Good Cops, Bad Cops

Image credits. Left, Louise Macabitas. Right, Steve Hillebrand, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

If you look around the internet, you can find plenty of examples of American police acting in ways that are a disgrace to America. You can also find examples of cops acting professionally, and sometimes even heroically. What's the difference? How can you get some police officers acting civilized and some acting like savages?

One difference that stands out is attitude. Some cops have a professional attitude and so they exhibit professional demeanor. But we've all seen the other kind of attitude, the "punk with a badge" who seems to think that he's a special class of human. We've seen the cops who display courage on the job, and we've seen the cops who empty their weapons at anything that can remotely be viewed as a threat.

But bad attitude isn't the fundamental problem.

Humans aren't born with attitudes. We acquire them through experience, and our attitudes can be molded through training. That's how the Marine Corps can take a bunch of civilian kids and turn them into warriors. The Corps instills a different set of attitudes into its recruits.

Anyone who's been through Marine Corps boot camp can back me up on this. It's an attitude adjusting experience.

The problem we have with policing in America comes down to bad training. Really bad training. Training that's an embarrassment to a nation that holds itself as a beacon of respect for human life and liberty.

When you have a problem with training, you have a failure of leadership. When you see a police officer shoot someone he wasn't justified in shooting, when you see him treating American citizens like animals, when you see him spraying a hail of bullets because he can't shoot well enough to hit his target, what you're really seeing is bad leadership.

It's not up to the police to decide if their training, leadership and attitudes reflect well on the nation. It's up to we the people. From what I've seen, American police need an attitude adjustment.

And that means that the police need a lot better leadership than they're getting today.