The police are not your friends; they’re hardly even protectors

Let’s be honest. How many of us have had truly positive experiences with police officers? I’m not even just talking about the annoyance of being pulled over. I mean that they are negative in general. Has a cop ever truly helped you or improved your life? I’m not saying it never happens, but police do not generally do good. I don’t even mean from the standpoint of unnecessary force or corruption. They just don’t do much positive at all as part of their jobs.

If your house is robbed, they will reluctantly come out and maybe dust for prints. They almost never find your stuff, though, or the person who burgled you. Get mugged? Much the same outcome, minus the need for fingerprints. Accident? Well, they’ll take statements but there’s a decent chance they’ll decide you were the problem in the accident even if you weren’t. Being assaulted by a spouse or whomever? They typically don’t do much of anything. They certainly don’t stop crimes. 

While there are uses and needs for cops, the fact is that they are neither protective for the vast majority of us, nor are they preventative. They rarely solve crimes; they almost never stop them before they happen.

And for a long time now, they’ve pretty much had free reign to be bullies whenever they want to be. They have almost literal licenses to kill, rarely brought to justice even when they kill unarmed children in cold blood. I could go through a long list of notable examples of police abuse and extra-judicial murder in the news the past decade or more, most of them involving non-white victims, but I have another idea: Let’s look at a very recent story about how St. Louis police crashed into a gay bar and arrested one of the co-owners.

What did the cops do after literally crashing into the bar as it was closing up? Demanded to see the ID of the guy inside the bar whom they endangered. When he refused, as is his right being the victim and all, things escalated. Police arrested him and charged him with assault.

Now, first off I don’t believe he assaulted the officers. If they’ve already crashed into his establishment and gotten confrontational, I don’t think he’s gonna throw hands. But even if he did—the man has just gotten the front of his bar caved in and is catching attitude from the people who did it. They should be apologizing or making up a good story already.

But no, they do what cops so often do. They turn the victim into the villain. They blame the target of their incompetence, or anger, or intoxication, or racism, or whatever, and they say they were the ones at risk.

As a Black woman, I’m all too aware from personal experiences and the experiences of family and friends, including my son, how easily and casually and frequently cops do this to Black people. Statistically, they are much more likely to do this crap to people of color, especially Black, Indigenous, and Latino people. But this was a white man. 

And I’m not even going to claim they did it because he was gay, because they probably hadn’t even had time to process that they had crashed into a gay bar. My point is that they don’t care at all about us. They are more willing to go after non-white people, but the fact is that cops are not friends to any of us. They exist mostly to protect the status quo and the property of people with money. They exist to hand out tickets to collect money. They are glorified gang members in so much of what they do. 

It doesn’t matter if you have a cop friend or cop relative or whatever and say they’re one of the good ones. This kind of thing happens all the time, and the cops almost never accept blame, they almost never apologize and they certainly don’t turn on their fellow officers. They are all complicit, even if they aren’t the direct villains.

And poor Chad Morris in St. Louis? They “generously” reduced the charges from felony offenses to misdemeanor resisting arrest and assault. He likely didn’t commit a crime at all, and the best they could do even after public outcry and obvious misbehavior on their part (video shows the accident, which was clearly the cops’ fault alone) was to give him a lesser crime to defend against. 

No, the police are not our friends. I recognize there is a need for some kind of law enforcement, but what we have ain’t it. We don’t have officers of the law in most of our communities—we have bullies (and worse) with badges.