Law enforcement officers are not Mental Hygiene Therapy Aides
In most mental hospitals, there is a job classification referred to as Mental Hygiene Therapy Aide. Generally those individuals receive a substantial amount of special training both in the classroom and on-the-job before they are asked to deal with patients who suffer from mental illness and may act out violently. None of this training is provided to law enforcement officers, nor should it have to be.
In the unfortunate death of the mentally disturbed individual in upstate New York recently, the local police without any support from mental hygiene professionals and without any means to obtain that support in an emergency did what they were trained to do in the Police Academy. Unfortunately, they had never been trained in the proper method of restraining someone who is suffering from acute mental illness and acting out violently.
Solutions
Is the solution an additional three months of police academy training as Mental Hygiene Therapy Aides including a week or two of supervised on-the-job training in the violent ward of a local mental hospital or mental hygiene treatment center? If so, the local governments which employ the law enforcement officers will have to find the money to provide the extra training. That money can only come from the taxpayers and the question becomes whether the taxpayers are willing to spend the money necessary to train their law enforcement officers to handle violent mentally ill individuals without causing them physical injury.
The only reason that the mass media and political demagogues rushed to judgment and immediately accused the police of using excessive force in their efforts is that the police officers were white and the violent mentally disturbed individual was black.
In the absence of special training as Mental Hygiene Therapy Aides, police officers can only rely upon the training they received in the Police Academy. If that training is inadequate to deal with mentally disturbed individuals acting out on the public streets, blame the municipality, not the police officers.
It now appears that police officers on the street are asked to respond to situations in which an individual with significant mental health issues is directly involved. Yet the vast majority of “street cops” have no significant training in handling mentally disturbed individuals or those acting under the influence of psychotropic drugs including alcohol who are violently acting out and may represent a threat to themselves or others.
Because of the mobility of the American people, the training of law enforcement officers and their education in respect for Constitutional principles of civil rights law must become a national priority and the entire training and education program should be under the supervision and control of the United States Justice Department and paid for by all the taxpayers and presumably law-abiding residents of the United States. The response of police officers anywhere in the United States to similar situations should be the same.
The behavior of a police officer during a traffic stop should be the same on any road in America. There should be a national standard for traffic stops which every driver should know and understand and police officers who violate that standard should be held accountable in a federal Court for a civil rights violation.
When an urban black motorist is pulled over by a suburban white police officer on a local street, they are strangers meeting under for the first time in a contentious atmosphere. The black motorist has an absolute Constitutional right to expect the same treatment from the officers wherever the stop occurs. The driver should expect the same treatment from any law enforcement officer anywhere. However, the police officer also has a right to expect that the motorist will keep both hands on the wheel in full view and move only as instructed to move when and as instructed by the officer. Without that mutual understanding, every traffic stop is fraught with danger and likely to become contentious.
Every police officer on duty should wear a body camera supplied and paid for by the federal government. Every police vehicle should have dashboard cameras paid for by the State which collects the revenues generated from traffic violation fines.
Murder by police officers
Police officers choked an unarmed black man in Minneapolis and in Kenosha a police officer fired seven shots into the back of a black man trying to enter a vehicle with his three infant children. Outrageous? Yes. Actionable? Yes. But that does not justify rioting, burning, and looting in places like Portland Oregon, thousands of miles away.
Since the president of the United States seems more interested in currying favor with and collecting votes from law enforcement officers then encouraging law and order by equal application of the law and equal justice for all regardless of their race or economic status, we see rampant lawlessness popping up throughout the country. Some of it is due to frustration with the lack of action by this President and his Attorney General in the face of rampant injustice, but much of it is instigated by unidentified and essentially unidentifiable agitators and agent provocateurs.
Injustice is the real problem; “racism” is just a label
We have to stop using the word “racism” when what we are really looking at is injustice. Minority groups of every kind throughout American history have suffered injustice of some kind, none more cruel and obvious than Native Americans and those whose skin is not white.
There is a “dirty little secret” underlying the apparent lawlessness of some law enforcement agencies. In most States and certainly in the political subdivisions of those States no candidate for public office can be elected without the endorsement of the local law enforcement collective bargaining units or unions. As long as that state of affairs continues to exist one cannot expect vigorous management of local law enforcement agencies by the municipal governments which employ them.
The more political power law enforcement unions wield in local municipal elections the less likely it is that those municipal governments will actively supervise, control, and hold local law enforcement officers accountable.
While the majority of local law enforcement officers and their supervisors sincerely believe it is their sworn duty to preserve and protect the citizens of their communities, the political power wielded by their unions essentially prevents meaningful accountability.
Civil Rights and The Civil Rights Acts
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the creation of units within the United States Department of Justice to deal with inappropriate and unconstitutional police actions throughout the United States excessive force by police officers, particularly against minorities were often prosecuted in the federal courts both civilly and criminally.
