Aside from the truly hardcore stupid, one thing has grown out of the failure to indict the police who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, coming atop the  killing of Tamir Rice and Akai Gurley.  People who usually exercise their mind by watching the latest episode of Real Housewives of Somewhere are starting to question whether maybe, just maybe, we have a problem with cops.

When that happens, so too does the pushback, the inevitable forces that bolster the most simplistic ideas and basic fears and prejudices that keep society in line.  There are brilliant people of all political flavors, even those you personally disagree with.  And then there are good looking people who are dumb as bricks, but adore being famous and truly believe what they say.

One such dolt is Jeanine Pirro, to whom Fox News has given a soapbox to suck up the demographic they can squeeze away from Nancy Grace.

As Raw Story explains it,

Wrapping up an episode of  Justice with Judge Jeanine, host Jeanine Pirro relayed the results of a Fox News “Instapoll” asking viewers whether police officers need to be retrained to better deal with “minorities,” before she concluded that it is the public that needs training in police/community relations.

If you find yourself wiping a tear from your eye, feeling kinda lousy about the hurtful thoughts you’ve had about cops lately, then you will appreciate how insensitive we’ve been toward police lately.

But most of you, I suspect, won’t share this brick’s view that the public needs to be retrained to respect police authority, and will find the fact that Fox News has chosen Pirro, who I hasten to note is also a real network legal analyst despite having the wrong hair color, laughable.

So when you realize that New York Times columnist David Brooks shares Pirro’s concerns, albeit using bigger words, it gets even harder to explain.

Early on, I learned that there is an amazing variety of police officers, even compared to other professions. Most cops are conscientious, and some, especially among detectives, are brilliant.

They spend much of their time in the chaotic and depressing nether-reaches of society: busting up domestic violence disputes, dealing with drunks and drug addicts, coming upon fatal car crashes, managing conflicts large and small.

Yes, it’s a hard job, being a cop. So many conscientious cop things to do, while the rest of society sits back in the safety and comfort of their mansions eating bon bons.

They ride an emotional and biochemical roller coaster. They experience moments of intense action and alertness, followed by emotional crashes marked by exhaustion, and isolation. They become hypervigilant. Surrounded by crime all day, some come to perceive that society is more threatening than it really is.

It must be terrible to be surrounded by crime all day. Some would call it society, their neighbors, reality, children, people struggling to make ends meet, life, but if Brooks wants to call it crime, who am I to question?

To cope, they emotionally armor up. Many of the cops I was around developed a cynical, dehumanizing and hard-edged sense of humor that was an attempt to insulate themselves from the pain of seeing a dead child or the extinguished life of a young girl they arrived too late to save.

Memo to Brooks: One way to avoid the pain of seeing a dead child is not to kill a child.  You see, that’s the job.  No, it’s not always fun and easy, and like many of us who stare the uglier side of life in the face, we wrap ourselves up in gallows humor and maybe even cynicism, but that’s a bug, not a feature.  We may do so, but we aren’t entitled to take refuge in our own misery as an excuse to inflict it on others.

Even though most situations are not dangerous, danger is always an out-of-the-blue possibility, often in the back of the mind.

Damn, there’s that tear again.  Nobody wants a police officer hurt or killed in the line of duty, but danger comes with the territory.  It’s not an excuse, but a job requirement. Like others here who have expressed the fact that they can’t imagine a job where they could face the business end of a criminal’s gun, Brooks mistakes his sensitivity to danger for that of the cop’s.  The message is that Brooks doesn’t have the chops to be a police officer, not that police officers should be cut slack because Brooks is a fraidy-cat.

This is a life of both boredom and stress.

Yes, it’s not like cops on cool TV shows.  And truth be told, it’s far more boredom than stress. When monitors watch police body cam video, the worst part is the hours and hours of watching grass grow and paint dry, because that’s what cops do most of the time.  Maybe they should complain to television producers about creating false expectations?

Most cops know they walk a dangerous line, between necessary and excessive force. According to a 2000 National Institute of Justice study, more than 90 percent of the police officers surveyed said that it is wrong to respond to verbal abuse with force. Nonetheless, 15 percent of the cops surveyed were aware that officers in their own department sometimes or often did so.

Apparently, not a single cop surveyed admitted that he was the mutt who abused his power or engaged in the use of excess force.  Isn’t it odd how that happens?

But at the core of profession lies the central problem of political philosophy. How does the state preserve order through coercion? When should you use overwhelming force to master lawbreaking? When is it wiser to step back and use patience and understanding to defuse a situation? How do you make this decision instantaneously, when testosterone is flowing, when fear is in the air, when someone is disrespecting you and you feel indignation rising in the gut?

Damn that tear. Perhaps Brooks feels the pain, the anger, the hurtfulness, of the cop who is being disrespected and can’t control the indignation “rising in the gut.”  So he’s not cut out for being handed a gun and shield, and told, don’t kill people because they piss you off.  He might, so he can understand how others might to.

Racist police brutality has to be punished. But respect has to be paid. Police serve by walking that hazardous line where civilization meets disorder.

Respect doesn’t have “to be paid,” any more than people need to be retrained. The “hazardous line where civilization meets disorder” can’t be easily seen lately, because it’s littered with dead bodies of people killed by cops.  If you need to feel badly about somebody’s really bad day, try them. Cops chose their job.

They get no sympathy for being expected to serve without doing harm.  If they want respect, they can earn it, just like everyone else.  And if Brooks and Pirro think cops have it hard, those on the south side of police indignation haven’t been having too easy a time of it either.