There is probably no harsher critic of law enforcement officers than my friend, Bill.
Check that, there is no harsher critic of lazy, crooked, incompetent law enforcement officers than Bill.
It might surprise you to know that Bill spent 40 years as a cop. It shouldn’t. Bad cops are a danger to everyone, especially good ones. It didn’t take Bill 40 years to learn that.
What he has learned, he says, defies much of what we are hearing these days about law enforcement and the growing chasm between police and the communities they serve, especially urban communities.
Bill’s career started in the 1970s in Phoenix – more specifically, South Phoenix, where he says “the only white things you saw there were the white line in the middle of the street and me. It was mostly Hispanic, black and a few Yavapai Indians.”
That experience he says taught him his first lesson: The idea that the best way to police black communities is to hire black officers is a mistake. Recently, we’ve seen evidence of that fallacy in Baltimore where three of the six officers indicted in the Freddie Gray death are black.
Another trend he finds almost as disturbing is that departments aren’t only hiring on the basis of race, but of education. More and more, departments are hiring college graduates.
Big mistake, he says.
“When I first joined the police force, the people they hired weren’t college graduates. They came form the military or the mines or the working class,” he says. “Why does that matter? Because those people understood the neighborhoods they patrolled. They could relate to them. They knew how they thought, where their buttons were, you know? They understood the streets because they came from the streets, at least on some level.”
Even though he “stood out like a sore thumb” in south Phoenix, Bill was savvy. He made it a priority to know people.
“My theory was that, if I got jumped and was getting the hell beat out of me, I would at least have one or two people in the neighborhood that would call 911,” he says.
After 40 years that included some of the most stressful, dangerous duty an officer can have (he worked undercover in narcotics more a dozen years), Bill moved up to ranks, eventually becoming a lead investigator.
In that role, he became painfully familiar with the incompetence and dishonesty of many an officer in a system that was all too eager to provide cover for even the most horrid conduct of officers.
Now in his retirement, he works as a consultant for defense attorneys, especially cases involving misconduct by police officers. He has more work than he can handle these days.
Last week, Gov. Phil Bryant wrote an op-ed piece that ran in the Jackson paper. The premise was that the current crisis is a matter of Police vs. Criminal Class.
But Bill says there is a danger is such a simple attitude: It does not address what he sees as a growing lawlessness among the very people we rely on to uphold the law.
“Police work is like most jobs,” he says. “Some people are terrible at it. Some are corrupt. Some are lazy. Some are just stupid.
“As a cop, I never had any interest in giving those (colorful expression) any cover and, let me tell you, there are plenty of people out there who have no damn business wearing a uniform. So to say, ‘Well, let’s pick sides and go with the good guys,’ that doesn’t help anything. It sure doesn’t help the cops. Anybody that says that doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“You want to solve this problem? There’s a lot you can do. The first thing you can do is get rid of the bums.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer at The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected]
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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