Sympathy for the cops

During this coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns, we’ve all heard and read heart-rending stories from friends who couldn’t be with their dying parents, those who have lost their jobs, or those who still have to work in unsafe settings. Google Trends suggests that searches for “empathy” hit an all-time high in early June.

But how far does and should our empathy and sympathy go?

Specifically, do we have enough room in our hearts these days to feel empathy for the police?

Law enforcement is always dangerous, and often no fun at all. Over the past few weeks and months, it’s become far more difficult.

Amid a pandemic in which authorities say going to work is unsafe, police officers have had to work overtime, often lacking any protective measures. Lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have upended policing in a way that may be confusing, tiring, and dispiriting.

And, of course, there are the protests and the riots. Law enforcement has been thrust into tense settings, worked around the clock, reviled, and spat upon. At the demonstrations against judging people by their skin, officers see that simply wearing a badge and a uniform makes them, in the eyes of many protesters, guilty of the worst acts committed by anyone else to wear that badge and uniform.

It’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s especially true these days, and we can say it without diminishing the legitimate complaints about police brutality: These are tough days to be a police officer, and if we have empathy or sympathy to spare, we ought to parcel some out to these men and women in uniform.

‘You are the threat’

“You’re not going to find any police officer in the country that’s going to look at what happened there and say it’s proper,” one veteran police officer told me of George Floyd’s death.

Speaking to law enforcement officers — local and federal; black, white, and Hispanic; veteran and rookie — I found universal condemnation of Derek Chauvin’s treatment of Floyd.

“We were in complete agreement with Al Sharpton for the first time,” a white New York police officer told me.

That agreement wasn’t worth much, though, on the streets of New York, D.C., or most major U.S. cities, where protests and sometimes riots erupted following Floyd’s death.

Some police have tried in vain to reach out and bridge the widening chasm with black neighbors and protesters. “We’ve been trying,” a New York officer told me. “The bosses are all taking a knee. It doesn’t help at night.”

The rallies near the White House the first week of June, for instance, were organized and presented in the media as rallies in honor of George Floyd, protests against police violence, and marches to draw attention to systemic racism. And they were about these causes. But they were also hate-fests against police.

“You are the threat!” was a common chant near the White House, where the Secret Service, Park Police, Federal Protective Service, and other law enforcement agencies were posted around the clock.

“An eye for an eye,” one protester shouted at police one night as a group tried to tip over the steel barricades erected around Lafayette Square and the White House.

Chants at Lafayette Square that day included “I smell ba-con,” “Shame on you!” and “Quit your job!”

“F— 12” was both a common chant and ubiquitous graffiti, “12” being urban slang for narcotics police, but also police in general. One instance of “F— 12” graffiti on H Street across from Lafayette Square had a deceased pig painted next to it and included the command “Kill cops!”

That’s not an abstraction or an empty threat.

The Federal Protective Service is an arm of Homeland Security that protects federal buildings. At Lafayette Square that Tuesday, their job was to stand in a line on Vermont Avenue, without any physical barricades between them and these angry protesters.

Just a few nights earlier, during the protests in Oakland, two on-duty FPS officers were shot. One of them, a black officer named Dave Patrick Underwood, died from his wounds.

That Tuesday, one young man paced back and forth before federal law enforcement outside the White House, lecturing the police they had better leave. “Y’all don’t know who has guns,” he warned. “Y’all is risking your lives.”

When a large crowd gathered to jeer the line of FPS agents on Vermont Avenue, one white woman started a chant, “No justice. No peace. F— these racist-ass police.” The officer most directly in front of the white “cheerleader” was black.

At one point, a particularly short, white FPS officer posted on the line at Vermont Avenue, spurring a crowd of young men to howl in laughter at his size and film selfies, mocking the man.

