Demanding Heroism and Police Officer Hypocrisy

            When police officers die in the United States they receive patriotic parades and herds of people showing up waving American flags to honor the deceased, as well as paying homage to the entire law enforcement community.  Often, the local media will get involved and describe the police officers as being heroes, courageous, and brave.  The police departments and community are then connected through the tragedy and the relationship usually lasts several weeks and is filled with news broadcasts that contain the above-mentioned adjectives.  Yet, when police officers wrongfully kill a citizen the amount of media attention about these poor performances is diminished and police departments hide from these tragedies that they are responsible for, and hardly take any accountability for their illegitimate actions.  Moreover, when people are killed by police officers or exonerated for crimes that they were mistakenly found guilty of there is no parade or patriotic showing for the victims and, again, the law enforcement community hides from the media and gives little explanation about the botched justice that they administered.  What happened to the courage, bravery, and heroism in these instances?  Where are all those slogans that entail integrity and public service after an unnecessary death or wrongful arrest/conviction?  Did the wrongfully killed people or exonerees get any apologies or sympathy from police departments or others involved in their demise?  Most likely not.

  

Another example of police officer hypocrisy is demonstrated by understanding the entire criminal justice system.  Every criminal charge, conviction, and sentence starts with an arrest by a police officer, and with the millions of people who have entered the criminal justice system – many for non-violent crimes – the harm that is delivered to offenders and their loved ones seems to be disregarded by everyone in our society.  The concepts of bravery and heroism in the United States as it is applied to police officers is hypocrisy at its worst, and if the unjust and harmful acts by police officers is compared to the actual heroic acts, the depiction would mostly show how police officers cause more harm to society than these heroic images that they present to communities.  Community policing and good-natured public relations is not as vast as many people think; especially in poor neighborhoods.  These heroic images that are displayed by the police departments and media rarely describe the situation behind the unfortunate police officer death as well, and citizens usually never ask about the details because of the sensitivity that is involved with the situation.

This hypocrisy needs to end, and if police officers want to be respected and viewed as heroes, then they need to start helping people more often rather than worrying about arresting people for behaviors that are less dangerous than their actions that they participate in daily.  Everyday police officers gear up for the possibility of something dangerous, but they forget that if they started performing more positive renditions of community work then their uniforms and shifts may not include lethal devices or threatening encounters.  With this being stated, the hubbub about the dangerousness of the police profession needs to be presented in its reality as well.  There have been many studies that conclude with an array of jobs that are more dangerous than police work and, again, none of these practitioners get parades or patriotic ensembles when there is a death in their field.  The police departments are full of shit in this country, America.  Fuckin' bullshit.