Cop pepper-spraying protesters is symbol for arrogant police culture

By David McElroy · November 21, 2011

You’ve probably seen this picture or seen video of the same scene. Campus police at the University of California at Davis blasted pepper spray at peaceful student protesters Friday. Many people are outraged. Many are calling for the firing of the officers. I’d like to step back and take a broader perspective with three points.

First, this incident proves again that photography matters. In many places, police arrest people for taking pictures of them doing their jobs. In some places, it’s even specifically against the law. The attempts of police, politicians and prosecutors in some places to stop photography of them are wrong, whether it’s through arrests or intimidation.

If the pictures and video from the UC-Davis incident didn’t exist, this would be a non-story. We wouldn’t be talking about the issue. It would be almost as though it didn’t happen. This is why it’s important to strongly press the case that photography is not a crime. (You’ll find plenty of stories at that site of police and other public officials attempting to stop photography that they don’t like.)

Second, these sorts of incidents — and far worse — go on almost every day, but we don’t know about them because there is such a strong “support the police” culture in this country. The people who are experiencing oppression, threats and intimidation from police are mostly those who are powerless to do anything about it. They tend to be poor, black, brown or undereducated. They tend to be people who either don’t know their rights or know they won’t be believed if they complain.

In this case, a bunch of middle-class white college kids were targeted — with plenty of evidence. If we wouldn’t be talking about this incident without photos and video, imagine how much worse it would be if you were a poor urban black male and it’s your word against a police officer’s. You wouldn’t stand a chance and you’d know that. Is it any wonder so many of them are scared of police?

Third, this isn’t a problem of “a few bad eggs.” This is the modern police culture. This is the way they’re trained. There have always been some people attracted to law enforcement because they have the kind of attitude that lends itself to believing, “I have a gun and a badge, so you will obey me,” but the culture makes it very clear that a large proportion of police believe they’re above the law — and that they should be allowed to do pretty much anything they believe is right. Many of them believe that people’s rights are irrelevant, and they’re willing to lie to make it appear they’re following the law. These people are just as evil as the criminals they supposedly oppose.

Since the incident Friday, many are calling for the firing of police Lt. John Pike, the officer in the photo above. You can sign a petition here or see a Facebook group about it here. And the university has suspended a couple of the officers while the case is being investigated, although police were still defending what they did.

I certainly don’t have a problem with firing the officers who did it, because it can at least send a message to the others on the job. Maybe. If it’s like most such incidents, the officers would be rehired by other departments immediately. The police culture protects its own — because they don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong.

And that’s the key. Firing a few officers here or there isn’t going to change things. It’s a systemic problem. Police have to learn that they’re not above the law. They have to learn that they’re going to be consistently punished if they lie or abuse people’s rights. They have to know that complaints against them are going to be taken seriously, not ignored by people more concerned with the appearance of “procedure” than with justice.

The police culture has to change. I don’t know how to do that, because I think the lousy attitudes ultimately come from the public. The vast majority of the public seems to vaguely believe that police should be supported in almost all situations. Especially in you’re in a Republican district, the safest thing you can say is that you support police and want to spend even more money on law enforcement — for higher salaries and new toys for them to “play” with.

I’m not in a lot of danger from police, because I’m a white middle-class guy, but even I get nervous with them these days. A friend of mine made the same point to me over the weekend. Until most people demand accountability and courtesy from some of the thugs who we’re giving guns and badges to, this behavior isn’t going to stop. It won’t affect those of us in our nice, safe, comfortable suburbs, but don’t be surprised when crime gets even worse as more people in minority communities turn against police.

I’m glad to see the outrage against what these thugs did Friday to some white middle-class students. I’d just like to see the same level of outrage when the victims are poor blacks or Hispanics.