Mockery, jeers, and eggs thrown at you aren’t the worst things in this world, but this wasn’t what these officers signed up for when they entered law enforcement. Standing on the street for hours, laden with gear in the June sun as you become an object of hate, ridicule, and scorn is a particularly unenjoyable job. Even though most projectiles can’t hurt you, particularly behind your armor, helmet, and shield, nobody likes getting egged or pelted with water bottles.

We can observe, rightly, that victims of police violence, particularly George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, suffer far more than these police while still remembering that police assigned to become full-time targets of hatred deserve our sympathy.

“When you become a target,” one senior FPS officer told me, “it eats you up. A lot of my guys get really affected.” The officer, a black man and a supervisor, told me he had to pull men off the line for a while out of concern for their mental and emotional well-being. “This is the most emotional event we’ve had to deal with.”

It was the scene all over the country. Ask any law enforcement official of any race in any part of America how life has changed since Floyd was killed, and most will give the same answer: “It’s not fun.”

“You went from being loved to, in a heartbeat, being the most despised person in the country,” one small-town police officer told me. “The stuff that was yelled at me” in his small town “was worse than anything I had heard in 13 years.”

Officers from multiple agencies, including D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, told me their days off were canceled and their regular assignments scrapped for them to stand guard around the protests — protests against them.

During the protests, video clips poured in from around the country of excessive force by police, gratuitous use of pepper spray, and police inexplicably slashing protesters’ tires. And while protesters and journalists were endangering themselves by protesting, you could also find scenes of protesters and rioters abusing police.

As they were guarding against looting on June 3 in New York City, two officers were shot and one was stabbed in the neck. On two separate occasions, gunmen ambushed police in California, killing one officer and leaving two others wounded.

One video from Austin showed a crowd of protesters surrounding, mobbing, and physically harassing a black law enforcement officer.

The New York Police Department reported that 354 officers were injured in the line of duty during the protests. Two attorneys in New York were arrested for trying to blow up police cars with Molotov cocktails. In Chicago, a man in a Joker mask lit a police SUV on fire in broad daylight. A gang member in Queens shot into a marked police cruiser while two officers were inside.

Video shows rioters assaulting a New York police officer and then someone driving over him in an SUV. Milwaukee police say protesters threw Molotov cocktails at their officers.

A man in Las Vegas targeted and shot a police officer. Reports say the bullet went through the officer’s spine and lodged in his face. In Buffalo, a protester drove a car into a gathering of police, injuring at least two. Four officers were shot in St. Louis.

Retired police Capt. David Dorn, a black man, was killed by looters on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in St. Louis.

And the protests began with an act of war against police: violent protests in Minneapolis in which protesters burned down a police station.

Being a policeman is always dangerous, of course, as the nature of the job is taking on criminals. But these days, the insult added to the danger of injury is that so much of the governing class and the commentariat are arrayed against you.

The political class

Protesters and rioters aren’t the only ones making officers’ lives hard. Their bosses are doing it too.

Infamously, Attorney General William Barr ordered federal law enforcement to push back peaceful protesters in order to clear a path for a President Trump photo-op. It’s possible some Secret Service and Park Police officers enjoyed plowing through crowds with their plastic shields and using force against people who didn’t pose a threat, but for many, it was a pointless order they had to follow that put them and the protesters in danger.

The coronavirus lockdowns weigh in here, too. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio deployed officers to break up a Jewish funeral. Others have been sent out to take down basketball hoops. “We would get phone calls all the time,” one suburban police officer told me. “‘There’s these kids playing basketball,’ ‘There are people playing soccer.’” And the officers had to respond and spend their time breaking up pickup games instead of actually protecting the community.

At the other end are the police who feel like they’re being told not to police.

Fear of spreading the virus spurred orders to stand down. “We got the instructions to limit your exposure,” one police officer told me. “Basically, don’t be proactive and look for things. Just be reactive.”

Amid the looting and the riots in New York City, one officer told me, “We are the NYPD. We can take care of this. But we need to be allowed to take care of this.”

De Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo did not send signals that they would support the police in a police-versus-rioter conflict, officers said. “Nobody’s backing you up” politically, one said.

The media and political class largely signed on to the message that police forces are evil, reinforcing the idea that officers were lawless killers. At CNN.com, you can find a constant string of stories on police misconduct, but you won’t find a single story mentioning slain FPS officer Dave Underwood.

NBC News posted on Twitter on May 29, “A black transgender man was fatally shot Wednesday by a police officer in Tallahassee, Florida — at least the third reported officer-involved shooting in Tallahassee in two months.”

Omitted from the headline, the subheadline, the Twitter post, and the article’s lead paragraph were the details that the victim was a suspect in a stabbing and was armed with a gun.

Politicians sometimes sided with violent protesters over police. The rioters who burned down the police station in Minneapolis were vindicated a couple of days later when the City Council president and most of the council agreed to abolish the police.

This has sent shock waves throughout other departments. “Our commander has talked to us about how if a mob forms and tries to take over our station, we’re not giving it up,” one suburban officer told me.

And it’s more personal. Being demonized and turned into an enemy (“You are the threat!”) means the fear comes home. I spoke to one officer who works for a precinct that allows officers to drive home in the cruisers and park them at home overnight. He’s stopped doing that for fear that a police car parked in the driveway will mark his home and his family for violence, looting, or fire.

Then he noticed that the cruiser shows up in his driveway in Google Street View. He started speaking with his wife to plan “an escape route out of the house.”

“You come to accept the fact that every time you’re going to work, you’re putting yourself at risk,” he told me. “When your family’s safety is possibly impacted because of your work — that’s a different level that I don’t know a lot of guys are willing to risk it.”

Race

As with so much of the tumult throughout American history, race is at the heart of all of this.

Black protesters at Lafayette Square spoke to me with passion about how demoralizing and infuriating it is to be held suspect every time they walk down the street. At the very least, it leads to humiliating police stops for simply walking down the street.

Officers don’t deny this, but they say it isn’t all the fault of police. One from a wealthy, white area told me, “We have something we call ‘being black in public.’ Residents call for some black guy” who’s just walking down the street, the officer said. If the resident expresses concern that some law is being broken, the police are obligated to respond. “If there’s a call, we have to respond,” the officer said. “We gotta look like a-holes because somebody called.”

Most of the angst expressed at the protests reflected a greater fear: The fear that police pose a constant lethal threat to the lives of all black people. Thus the chants “You are the threat.” Thus the calls to abolish or defund the police.

White officers are presumed racist, and black officers are called Uncle Toms.

“Uncle Tom” was the chant one night at Lafayette Square, directed at black officers. Earlier that evening, I watched one white man berate a black FPS officer about systemic racism for about 30 minutes. The officer’s job was to stand there and take it.

Protesters screamed at black MPD officers, “Y’all don’t care about our lives. Y’all are protecting white lives.”

It’s hard on a police officer who has never even been accused of racial bias in his work to be publicly excoriated for the sins of officers he’s never met. “This happened halfway across the country,” a New York officer said of the killing of Floyd, baffled at the new vitriol from his neighbors. “That wasn’t our guy,” a D.C.-area officer said, befuddled that the indefensible actions of Chauvin and the inexplicable inaction of his partners have spurred hatred toward his force.

I couldn’t find a single officer who defended Chauvin even a little bit. “It’s inexcusable what that guy did,” a New York officer told me. Police, active and retired, expressed frustration with poor training and poor practices that lead to more escalations. Others pointed to a broken bureaucracy that promotes officers who can pass a test rather than those who are widely respected or have leadership skills.

These problems with police forces, problems which reformers are trying to address, are one more reason to have pity on law enforcement. But officers fear that real reforms are blocked by making everything about race and then thrusting a racially infused story to the national stage.

“I only know this department that I work for,” one Hispanic officer told me, saying he finds it bizarre “to hear and read that there is an undercurrent of white supremacy going through police departments throughout the country, to say that it’s a national crisis in police departments.”

