Most of us remember our first kiss. Not because it’s better, or even materially different, than our second or twenty-second kiss, but because it’s our first. Nobody remembers their twenty-second, however. It fades into an amorphous mass.
Radley Balko at The Agitator has done yeoman’s work at noting and cataloging abuse by police, whether against those with the audacity to record police, raid the wrong house, shoot a guy named Jose Colon in the process, Taser death or kill a puppy because, well, they can. The “joke” about it, though it’s hardly a funny sort of joke, is that the response to each glaring mistake by police is that it’s an “isolated incident.”
I similarly take note of these incidents from time to time, having done so more frequently in the past than I have lately. Lately, these “isolated incidents” haven’t made it to the front page of SJ. It’s not because they aren’t worthy, or important, but that it plays into one of my greatest fears about police misconduct and abuse. My fear is that it happens with such regularity that we quickly become inured to it.
Too many brutal videos of police needlessly beating people and lying about it turn an outrage into the new normal. The impact of seeing in living color, maybe even hi-def, police officers beat a human being whose “crime” is not jumping as high or as quickly as some pimple-faced cop demands can have a huge impact on those who have muddled through life believing that such things could never happen. Like judges.
The hope is that by posting about such things, providing the opportunity for people to see the very things that they have spent a career denying to themselves ever happen, will be a first kiss opportunity for those in the system who need to know what we know. The fear is that the impact will fade when it’s the twenty-second isolated incident, and they can go back to hiding from the ugliness to go about their business as they always have.
There isn’t much to write about another search warrant executed on the wrong house, burned to the ground by the flash bang grenade. It goes from an outrage of carelessness, meant in the sense that the police simply don’t care enough about the potential for destroying the lives of innocents to get it right, to just another sad, unfortunate incident. Sure, it’s bad. It’s terrible. But it happens, apparently all the time. Just another collateral casualty in the same old war that’s been waged forever and ever. Ho hum.
I admire Balko for his dedication to the cause of keeping these isolated incidents front and center. He’s right to do so, and not let the harm done in the name of Order escape unnoticed. Yet it plays into my greatest fears, that it immediately gets filed away as another isolated incident. It’s impact is lost, and it dissipated the impact of the stories of harm and wrong that came before it. It becomes part of the great amorphous mass of police misconduct.
Balko remembers the names of those he writes about, and even as the New York Times reported yesterday that a New York City cop shot an old man named Jose Colon, apparently because there was no puppy available, his mind flashed back to another Jose Colon.
Strangely, when someone first sent me this story last night, I actually thought it was an old story. I vaguely remembered writing about another New York raid involving someone by the name of “Jose Colon”. Sure enough. In 2002, a graphic arts student named Jose Colon was accidentally shot and killed during a drug raid in the Long Island town of Bellport. According to police, that Colon was killed when an officer tripped over a tree root as the raid team approached the house. Police say he then fell into the officer in front of him, causing that officer’s gun to fire three times, striking Colon in the head as he emerged from the targeted house. Colon was not a suspect, and had no criminal record. The police found eight ounces of marijuana in the house.
It’s bad enough that the incidents begin to blur, but when the names get repeated such that one can’t distinguish today’s isolated incidents from those happening years ago, we can appreciate just how pervasive incompetents with guns and shields have become.
How do we get back the feeling of that first kiss? How do we note these “isolated incidents” without their becoming stale and tiresome, a repetitive bore. Each human being whose life is beaten out of him is worthy of our attention, our concern, but we’re subject to human nature and people tire of hearing the same story over and over. How do we return to the sense of outrage that this happens, and continues to happen, in our midst and yet the people with the power to stop it don’t give a damn?
At the pace we’re going, it won’t be long before nothing on the internet, no story, no video, will shock us and move us to be outraged. Then what’s left?
Update: Jeff Gamso’s post today includes these words, which are particularly apropos here:
Too many and they blur. Stalin knew.
A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.So it’s important to focus. On the single death.
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I think the awareness problem takes care of itself. More and more, people are seeing isolated incidents strike close to home. I think it’s always been happening; it’s just getting more and more visible.
So: we just keep at it, and remember who our forebears (genetic or spiritual; Eleazar ben Mattithyahu or Toms Paine or Jefferson) were. Not a perfect soul, or a wimp, among them.
IMHO, speaking for myself and everybody who agrees with me (if anybody), and all.
“More and more visible” is both the feature and the flaw. Remember that people’s concerns tend to be limited to the things that touch their lives. Until it touches you, it’s academic.
The candidate who trounced DA Mark Hurlbert of hit and run fame in Colorado in the State Senate race knew nothing about the non-isolated nature of these incidents until hearing story after story from “normal” people in the jurisdiction about the abuses. That hit home with him.
