CULTURE OF SWINE: WHY COPS REALLY ARE PIGS

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

Christmas Eve, 1988

One of my favorite rituals during my college days was getting the hell out of my parents’ house whenever I was home for the holidays. I spent many Christmas Eves driving around my old suburban environment with good friends, talking, bonding, and smoking cigarettes.

One particular Christmas Eve, instead of driving around, I ended up hanging out with my pals in my parents’ backyard (which was open to the streets behind and to the side of the house with a heavily forested vacant lot to the back and public easement to the other side) at, say, 11:30 or so. We were not doing drugs, drinking, worshipping Satan, joining the Communist Party, or supporting Michael Dukakis.

But that didn’t matter to the pissed off cop. We were just standing there in my parents’ backyard talking about music or movies or something: the cop had an immediate suspicious attitude and demanded to see all our driver’s licenses. All of our “yes, sir” and “no, sir” appeasements did nothing for his Christmas disposition.

“Where do you live?” he commanded more than he asked.

“There,” I said as I pointed to my parents’ house less than thirty yards away.

“Do your parents know where you are?”

“Yes, sir. They know I’m in the backyard,” I said while mentally noting the sense of surrealism that almost always accompanies my conversations with cops.

After detaining (or was it harassing?) us for another ten minutes or so, the grumpy cop was on his way. I had the good feeling of knowing that our county constabulary was on the job, protecting us all from dangerous societal elements, a sort of strong, kindly big brother figure looking out for our well being.

Not.

Two Or Three Springtimes Ago

I am a high school theater teacher in a large, working class petrochemical town near Houston. Teachers are pillars of the community, very respectable generally. Right? Right?

Not to cops it seems.

A chair, a somewhat valuable property of the theater department, had turned up missing after an inventory. The gossip was that a former student who had graduated a couple of years earlier had snagged it. The chairman of the department had been putting up with student theft for years and decided that enough was enough. She called the police.

I actually believed that the girl who was the suspected thief either didn’t have the chair or believed that she had permission to take it, a misunderstanding. But whatever. There had been many props, costumes, and set pieces stolen over the years. So I didn’t complain about involving the cops.

Bad move on my part.

Even though I knew absolutely nothing about the missing chair, a local plain-clothes detective sent a message asking me to meet him in the front office that day after school. Being the good citizen and role model that I now pretend to be, I went straight there when the final bell rang. Then, I waited. After ten minutes, I figured that he must have ended up in another office by mistake, so I went hunting for him. No such luck. I asked around and nobody had seen him. I kept waiting. After thirty minutes, I thought to myself that I was waiting for a guy who I had never spoken to and may never show up. I went home.

The next morning, Sergeant Stedanko, as I now think of him (remember the Stacey Keach character in Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke”?), and a uniformed cop came to my classroom during first period and ordered me to step into the hallway. So I left twenty-five students hanging during the middle of a lecture to go play my part in the mystery of the missing chair. I was annoyed, but then my interactions with the armed security agents of the state are always annoying.

Things got worse.

“Now, why weren’t you in the front office waiting for me after school yesterday?” Stedanko angrily asked.

Twilight Zone time. “Um, I waited for you for thirty minutes…” I said.

“No, you didn’t. I was there,” Stedanko retorted.

“Well, I was there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

I shrugged. Stedanko continued, “Now, I want you to tell me why an innocent girl’s reputation needs to be destroyed.”

“Uh…Well, I don’t really think that’s a good idea, actually.”

“So why are you accusing this sweet girl of stealing that chair?”

“Well, I’m not accusing her of anything, to tell the truth…”

“Then what do you think should be done?” he asked and glared.

I chose my words carefully, “I guess…if she’s guilty, she needs to be punished and if she’s innocent, her name needs to be cleared.”

Sergeant Stedanko just stared at me and then turned around and walked away. No “thank you.” No good byes. Just a foul taste of cop in my mouth.

So much for being a pillar of the community.

(As it turned out, the whole thing was, in fact, a big misunderstanding that I had absolutely nothing to do with. But I guess cops need no justification to harass.)

