I Spent Two Years Learning How Flawed Our Justice System Is. I'll Still Never Believe Defund The Police Is The Answer

 

 

Last January I delved into a personal situation in my life that had parallels to real-life events. I knew going forward that there were far more of them that had to do with the world today and that I could speak from a perspective that many people couldn’t. For that reason and in part because it may have therapeutic value to myself, I will deal with these events.

In July of 2021, not long after moving into my apartment I became the target of harassment by the neighbor who lived directly above me. This person, who I will refer to X, was in their seventies and from the moment I first met him it was clear that he was suffering from some kind of major psychological illness.

For nearly a year he engaged in a campaign of harassment that ranged from verbal abuse to posting threatening notes to eventually hammering on my door or ringing my doorbell multiple times a day. Part of his pattern was to regularly call 911 and made anonymous noise complaints claiming on what were anonymous charges from loud noise to the stealing of random items. It was clear by this point he was slipping into dementia and that made his delusions worse; at one point I learned that X believed that I was climbing up the wall of the building and entering his apartment through his window to steal his pills.

The local precinct was across the street from me and I became more acquainted with patrol officers then I ever wanted to. I expressed in an article I wrote about swatting how traumatizing this part was to me emotionally simply because that no one wants to see the cops on their front door under any circumstances. I should mention now that they were more patient not only with me but X.

I would eventually learn that for every visit the police made they received at least three times as many phone calls. By this point X had been engaging in this pattern of behavior for years and the entire precinct was aware of the man’s condition. He had been hospitalized on multiple occasions but for whatever reason he continued to live in the apartment with no action taken from any agency even though he had been engaging in this pattern of behavior not only to me or tenants in the building, but throughout the entire neighborhood.

X seemed to spend every waking hour he wasn’t harassing people either calling the cops or when he lost his cell phone (which happened frequently) walking into the precinct and demand that I be arrested. This pattern of behavior continued for more than a year until in the summer of 2022, he tried to strangle in me in front of the entire floor. 

That led to X being arrested and a restraining order was filed. X paid no more attention to this than anything else that happened; he violated it no less than eight times before he was finally judged incompetent by a court and was moved to a long term care facility.

Now I am an empathetic person and try to have sympathy for all people, but by July of 2022 I had completely run out of it for X. By now I realized that it was his mental condition responsible for his actions and that this was not personal but at that time I was so worn down by the process I was incapable of caring. During this period I indulged in some truly dark thoughts but because I am not a violent person I wanted a proxy to carry it out.

By this point, of course, we had all been deluged with the horror stories of Americans across the country being killed or assaulted by the police or dying in custody. X was a disturbed individual who needed no provocation to start shouting or become agitated. Every time the police came to the door, he was frequently shout at them, sometimes deny them access to his apartment and on one occasion they started to plan a way to force entry into it.

Here is my confession: on at least one occasion, I hoped something horrible would happen to him. That they would mistake his aggression and shoot him. That they would beat him severely and he would die of his injuries. There is a part of me that at that point genuinely believed this situation would only end with him dead and gone and another part that really thought X had been lucky to escape that fate so far. I just wanted this cycle that seemed endless to finally be over.

That was at my darkest. Eventually I realized how truly mentally unstable X was and that none of this was personal. Things finally managed to get better and even before he was removed, I began to feel empathy and sympathy not just for him but for everybody involved. And that, I need to say, includes the police.

During the years immediately leading up to my experience, the nation had been undergoing a reckoning about our system of law enforcement, mostly when it comes to violence against minorities with almost no oversight or consequences. That reckoning seemed to enter every aspect of our lives including the police procedurals that make up our television shows. I myself have written countless articles on this blog, both before and after my experience defending some shows portrayals of cops (Homicide) and pointing out the true flaws in others (The Closer).

I have always been aware, even before the events of the last decade, how horrible the reputation of law enforcement has been. Even without the racial impetus, it has always been at best deeply flawed. There has been corruption among the police force almost since it came to existence, with cops being bought and paid for by gangsters and drug dealers. The LAPD alone has one of the most deservedly horrible reputations in the world and they are just the most preeminent examples of it. And I don’t need to be convinced that many of the cops who aren’t corrupt can often be lazy or indifferent; my recent viewing of Dahmer would have convinced all but the most adamant pro-law enforcement officials how indifferent cops can be to human life and how little consequences there are for that indifference.

I know how messed up our justice system is: my parents are both attorneys and I know more about how the system works than most non-professionals. And I’ll confess there were multiple occasions during the long, hard experience that I repeatedly was frustrated with how badly things were going involving everything with X. It was so clear cut to everybody – including the cops – that I could not and still can’t comprehend why it hadn’t been resolved well before I moved in. I kept thinking over and over the system had failed me – and it had. It had also failed X.

But even at the darkest moments of this period while I was frustrated with the police I never resented them. In time, I actually felt more sympathy for them. My family and friends would often engage in graveyard humor about how quiet the life of the precinct would be if X wasn’t in the building any more. I made jokes that every time they got a noise complaint, the officer ducked under their desks. “Can’t I investigate this cannibalistic serial killer instead?” I joked they say. “Pretty please?”

Because it has to have been as maddening for them, as well as me, to deal with this situation. Day after day you are called out to the same address, knowing the complaint is false but knowing you have to go through the motions anyway. You admonish an individual who is clearly disturbed, tell him that he needs to stop doing this, knowing that the next day at the latest you will have to deal with him again. And frequently when the situation gets worse, you receive the increasingly agitated complaints of the target of this harassment who justifiably can not comprehend why this state of affairs continues. Over and over you explain the limitations of your job, and not only do you not get patience you are the target of the frustration.

