Policing in America

Where's the reckoning from within?

The media industry is having a moment right now. 

In newsrooms across the country, a vigorous debate is playing out about how journalists should cover stories, about the ideal of objectivity, and about the purpose of a free press. Everyone from bright-eyed young reporters on their first beat to respected editors at legacy institutions are engaged in a fight for the very soul of the industry.

For those of us who geek out over media coverage (I don’t leave the house without reading my Reliable Sources newsletter in the morning), the roots of this struggle have been visible since Donald Trump took office. Part of it was a recognition of the media’s failure to represent the communities that voted him into power, something few people in the industry saw coming. But the reckoning has intensified throughout the last four years. As a president, he’s been an enigma to try and cover, and that difficult process has introduced — or at least, brought into the spotlight — a new barrage of ethical questions for journalists to consider.

How do you properly cover a pathological liar? Do you have a duty to refute each lie because he’s the president and he holds influence over millions of Americans? Or is that simply amplifying each lie to a wider audience?

Is Trump’s Twitter feed unworthy of coverage? Or is it an essential tool that allows us an unprecedented look into the mind of our commander-in-chief?

Is the ideal of a view-from-nowhere objectivity possible when one side peddles in lies, conspiracy theories, and misinformation? Is it possible at all?

Can journalists practically stay impartial when everything is politicized?

Does the ideal of free speech mean printing any opinion, even if it’s dangerous and unsupported by the truth?

To the uninterested onlooker, the last four years of media coverage might appear to have been nothing more than partisan bashing of the President and the party that has completely sided with him. But when you remember that journalists’ first obligation is to the truth, that “bashing” takes on a more rational light. As the adage goes, if one side tells you it’s raining and the other tells you it’s sunny, your job isn’t to quote both of them; it’s to look outside the fucking window.

To the general population, these debates have grown more apparent in recent weeks with situations such as the uproar over the Tom Cotton NYT op-ed, the publication of the Harpers letter, the firing of Tucker Carlson’s head writer and Carlson’s subsequent reaction, and most recently, the incendiary resignation letter tendered by NYT Opinion editor Bari Weiss.

While I certainly have my own thoughts on all of these matters, that’s not why I’m bringing them up. Rather, I’m doing so to highlight the absence of a similar reckoning among members of a different profession: police.

Journalists are engaged (and always have engaged) in an internal struggle. They hold one another accountable. They continuously discuss and debate best practices. They believe in a code of ethics, and they call each other out when it’s broken. 

Why? Part of it is that they understand that theirs is an estate so essential to a functioning democracy that it is explicitly protected by the First Amendment. They want to uphold the integrity of their institution. 

But part of it’s just that they care about what they do. When you believe in something, you make sure it’s done right.

Though the debate around policing in America has existed for decades, the integrity of the institution has never been as widely questioned as it is right now. And yet with everything that’s going on, the reaction from the police themselves has not been to engage but to defend. Rather than work with communities to better themselves and improve their role in society, they’ve rallied around the stubborn and divisive argument that they’re right and we’re wrong.

Why, for instance, do they stand behind their fellow officers who’ve committed atrocious acts (usually on camera) in the line of duty? Why don’t they call for accountability?

Why do they continue to insist that it’s a few bad apples, as opposed to an issue built into the system itself. And why, if they truly believe that, are they not questioning why they continue to attract and hire so many bad apples?

Why, in the face of so many needless killings at the hands of their fellow officers, do they continue to see the real problem as the way they are being treated? 

Cops who respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “Blue Lives Matter” are apparently so fragile that they’re sensing attacks where they don’t exist. As 17-year-old Narain Dubey wrote last summer, “People are quick to challenge discussions of police violence with the idea that ‘not all cops are bad cops.’ But when we argue in defense of the morality of individual police officers, we are undermining a protest of the larger issue: the unjust system of policing in the United States.”

I’m sure that there are many officers who do want to build a system that will better serve their community. One who comes to mind is the former Dallas police chief David Brown, who admitted the constructive point that we’re asking police officers to do way too much. But for the rest of you, if you’re out there, you’re not being loud enough. All we’re hearing is the Blue Wall of Silence.

Where is the police's moment of reckoning? I’d wager that every police officer in the country would say that their aim is to protect, serve, and better their community. The irony is that the goal of the Defund the Police movement is exactly the same; it’s simply driven by more productive thought and open-mindedness. If cops could drop their defenses for a second and educate themselves on what’s being proposed, they might see that the best way to serve their community is to direct some of their exorbitant funding into other societal services — in other words, to address crime at the source as opposed to simply punishing it after the fact.

What your communities are saying to you, officers, is that despite whatever intentions you may have, you don’t make them feel safe. Your response, so far, has been to armor up. If you don’t see what’s wrong with that, I don’t know where we go from here.