In our lifetimes, at some point, most of us will experience contact with law enforcement. It could be for something that happened to us, such as a burglary or a motor vehicle crash, or it could be something we caused, like a burglary or a motor vehicle crash. There are so many ways a person can have contact with law enforcement, and it isn’t always clear what kind of attention you will get, or what kind of treatment you deserve. What happens at the upper socioeconomic levels is frequently different from what happens to the ordinary Joe or Jane, but not always.

When I was a teenager, I was one of those kids who didn’t follow the straight and narrow path to success. In retrospect, my life would have been so much easier if I had, but you know that hindsight is always 20/20. I grew up in the suburbs, where there were few racial minorities. The times were such that, during the early 1970s when I was a young teenager, I and my cohort of teenagers painted targets on our backs, in the form of boys growing out their hair, and everybody wearing faded jean bellbottoms and jean jackets, along with other types of fashion, like fake army jackets, peace symbol patches, American flag patches on the buttocks (although I can’t remember seeing any of those at my high school). So we, in effect, made ourselves into minorities and, essentially,  law enforcement targets. It doesn’t sound very strategic, but those were the times and the fashions of the times, and teenagers are nothing if not slaves to fashion. The cops in my town had a reputation of being tough, particularly on speeders and illegal drug users and dealers. I had a few run-ins with them, but nothing really serious. I made it out of high school without any majorly bad experiences with the cops. But I had a decidedly negative view of law enforcement, especially street-level drug enforcement.

Fast-forward to my middle-age years, when I got a job working at the Registry of Motor Vehicles. The RMV being a quasi-law enforcement agency, I met many police officers, encountering both state and local cops on a daily basis. I became friends with some of them, as well as with people trying to get jobs in law enforcement. I liked them. I could joke around with them, and I didn’t feel constrained by trying to be too politically correct. I could be myself. And I liked that. So I changed my views on police officers, going from decidedly negative to decidedly positive.

And then we started to get all these amateur videos of police officers laying a beat-down on black men, sometimes killing them. Let me say for the record: I don’t toe anybody’s line when it comes to views on law enforcement, especially on racially-charged red hot media stories. There was the one in North Carolina when a cop shot a black man in the back, then appeared to try to rig the evidence in his favor. Now that was pretty cut-and-dried. The man, Walter Scott, shouldn’t have bolted from the cop, Michael Slager. But the penalty for poor judgement shouldn’t be death. That case was not open to interpretation. Then there was the one where a man was shot by police while his girlfriend recorded the whole thing. She was providing a running narrative while begging the cops not to shoot her boyfriend, who was a black man named Philando Castile. He was shot in Minnesota by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez, a man of Hispanic descent. He was acquitted and fired from his job. I don’t understand why he felt he had to shoot that man. I don’t think he did it with malicious intent, but he should at least have been convicted of manslaughter, in my opinion.

But the mother of all of these stories was the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. What I will say about that is that shooting served as a catalyst for a long-simmering rage about black people being profiled and fined and, if unable to pay the fine, jailed. It is understandable from that point of view, but it is regrettable that the good people of Ferguson chose such a miserable case to hang their outrage on. Michael Brown was found to have tried to grab the officer’s weapon. DNA evidence confirms the fact. This is the Department of Justice report. It says that the shooting was justified. Of course, nobody, at least no good person, wants to see a young man cut down in his prime. But he asked for it. The Washington Post, not known for its conservative views, believes that the report was fair.

What has happened to me now is that I have rebounded to the middle of the road. It is hard to be middle of the road on anything these days, and things are conflated together, as in, if you respect police officers, you must be a racist, right-wing Trump supporter. If you support black people in their protests against police shootings of their young men, you must be anti-cop. I’m not anti-cop at all, nor am I a Trump supporter (unless Trump supporters are allowed to hate Trump’s guts).

I started watching the Cops TV show in the early 1990s. For many years, I was a crime-show junkie. Both true-crime and fictional shows. I still like them, but not as much as I used to. But what seems to be the normal course of action, from just about everything I’ve seen on video showing real cops in action, is that they seem to use overwhelming force in almost every situation. I have no idea if it’s like that in other countries. I have seen, almost exclusively, American videos. What I would guess, and this is just an educated guess, is that, in dictatorships, police officers behave similarly to American cops, probably worse. Furthermore, I would guess that, in Western European democratic countries, they use as much force as necessary to do what they have to, no more. In some countries in Europe, cops don’t even carry guns. But, in defense of American cops, that ship sailed a long time ago. America is armed to the teeth. To expect police not to be also, would be crazy. But I just don’t really see why it takes four police officers to practically sit on an unarmed suspect while delivering punches to his supine body, in order to effect a lawful arrest. Admittedly I’m not a professional in the field, but I have watched many, many videos of real-life police arrests. It seems to me that they could, in many cases, do what they need to do without assaulting the person they are arresting. I get that they have to protect themselves, but they also have a duty to protect and serve the communities that employ them. I think that there needs to be a major overhaul of police officer training in America (once Trump is gone, of course). They need to be instructed on how to effect a lawful arrest without resorting to breaking the law themselves, and committing assault and battery on their suspect. Although this behavior is extreme, I think that lesser versions of what happened in that link to a crime by the Pennsylvania State Police, lesser versions of their crimes happen on a daily basis.

First, we need to excise the cancer of Donald Trump and his corrupt administration from our body politic. Then, we need to set up a commission on American human rights and police policies, and throw some serious money into it. The rewards would far exceed the cost.