With the ascension of Donald J. Trump to the presidency and his policy of openly supporting excessive force against citizens by local law enforcement fueled by his encouragement of racial and ethnic conflict and confrontation, there has been no effective check upon the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers in situations where such force was not called for or was inappropriate.
Without the United States Department of Justice as an agency which provided at least limited monitoring of law enforcement activity which resulted in injury to the citizens law enforcement officers were supposed to be protecting, there has been no effective restraint upon local law enforcement officers.
However, the communities in which these officers work and in which many of them live are not without blame. They have not supported much less participated in the efforts of law enforcement officers to preserve the quality of life in their communities and protect all its citizens.
The claims of “racism” and the unreasonable targeting of “people of color,” by law enforcement, not to mention the unfair treatment of “people of color” by the criminal justice system throughout this country should not be directed solely against police officers and local police departments. It is the communities they serve which foster, tolerate, and even facilitate maintaining two systems of law — one for white people and the other for everyone else.
The police are not the enemy of “law-abiding” citizens
The police are not the enemy of “law-abiding” citizens, however, the laws they are asked to enforce place greater burdens on people of color in most communities than they do upon white people. The most glaring example has been the drug laws since the end of Prohibition during the Great Depression.
When liquor became legal again, the gigantic law enforcement establishment created by Prohibition and the criminal empires which were created to provide alcoholic beverages to the vast majority of Americans who wanted them and did not consider themselves criminals for drinking them found themselves out of business.
It did not take long for government to move from prohibiting alcoholic beverages to prohibiting “drugs.” And it took even less time for organized crime to begin supplying the drugs Americans demanded.
The sad story of marijuana, a relatively harmless “recreational” drug with physiological effects not much different from those attributable to alcohol, tobacco, and many other addictive substances which have been utilized by human beings for thousands of years. Nevertheless, the ruthless prosecution of individual marijuana users quickly created a double standard in the criminal justice system.
White users, especially young people were allowed to plead out to violations which did not encumber them with a criminal record. They were admonished to get on with their lives and not get caught smoking pot in the presence of law enforcement officers again. People of color who were arrested for using marijuana found themselves with criminal records which seriously impaired their ability to find substantial gainful employment in the national economy or even to join the military. The likelihood of spending time in jail for the recreational use of marijuana was considerably greater for a person of color than for someone who was white.
How you were treated by the courts in the criminal justice system for possession of marijuana also depended on your economic status. If your parents were wealthy or you were earning “good money” in a white-collar job, you are likely to walk away from a marijuana possession charge without a criminal record. Woe be to you, however, if you were a person of color. In that case the white-run criminal justice system saw your use of marijuana as the first step toward a lifetime of drug-fueled, depraved violent crime against the persons and property of white people. The prisons are filled, even today with the victims of this double standard.
The President is fanning the flames of these old attitudes and doing whatever he can, whenever he can, and wherever he can to bring them back into law enforcement as quickly as possible.
Cops as revenue generators and tax collectors
The other “dirty little secret” of local law enforcement throughout the United States is that their primary purpose is earning revenue rather than protecting lives and property. Many municipalities, particularly small ones located along a major highways, pay for their municipal services from revenues derived from traffic tickets. Police officers are required to meet ticket quotas. Whether they are formal or informal those quotas must be met. The state police in many states exist primarily to write speeding tickets on state highways.
Certainly, the police have an obligation to prevent reckless driving on public highways. However, there are very few reckless driving tickets written in most states. The revenue function of police officers patrolling the highways can be seen every day in the various “Traffic Courts” or “Traffic Violations Bureaus” of many states and municipalities. Throughout the day those traffic courts and agencies are filled with police officers waiting to testify about their revenue-generating exercises rather than being out in the street protecting the lives and property of the local services.
How to de-escalate the violence and tone down the violent rhetoric
Any change in the present dangerous and explosive situation involving law enforcement has to begin with a change in attitude by the President of the United States. The President must acknowledge the problems and demand that they be fixed immediately at the local level with as much help and support as the national government can provide to get the job done as quickly as it must be done.
The federal courts must eliminate the barriers to citizens seeking remedies under the Civil Rights Acts.
State and local government must explain to their local law enforcement officers that they work for the people — all the people — they have sworn to preserve and protect.
There must be a concerted national effort at every level of government to repeal and remove from the criminal laws all the silly and unenforceable statutes which do not directly affect public safety and public health. The laws which remain should be enforced fairly and vigorously but with an even hand.
After the penal laws and criminal codes have been stripped of their 19th century social views Legislators should reflect on the ancient wisdom of Thomas Aquinas in his 12th century Summa Theologica, Not every moral wrong should be prohibited by Public Law; only those which affect the public order. The new criminal code should reflect that philosophy.