As I suspected, the cop posts would not end with a trilogy.  Bob Herbert of the Times brings us more details, following up on his column of last Sunday.  Most striking about this column is how mundane these interactions between police and minority youths can be.  He describes it as knee-jerk, the assumption that all black and Hispanic kids are presumed criminals, and treated as such without a second thought.

The description that gets me is when a cop questions a high school student who is trying to get into the subway, and asks her what the square root of 12 is.  When she can’t answer (as if the cop could), he proceeds to ridicule her as stupid.  Gratuitous denigration.  Why?  Why would anyone take pleasure from gratuitously ridiculing another person, no less a kid.  What sort of sadism drives the need to hurt others?

Herbert suggests that this problem could be swiftly resolved if only politicians had the guts to acknowledge it, confront it and demand that it end.  I believe that he is naive.  While directives from on high may impact the wanton discharge of weapons, a happenstance that all cops know will draw unwanted attention, it will not affect “death by a thousand knives.”  These are the daily indignities visited on minority kids in the ordinary course of the day.  Even Herbert can’t chronicle every one of these, and they will fade from our reality second after inflicted, though not from the memory of this children.

This is cop culture.  Cop culture is terribly misunderstood, even by many of us who function in the realm of criminal law.  There is an “us against them” mentality that is so deeply embedded in the cop mindset that it is not susceptible to political oversight.  It serves to create a bond between cops that is necessary for their safety, on the one hand, but isolates them from the people they are supposed to serve. 

Ironically, this does not mean that cops are inherently good or bad because of this cultural wall.  The same cop who abused this teenager might well be the cop who saves her from a burning building, putting his own life at risk.  Cops like to be heroes, and that’s a good thing.  So how do we square this good cop/bad cop thing?  While there is a tendency to see the problem as black and white (no pun intended), it is hardly the case and distract us from finding a real solution.

Until cops as a reference group stop seeing the non-cop world as being made up of skels and mutts, and start thinking of every person as being a real, living human being, nothing will change.  How can we inject this idealism into our police?  How can we drive this cynicism out of our police?  I don’t know.