Cops are Nazis. Well, they could be.
May. 12th, 2003 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khaosworksMay 10, 2003
Shock Therapy for Police Recruits
By BRUCE WEBER
I remember studying police systems during my final year in law school when I did Criminology - it's a horrible, thankless job. You are supposed to keep order among people who essentially resent your presence when you impose that order on them, so they hurl abuse at you. And at the same time, they demand that when they're the ones who are victims, you have to act in their interests to impose order. And if you don't do it quickly enough, or hard enough, they hurl abuse at you for not doing your job. At the same time, you are placed under severe scrutiny - there's never a moment when you're really off duty. Your rules of engagement are stricter than any soldier's, defence attorneys call you a liar, and technical mistakes haunt you when the perp gets away. You're counsellor, enforcer, peacekeeper and warrior all at once. It's no wonder that cops go bad. The ones that still remain good should get citations for sainthood.
The ones that go bad should still be bound in barbed wire, castrated with a blunt-edged spoon and then dunked head first, mouth open, into a vat of steaming donkey spunk previously laced with nine types of venereal disease, all of them painful, and none of them immediately fatal. For starters. But I digress.
Shock Therapy for Police Recruits
By BRUCE WEBER
WASHINGTON - What kind of person constitutes a threat to public safety and the general welfare? When do you unholster a gun and when do you use it? Where is the line between a rights-bearing citizen and a rights-forfeited lawbreaker? Law enforcement aspirants generally expect answers in concrete terms, with strict guidelines made clear as to what separates the good cop from rogue cowboy. And it's what civil rights advocates, editorialists and the public also expect.Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. But either way, it never hurts to be reminded of the fine line between order and oppression.
But the lessons being imparted in a classroom at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Kayle Becker was conducting a seminar for two dozen trainees from the Baltimore County Police Academy, are far more oblique. As part of a spreading police education program that the museum counts among its most prized achievements as it celebrates its 10th anniversary, the recruits had finished a two-hour museum tour, a history lesson that stunned many recruits to sobered silence. There were its depictions of Jewish ghettos and the Nazis' gleeful exercise of brutal authority, its photographs of victims, its collection of the shoes of the exterminated, its relentless documentation of savage cruelty and, perhaps most stunning of all, of the world's indifference to it.
The recruits heard a lecture, accompanied by shocking photos, about police practices in Nazi Germany from Peter Black, a museum historian. And Ms. Becker, associate director for law enforcement outreach for the Anti-Defamation League, explained the similarities between the mandates of the local police in the Third Reich and those of the recruits.
Her list included having knowledge of their communities, investigating suspicious behavior, marshaling power and responsibility, making good use of their training and experience, instilling trust in the public and ensuring the continuity of an orderly society.
Ms. Becker reminded the recruits that they would enforce laws they did not have a hand in writing, among people who often did not welcome them and under the scrutiny of an impatient, skeptical public. As she completed her analogy, it seemed to be dawning on the recruits that 60 years ago in Germany young men and women just like them, perhaps just as certain of their purpose, were blindly committing themselves to evil.
"Every single thing happens on a local level," Ms. Becker said, "and that's you. You decide who is a stereotype and who is an individual. You decide who is a criminal and who isn't."
I remember studying police systems during my final year in law school when I did Criminology - it's a horrible, thankless job. You are supposed to keep order among people who essentially resent your presence when you impose that order on them, so they hurl abuse at you. And at the same time, they demand that when they're the ones who are victims, you have to act in their interests to impose order. And if you don't do it quickly enough, or hard enough, they hurl abuse at you for not doing your job. At the same time, you are placed under severe scrutiny - there's never a moment when you're really off duty. Your rules of engagement are stricter than any soldier's, defence attorneys call you a liar, and technical mistakes haunt you when the perp gets away. You're counsellor, enforcer, peacekeeper and warrior all at once. It's no wonder that cops go bad. The ones that still remain good should get citations for sainthood.
The ones that go bad should still be bound in barbed wire, castrated with a blunt-edged spoon and then dunked head first, mouth open, into a vat of steaming donkey spunk previously laced with nine types of venereal disease, all of them painful, and none of them immediately fatal. For starters. But I digress.