It didn’t hit home with me until I became a criminal defense lawyer. Now, if we are still permitted by our masters to record cops this concentrations of repeated experiences can hit home with civilians too. I can see how the populace of Denver has changed after incident after incident is documented.
With Reps supporting “law and order” and dems supporting union thugs, the solution is a tough one. But I can’t help but feel that the education of the public that these are common and not isolated incidents is a force for change – not mere numbing.
I do agree with you that criminal justice matters are by their very shaming nature things most people think will never happen to them. And I think that’s because people in fact do know people close to them to whom the misconduct has happened, but who don’t wish to share that info. But I think the more obviously innocent folks are shown exposed to this the more everyone else can relate.
I’ll take the chances of daily exposure and the internet search engines filled with so many incidents you can’t look them up without specific towns, dates, and names over isolation any day. It’s not numbing at all to lots of people – it’s eye opening.
I’m sorry, but I’m a bit confused and concerned.
If you writing about a single case a day or Radley’s reporting on maybe a couple reports a day are more risky than beneficial, then what I do by reporting on dozens each day must be a really bad thing to do.
Should I change my approach, maybe not make the reports I use to gather statistics on police misconduct public so it doesn’t inundate people?
Or, maybe it’s just wrong to even try to measure police misconduct?
To the contrary, what you do is quite different, and extremely useful on its own. If this was just about telling individual stories, then I might have included Injustice Everywhere, but you serve a greater function that will ultimately prove invaluable.
I admire what you’re trying to say, or save, and I admire your literary presence. But you’re wrong.
What you’re pining for in different words is a return to the Golden Age of our youth, of a (privileged) America when everything was shiny and hopeful and booming; when infrastructure was fresh; when Ward Cleaver was Dad, stern when he needed to be, and June his perfect complement; and when Andy Taylor was Sheriff: our role models.
Well, we can’t go back. That’s not Radley Balko’s fault.
Moreover, that pristine America of the Camelot years was a mirage wordlessly kept (by a pair of figurative brass knuckles) from the underclasses. But even without reality TV or camcorders or a mouthpiece to speak with, the trampled-upon existed then, as now.
Then they were unseen. Is it better to be unseen? I suppose it depends who the cool cats are and who the mice. But I will be bold and say out loud that, in general, no, it’s not better to be unseen.
There was police brutality then – as there always has been. It was not spoken of in polite circles. There is an analogy to be made to all the other taboo things, be they child molestation or female circumcision or any of the others about which No One Ever Spoke. Before. Indeed, returning to police brutality, it was not even considered illegal in the US under state law until the pre-civil-rights cases of the post-War 1940s.
I, too, have become a social-media activist with a vengeance on this issue in the last half-year. Even after I was galvanized to do so and believed myself to have become well informed, I found myself shocked at the sheer number of incidence. Yes, it’s a big world and a big country. And I expected lots. But there’s ten times “lots,” or fifty. It’s not a series of isolated incidents! My friend, no: it’s a systemic disease that has not yet been — Balko and others who speak out aside — properly addressed.
All these incidents. I have never met Mr. Balko (though I’ve been reading), but I believe it’s fair to say he’s not become inured to them by dint of reporting on them. And neither have I.
Far be it for me to put an argument in your mouth that you may not have intended… but it really does seem like you’re suggesting that listing all the acts of police misconduct that occur each day only serves to dull the public’s outrage about police misconduct and that measuring the issue of police misconduct via statistical analysis does nothing more than reduce all the pain and suffering caused by it into a meaningless number.
I hope you understand my confusion in seeing the argument your posing here as nothing more or less than an indictment against the work I’ve sacrificed for over the last two years. I’m happy you say it’s not, but the argument itself has valid points that, even if not intended that way, are still valid and give me pause about whether what I’ve been doing might do more harm than good in the long run.
Despite the intent of the argument, it still makes me question what I’m doing.
Let me put it another way: We need both tragedy and statistics. You’re doing an excellent job amassing the stats. I fear we aren’t doing nearly as well at conveying the tragedy.
Sadly, you’ve completely missed the point of the post. Completely.
And why, aside from your wearing a tin foil hat, do you think it’s all about you?
Whew. I thought it might be me when I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about or what Andy Grifith had to do with anything. You do attract some long-winded nuts.
It’s a gift.
desensitization. Geez, even I got the point of this post.
You see how often I have to deal with this? It’s nothing personal.
The comment was merely an attempt to poke fun at myself.
I’ve developed a thick skin.
That’s part of your charm. 😉