What happens when a moral compass stops working?
It’s been 72 hours since a local cop was fired. That’s not a big deal these days, but I was going to write this column based on the fact it had actually been almost two weeks since the last one until Monday’s news about a local chief being shown the door. But I figure “it’s a chief, so what?”
Has the wave found its high water mark? Maybe, maybe not. But have we learned from it? I actually think so.
We’ve learned that recruiting for police officers must be an absolute bitch right about now for one thing. We’ve learned that with this kind of volume of business lawyers can get their year-end bonuses in February. We’ve learned that there’s suddenly a surplus of gently used cop-gear in training department storage rooms everywhere. We’ve learned that there will be a budget surplus from all the vacant funded positions in public safety locally. See? Glass half full.
The chief I mentioned was let go for, among other things, a lack of accountability. It wasn’t his fault in his mind (according to his now former boss’s walking papers). And with this I think we found a common theme.
It gets away from you. The things done in case after case paint a familiar picture despite the different circumstances of each termination. The copper in each case didn’t hold him or herself in accordance with rules they could never plead ignorant to. I’m not talking about not knowing a speed limit in a random stretch of road—I’m talking about, say, “rape under color of law.”
While extreme, it’s happened more than once in the last several months. How in the hell, right?
A little insight: These guys are trained together, but their first day after training ends and every day thereafter, they work alone. They are handed tremendous responsibility with tremendous leeway to make tough decisions, and occasionally their moral compass needle doesn’t just get bent, it get ripped off the face of the instrument.
There’s no one to watch the watchers when bad ideas take root after working alone day after day and night after night. Bad stuff gets somehow “reasonable” with these guys.
That’s just my take on it, but however horrifying the missteps you must also bear in mind they are an extreme rarity. These bad operators represent a percent of a percent; a statistical anomaly, but obviously one that is amplified like sunlight through a magnifying glass. The only fix is to eliminate human error, and that’s just not going to happen.
You can’t put a supervisor in each car and reasonable people can only operate under so much video scrutiny (since 24/7 body cams are occasionally brought up), so you’re left with what you’re seeing now: Wholesale employment evisceration on the front of the local newspaper and at the beginning of each broadcast.
What’s being done to defend against bad actors is to make the idea of getting caught so terrible that those bad ideas on long nights alone seem “darn unreasonable” once again.
Will it work? Well, like I said...it’s been at least 72 hours since the last public hanging of a safety professional so I have a good feeling about this. I also noticed they’ve been pushing a recruiting drive (as if the public didn’t notice a wave of recent vacancies in the ranks, “LOL”) but this is a good thing too.
If you’re thinking about being a po-po these days, these cases are perfectly poised to give you second thoughts about signing up half-assedly.
It’s not an easy job. It’s not a glamorous job. If done correctly, in fact, no one will ever know you’ve done it since a crime prevented is tough to measure. That said? It’s worth it, but how you exit the profession (barring random chance) is generally up you.
Teach the new guys to keep their moral compass in good working order, and failing that? Show them newspapers from the last few weeks. Either way, do it quickly.
Like them or not, we still need coppers, day and night.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.