which you take to be something that sustains them through a psychologically difficult job, I took you to be offering an apology for that ideology. Again, if I have misunderstood, then I apologize.
      Most people I talk to simply do not realize that the police have objectively less dangerous jobs than lots of other people. My guess is that the outsize estimate of the level of danger faced by police is due to Hollywood and television portrayals. If police did have a very, very dangerous job, then maybe they would be justified in having an otherwise distasteful ideology. I’m not sure about that inference, especially since there might be non-odious ideologies that would also let police cope with their difficulties. In the actual world, though, the police do not have such a frighteningly dangerous job that otherwise indefensible attitudes and actions might be defensible. We would not (I think) excuse a truck driver who runs over a pedestrian — even accidentally — on the grounds that the truck driver has a dangerous job. Neither should we excuse a police officer who shoots someone — even accidentally — on the grounds that being a police officer is dangerous.
      Andrew,
      I never said that all possible objections to the post were or had to be apologies for the police. I was specifically replying to one remark, which in my experience often is the basis of an apology for abuses of police power.
      You write, “But there will be no progress with these issues if those of us in comfortable academic lives, with no idea of the extraordinarily difficult jobs faced by police officers (whatever the fatality statistics) simply display the same attitude.” I don’t understand what you’re trying to say or how it is relevant to either the post or my comment. I deny that police officers have an “extraordinarily difficult” job. They have a job. The difficulty of that job may be measured along lots of different dimensions. In some ways, policing is difficult. In other ways, it is not. On aggregate, as far as I can tell, policing is only a moderately difficult job. But what I really don’t understand from your comment is the bit about (uncritically? unreflectively? uninformedly?) displaying the same attitude. I’m honestly baffled by what you could possibly mean.

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    16. Art Esian Avatar
      Art Esian

      Well you do not get it. It every shift change meeting in cop shops in NA 90% of the directive is concentrated on trouble spots which largely concern a few well armed ‘poor me’ blacks in violent neighbourhoods. Cops are taxpayers too and they go to work annoyed at the wasted of treasury. Politicians have paid lip service to the problem with affirmative action and not been successful at solving society’s dysfunctional ills.
      Police are left to defend the innocent. That is the generalisation. The particular is that there is now no respect for rule of law, Grand Jury decisions, by a great spectrum of the progressive intellectuals that is encouraging to the violent and ‘poor me’ practitioners. It’s all about taking personal responsibility for your own behaviour and minding your own business. Who knows what is in the NY Grand Jury decision? I’ve not seen it.
      The poor man died from a deadly accident as he was being arrested. EMS treatment and emergency ward treatment in a hospital did not save his life. His death was not intentional and not murder. It has become a useless excuse to rant and rampage as was Ferguson.

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    17. Andrew Gleeson Avatar
      Andrew Gleeson

      Jonathon,
      Jonathon,
      I do think you are underestimating how difficult and stressful the job of police working on the streets in dangerous neighbourhoods is. Of course it is not the only or the most dangerous job, but the point is about the relative difficulty of policing vs. academic work. We are in danger of self-righteousness if, from the comfortable position, we adopt a relentlessly unsympathetic tone, as Samir’s original post seems to me to do. I accept that there are structural problems, that it is not just a few bad apples. But that is consistent with acknowledging there are many decent police, and many who have fallen into objectionable attitudes because of pressures I can’t begin to understand. I would not be a police officer ( on the streets) for anything. This is not in itself to make excuses for brutality and lethality. Most emphatically it is not a reason to be silent. But it is reason to be more nuanced than Samir’s original post, and not just to simplify the situation with a cartoon image of goodies and baddies.

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    18. Yo-Yo Mama Avatar
      Yo-Yo Mama

      US army overseas have a history of shooting unarmed looters, torturing detainees etc. Info is easily found on the web, but I guess you’re not interested in facts.
      So, what do you think happened in Ferguson, have you seen Michael Brown’s autopsy report?
      Do you think it’s a good idea to get high, rob a convenience store, walk in the middle of the street and punch a cop in the face, try to shoot him with his own gun, run away and then bum rush him when he shoots at you? Because that’s what happened.
      It’s a good excuse though to loot, riot and burn down your own community. Talk about wallowing in self-pity.

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