The data and the narrative

The data on police and violence tells a much more complicated story than the media narrative does.

A black man is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than is a white man. The most famous police killings are of white officers shooting unarmed black men. We know that white supremacists have infiltrated police departments. And, of course, police, called on to use their discretion and personal judgment, are likely as swayed by prejudices as the average person.

But it’s way too simplistic to cast the story of police violence as a story of racist white cops. For one thing, African Americans are slightly overrepresented in police forces around the country. Scholars at Michigan State University in 2019 found “that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot,” as researcher Joseph Cesario put it. “If anything, black citizens are more likely to have been shot by black officers.”

The study also found that “violent crime rates are the driving force behind fatal shootings,” in Cesario’s words. “Our data show that the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. It is the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings.”

If the Michigan State findings are correct — other studies have found conflicting results — that suggests police bias isn’t the main reason black men are much more likely to be shot by police than white men are. The root problems are the conditions that leave African Americans living in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Why is that the case? Blame our educational system. Blame our economy. Blame the legacy of racism and Jim Crow. Blame prosecutors and judges. Centuries of inequity are behind this dynamic. It’s not honest, though, to put all the blame on the police who arrive at this scene.

‘Quit your job!’

“When I was growing up, and my dad was a police officer, I was proud of it,” one officer recounted hearing a colleague say at the precinct recently. “Will my daughter be ashamed?”

It’s a bitter irony: While politicians and activists want to defund the police, officers expect that attrition will shut them down.

“No one’s gonna want to do this, the way they’re attacking police officers,” one officer said. “That’s what we feel. … Everybody’s like, ‘We’re done. If another opportunity where we can provide for our family comes along, we’re leaving. It’s not worth it.’”

Still, sometimes people thank officers for keeping them safe. “I hear that,” one officer said. “But this environment isn’t attracting good guys to stay on or to even apply. Why would they want to risk so much just to be yelled at and spit on?”

Attrition of good men won’t improve the situation. Policing will always attract a few bullies, people who enjoy having power over others. Those types won’t be deterred by a toxic environment in which the police are seen as the enemies of the people. The result could be police departments where the bad apples are more heavily represented.

“Quit your job! Quit your job!” was a common chant at Lafayette Square. Young black protesters regularly implored black officers (sometimes pleadingly, sometimes viciously) to quit.

“What are you doing as a police officer?” one protester questioned a black Capitol Police officer June 4.

“You have officers across the country who have never even dealt with black people,” the officer explained, “so if I quit and then all the police department is white, how does that help?”

Peaceful, and even productive, exchanges occurred between protesters and police. And some protesters I spoke to made it clear that they (like many police, frankly) came to seek systemic reforms rather than to hate on law enforcement.

“For these cops, unfortunately, they are in a tough situation,” John, a young black protester near the White House, told me. “They didn’t do anything. But it’s been going on for the past 10 years — cops killing people.”

John was explaining why his idea of peaceful protest didn’t include yelling in the faces of law enforcement officers, although he understood the anger of his fellow protesters. What John wants is “if something does go down, they are held accountable. … A lot of the time, they get acquitted. It’s like they’re above the law, and people are frustrated with that.”

I asked John if he’s had any trouble with the D.C. police.

“Me, personally?” he responded. “Actually, I’ve been trying to get into the D.C. police.”

“Ever since I was 8 years old, I looked at police officers, paramedics, as the real superheroes of the world. I like helping people, honestly. I just want to get into policing to help people. I feel like, as a black man, I can make a difference.”

We spoke about the heavy-handed tactics the Park Police used the day before, including pepper spray and shoving reporters. John thought it was wrong and felt bad for the protesters, but he saved some sympathy for the police.

“They got a job to do. They probably do want to do right by people, but you don’t want to lose your job. It’s tough. It’s definitely tough.”

Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, The Big Ripoff, and Obamanomics.