On the failed cop show The Unusuals a character played by Jeremy Renner told a rookie: “Police are garbagemen.” And that’s what they are in a sense. Far too often they have to deal with the refuse of today’s society, those left behind by the system themselves, those who engage in violence, those who deal with horrible situations. Some of them will see more dead bodies in a day than most of us will in our lifetime and they will see them before the undertaker does. They have to deal with the violence and bloodiness of our society. They have to work longer hours than teachers and many blue collar workers – and to be clear, deal with far worse conditions – and don’t truly get paid much more. Whenever you see a cop, it is never because anything good has happened, certainly not to you. They have to deal with the fact that their uniform or their badge has put a target on their back and that it might get them assaulted or even killed. Every single day, they know this and they put in on anyway

And what is their reward? At best, we regard them with indifference. At worst, we scream at them, shout at them for being unemotional when this is their job, yell at them for being ineffective at it or not doing enough, and most of the time, just hating them for existing. And that was before the last ten years. Now for too many Americans, the day you put on a police uniform, it’s the equivalent of wearing a swastika or a Klan tattoo, even if you’re a minority yourself. In their eyes cops spend their shifts beating up protesters, shooting minorities – or really anyone – on a whim and not solving any actual crimes.

This brings me to the catchphrase that has been circulating for the last few years: “Defund the police.” You have to love the wording. Whoever thought of it knew that if they said something like dissolve the police or destroy the police, you would be regarded as an anarchist. So they came up with ‘defund the police’. We don’t want to get rid of law enforcement, we just don’t want any money to go to it anymore. This comes, for the record, almost entirely from the same group of people who said it was absurd whenever 45 said they would make Mexico pay for the wall.

Let’s engage in this magical thinking for a moment. Say we decide to just not spend any money on police any more. I don’t know that works exactly: do you just not give police departments any money, do you stop paying cops or do you just let every bit of the justice system be regulated under the federal government?  Because it’s not like the FBI has the best record when it comes to law enforcement either. The building is named for J. Edgar Hoover, and we all know what a fine human being he was. Never mind.

Okay the police don’t exist anymore.  I guess all of these liberals who believe in job creation think its fine that millions of Americans are out of work, but I guess since there all white supremacists in their hearts anyway, who cares? I mean its not like having a lot of angry unemployed white people who have firearms training can ever lead to things going bad, right?

Here's the real issue. Once you stop paying the police, and the police magical disappear to the ether…does crime disappear? Let’s skip all of the talk about drugs and mandatory minimums because that’s another conversation (and one I’m willing to have) what about the actual crimes? You know all of the sexual assaults and rapes that have been happening? Who are the victims that you believe going to report them? All of the robberies and thefts that happen across the country? Who do you report your stolen property too? All of the assaults and murders that happen across the country, who investigates them? Who stops them? Are you going to that?

And since we’re on the subject that other problem you on the left love to make so big a deal of; all of the mass shootings. I grant you the police have been doing a horrible job stopping them from happening but with them all gone, how do you expect to stop them at all?

That’s the thing I never bought about ‘defund the police’. It argues that the police are the bigger problem then the people they arrest.  Does one think that if you stop police all of the people who commit crimes – and no matter how inflated you believe the figures are, you know it’s not zero – will somehow become saints? I grant you everything in our justice system is messed up, but what’s your answer going to be if you call 911 – and the only thing they can do is bandage your wounds and take away the bodies?

At the climax of one episode of Law and Order, a judge told Sam Waterson: “In my thirty years on the bench, I’ve seen every permutation of violence…But if we don’t heal what ails the human heart, we won’t make a dent in the body count.” And that’s as accurate today as it was nearly a quarter of a century ago. Our country – the world in fact – has to face that there in some of us, maybe more than we want to admit, there is a part of our nature that gives into its most unpleasant sides. Sometimes it may be as relatively banal as harassing your neighbor to their breaking point, sometimes it leads to serial killing. But you can’t point to a single aspect of our society and says: if we got rid of this, magically all our problems would get better. This is a flaw that every part of our political spectrum, every part of our identity politics genuinely seems to believe, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

My vision of the policeman, then and after my experience, has never been that of saint or sinner, but rather the cops that made up the force on Hill Street Blues or the murder police on Homicide; beleaguered civil servants who have to deal with the worst part of our society every day and on a daily basis questioning why they took the job in the first place. They get tired, they get upset, they get frustrated but they just keep going forward like the rest of us.

I have taken a fair amount of contempt every time I take the radical position that someone who a certain part of society hates – whether they are a Republican, a celebrity with unpopular views, a cable news network -  has the right to exist in our society. I suspect that by suggesting that policemen are human beings I will be a target of a certain amount of vituperation as well. No doubt I will be labeled a racist or MAGA extremist by some for taking this point of view; I’ve taken it for far less ‘inflammatory’ positions.

All I am doing is arguing for the middle ground; that there has to be a position between ‘defund the police’ and ‘cops should do anything they want with no interference’. There would seem far more wiggle room for that then most positions, but in a day when compromise is a dirty word for everybody, I suspect it will not come out that way. All I will ask right now is whether any of you people who argue that defunding the police is the only answer: would you do a cops job? Because if you want that, we’ll all have to. We’ll all have to deal with the refuse of our society, the violence that has been permeating, the death, even the random individual who yells at you and says you’re playing loud music even though you haven’t been in your apartment all night. Let me know if that’s the world you want to live in before you make that argument. Because I caught a glimpse of it and its not a place you want to live in.