Stop Reflexively Praising Police Officers As Heroes

Posted: 8/15/2014

Trigger

I was very surprised to read this article “It’s Time for Conservatives to Stop Defending Police There is nothing conservative about government violating the rights of citizens.” in the National Review.

Don’t get me wrong: Individual police officers have become true heroes through their actions!

The Police Department

The police officers are carefully crafted as first responders, heroes, putting their life on the line every minute of their duty; we are left to believe that many of them die every year in the line of duty in a shooting with criminals etc.

This contrasts clearly with the power that police officer labor unions wield and with the intensified militarization of police forces across the country latest since the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration upped the fight against drugs.

SWAT Teams

It seems now almost every police department in the country no matter how small has one of those teams plus the military gear. As NPR reported today, if a county has a SWAT team, the smallest town in that county wants to have one too.

Perhaps, in the beginning SWAT teams were strictly limited to counteract armed hostage taking or other, very severe offenses by armed criminals. However, now that there are so many SWAT teams, they have to be used whenever possible. Not least, once you have a SWAT team at your disposal and you don’t use it in an incident, the police department will be sued for negligence. Catch-22!

Dash & Body Cameras

From a technology standpoint it should be quite feasible today to equip every police car and police officer with such cameras that record their duty activities from beginning to end.

I would say, it should be done! If the powerful police labor unions object so be it! Police officers have such powers as no one else, they should be held accountable for what they are doing.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis is often quoted as saying:

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."” (Source; emphasis added)

Let’s add to that cameras that record the actions of police officers.

Such cameras would also allow to record offenses committed by criminals to be recorded more often in the act or to easily reveal the lies offered by criminals when caught.