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Do antidepressants work? It depends on who you ask and what standards you use. But a new Danish study concludes we just don’t know. There’s no question antidepressants make chemical changes in the brain, but the truth is that doctors don’t know enough about those brain processes to do anything more than try certain drugs and see what they do. The Danish study says that if antidepressants do help, the effects are tiny. I know plenty of people who swear they couldn’t live without their antidepressants, but the more I study about the root causes of depression, the more I suspect the placebo effect is what’s going on. Although some studies suggest these drugs have slight positive effects for some people, others argue that the positive effects are tiny — and that they cause more deaths than can be explained. There’s nothing wrong with using any drug that helps with something wrong with us — especially short term — but I’m coming to suspect that whatever good SSRIs and similar drugs do comes from masking our underlying issues, not fixing them. Denial is popular with humans, so it will be no surprise if this eventually turns out to be true.

Your brain has almost certainly tricked you into making bad romantic choices. A California psychology professor writes in Psychology Today that there are four things our brains do that cause trouble: 1) We think we know what we want — but we don’t. I’ve seen this in myself and if you haven’t seen it yet, you will. The things I wanted in a mate when I was young are completely different from what the mature version of myself wants. 2) We like more choices — as many as possible. We tend to believe that more choices lead to a better selection in all sorts of areas, but the truth is that too many choices tend to lead to the paralysis of failure to choose. 3) We try to be rational by “keeping our options open.” We’re scared to make the choices we need to make, because we’re scared of doing the wrong thing. This keeps us trapped in bad situations — and better choices eventually disappear. 4) We stay with the wrong people, because we don’t want our effort to go to waste. I’ve done this. Maybe you have, too. On several occasions, I’ve stayed in a relationship that I knew was dead and needed to end. At this point in my life, I know to trust my gut. It’s a lot smarter about most things than my conscious brain.

I just noticed that I’m approaching 3,000 subscribers for this site again. Although I’ve had plenty of individual days with far higher readership, the core of any site is those readers who are interested enough to subscribe and keep coming back. In the days when I wrote about politics, I hit 3,000 subscribers at my peak, but once I shifted focus, those subscribers started dropping like flies. These days, the readership numbers are still lower than they were when I wrote about politics, but I think it’s a better quality reader — people who are interested in something more important to long-term happiness than politics will ever be. I don’t know if I’ll hit 30,000 readers in one day anytime soon — as I did one day years ago when Rush Limbaugh and several conservative commentators linked to me — but I appreciate those of you who keep coming back again and again. I can’t thank you individually — and I don’t even know who you are — but I want you to know that I really appreciate you.

Few things threaten the future of the human race as much as the decline of the widespread ability to read words and evaluate them rationally. This has become a culture dominated by images and emotions, which scares me because our freedom and our wealth were built on ideas and rational thinking. Not so long ago, it was considered vital for every person to be able to read coherent arguments and respond to them with intelligence and reason. Today, emotions trump reason and images trump words. When Neil Postman published “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985, he made the argument that the age of television was slowly destroying Americans’ ability to reason. Postman is long dead, but it turns out that he and other academics such as Marshall McLuhan saw where things were going far before words started falling out of favor. I beg you to read Postman’s short and clear book, but if you won’t invest that much time, at least consider this article about news today. In “Could I have some news with my emotions, please?” a former NBC News executive bemoans the sad state of “emotion over information” in television news. I believe “television news” is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave that for another time.

UPDATE: For about 18 hours, I thought I had made a serious mistake at work last month that had sent a couple thousand dollars to the wrong party. When a problem was discovered last night, the data available to us in our accounting system made it seem certain that I had made that error. I felt sick. I was humiliated. Even though I’ve handled hundreds of real estate transactions for my company — millions of dollars — without ever making an error, I felt shame that I had made this one mistake. But it turns out that an anomaly in our accounting software was hiding the truth. Once I got to the office Thursday and reviewed the paperwork from the transaction, I discovered that I had done everything correctly. It’s great that I didn’t make the mistake, but it would be even better if I could learn not to have such horrible physical reactions of shame and fear just because someone else believes I’ve made an error. The fear of being flawed is very powerful for me. Old programming from childhood is hard to change.

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