Last July, 7 a.m.

My wife and I were sound asleep. We were going to get up around eleven or so and drive to New Orleans for a few days of merry making and revelry in the French Quarter. Then, bam, bam, bam! Bam, bam, bam! “Ugh, I think somebody’s at the door,” I sleepily said. My wife got up to see what all of the ruckus was about.

“Hey, don’t you need a warrant?” I heard her yell.

I got up and was standing next to the bed in my underwear when three sheriff’s deputies, weapons in hand, entered our bedroom. “Keep you hands where we can see them!” one of them shouted.

“…Uh, okay,” I said. I hadn’t heard that hands phrase directed at me for over ten years.

The cops searched our apartment, apparently for some fugitive, and left without explanation. Becky and I were, needless to say, shaken. She said, “Ron, look out the window.” Twenty cop cars were in the parking lot. Numerous deputies ran to and fro. A helicopter circled overhead.

“This is big,” I thought, “it’s gotta be on TV.” Sure enough, we turned on the set and saw a local reporter at the entrance to our apartments. It turned out that a deputy had been shot in the leg while trying to apprehend a car thief on the property. The cops told the reporter that they believed that the suspect was holed up in one of the apartments and that they were “canvassing” all residences. I guess that “canvassing” now means “wantonly violating the Fourth Amendment.”

It is important to note that my apartment complex is about 90% African-American and Hispanic. I don’t think this would have happened at a white complex.

As it turned out, the thief was caught elsewhere, blocks away. The wounded deputy was hit by friendly fire, an accidentally discharged cop gun. The police were not in “hot pursuit;” the incident had happened seven hours earlier. In short, the illegal door-to-door search was an absolute outrage, a total abuse of police power.

My older brother, an archconservative, pro-cop business lawyer urged us to sue. He was pretty pissed about it. We didn’t sue; he wouldn’t represent us…

Last Week

Tennessee cops gunned down a tail-wagging family dog on the side of the road while the kneeling, handcuffed mother, father, and son watched, shrieked, and cried. Read about it here. This story really kicked me in the gut. It was as though Hitler’s brownshirts invaded a Norman Rockwell painting and started busting heads.

In fact, it’s hard not to cry as I write this.

I now realize that when I read about police brutality toward humans (that is, as opposed to dogs) I get angrier in my head than I do in my heart. I suppose the image of uniformed men with guns blowing away a family pet while the helpless family freaks out is, at the very least, difficult to digest. But what about the countless individuals, human beings, most of them ethnic minorities, that have been brutalized, harassed, and beaten by the police? Things are much, much worse than the sadistic killing of a dog might suggest. I ought to be angrier in my heart.

Increasingly, I am.

American police culture is out of control. (I say “culture” because I believe that there are lots of well-meaning, good individuals that are cops. But many of those “good cops” end up doing bad things or remaining silent when they witness acts of corruption and brutality performed by their less well-meaning cop brothers.) Newspapers report HUNDREDS of instances of police misconduct every year but miss the big story: THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF KNOWN INSTANCES OF POLICE MISCONDUCT EVERY YEAR! How many Richard Jewells and David Koreshes must it take? How many murdered dogs? When will mainstream (that is, white) America wake up and realize that it is no longer such a gross, radical exaggeration to say that we’re not too far from Nazi Germany? (That is to say, Arayans equal whites; Jews equal non-whites...hey, there really is a comparison there!) The only thing out of the ordinary about the killing of the Smoak family dog is that the Smoaks are white. People of color know the score but lack enough clout and power to address the injustices. Whites, for the most part, live in ignorant bliss—when a white American gets screwed by the cops it is viewed as an “isolated incident” that is not representative of the overall situation.

Of course, that’s a lie. Authoritarianism and violence are simply a big part of what cops are. I hate cops. Because, you see, cops really are pigs.

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(Well, most cops, anyway. In all fairness, I ought to be willing to change my point of view on a case by case basis or the like, but I really think that each individual cop I meet would need to prove to me that he can be trusted first. That's only common sense given the circumstances.)

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