Police

Chief Wiggum

Urban policing in the United States is abysmal generally. Police unions have negotiated away weight and fitness requirements for officers. The unions have colluded with educational institutions to develop a faux-academic basis for raising salaries and diminishing on-the-street labor for officers. The patrol car has become the refuge for the corrupt and lazy. Beat cops, officers who walk or bike through neighborhoods, are considered luxury protection for the wealthy. If I need a policeman, I would do better to find a nearby construction site than call 911 here in Boston.

Police reps come to my local civic association meeting every month to give a crime report. The number of criminal occurrences rises every month, it seems. They add glib remarks about incidents, like house breaks, which go unsolved or ignored. The local crusade against street-walkers and addicted vagrants is presented as swimming against the tide with shrugs. Violent crimes are highlighted when there have been arrests and mumbled over otherwise. Crime prevention procedures are notably absent in the reports. There apparently are none.

The Boston police union has protested against the use of GPS devices to track police car activity. Officers complain this is an invasion of their privacy, as though they are independent sleuths, rather than public employees. The police have not been forthcoming in support of surveillance cameras on the streets. In short, our police do not want to be found or to take responsibility to find criminals in the act. 

My father was a policeman with a long career from the 1940's to the 1980's, ranging from beat cop along a tough urban waterfront to local FBI liaison. Being the kid of a cop is no joy, as most will attest. However, I take some pride in my father's ethics. He was an honest cop, a popular local youth worker and a generally admired public figure in my home city, a blighted community on the edge of Boston. He was encouraged to run for mayor and declined. He could not stomach the stench of corruption in our city hall, which eventually fell under state control because of its remorseless hacks bankrupted the city.

As I look at the current men in blue at my community meeting, I see rare glimpses of the man my father was. Unlike them, my father saw himself as a humble servant and protector of his community, not an authority. My father was not defensive about his performance, because he performed to the best of his ability on and off duty. If he saw criminal behavior on his day off, he stopped the car and intervened without hesitation without gun or badge. He was above all a good citizen who happened to be a good cop as well. 

As a gay man in my 60's, I am not particularly well disposed to the police. I will admit this. Policemen shook down gay men in my youth. They violently smashed up gay bars. They printed the names of arrested gay men in newspapers. They brutalized gay men in jails with impunity. I am glad this has changed in many places. 

As a taxpayer and active citizen of my city, I am greatly disappointed in the direction of policing. Like disease prevention, crime prevention is much more efficacious and less violent than reactionary policing. Crime prevention takes planning, liaison with civic associations and feet on the ground. 

I have left the ACLU as a member for a number of bad decisions that organization has made. For example, they are trying to overturn an ordinance in Portland, ME, which forbids begging in traffic by addicts and vagrants. Our local police have been loathe to take on enforcement of this ordinance in Boston. One of the police reps last evening almost gleefully announced that, if the ACLU succeeds in Portland, the Boston ordinance will no longer be enforced. This is a clear example of the wrong-headed attitude of current police culture in a city overrun with addicts and aggressive vagrants who are largely responsible for much of the city's petty crime.