Good Cop Bad Cop Psycho Cop

The George Floyd catastrophe was not an arrest so much as it was a crime in progress. From the beginning, the encounter between Floyd and the Minneapolis Police Department disintegrated rapidly, and it culminated in Floyd’s death. A cluster of complicated factors, including officer complicity and the phenomenon known as contempt of cop, played into the debacle, with race looming over the entire encounter like a miasmic cloud. Taken together, these factors solidified themselves into a gordian knot of police mistakes that ended in murder and the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In police work, race and economic class are inextricable clues that hint at criminality in the eyes of officers because they use them as building blocks of suspicion, however right or wrong that may be. Poverty seems to be the factor that unifies race and class, but what is clear in American policing today is that unjustifiable homicides of black men, and women, are occurring at the hands of police officers at alarming rates and, either the entire law enforcement system is infected with inexplicable racism, or we have a nation of psycho cops - or both.

First, here is an uncomfortable reality from the secretive law enforcement playbook: the reason why cops tend to treat black people like criminals is because the only black people they tend to interact with are criminals. Decades of inequality means there are scant African-Americans on the force and few to none in neighborhoods where white cops live or grew up, and they probably don’t patrol middle class neighborhoods where professional blacks live, so they grow conditioned to one kind of black person: the thug. They receive poor training in community relations, so they become conditioned to view black people as problems rather than people and, vóila, we have produced racist or at least biased cops. Black men become liars, not interviewees or become targets, not suspects. And worst of all, black men, and women, seem to make all the wrong moves during a police encounter so that things go horribly wrong. If the Floyd encounter is unraveled, we see many of these offenders at work.

When the first cops arrived on the Floyd scene, there was no ascertaining that an actual crime had taken place. No interview of the complainant, no examination of the evidence, no actual cause beside whatever preconceived notions resided in the responding officer’s head, and this response set the entire disastrous tenor of the confrontation from which there was no going back. First, you have suspects in a vehicle, which can move, and that presents a thorny issue, but the approaching officer has Floyd at gunpoint in a matter of seconds. Does he actually think he is going to shoot him if he fails to show his right hand? (No, he is thinking he has a gun, but still.) Floyd fully complies, and he is still yanked and cuffed, without explanation, from his car. Was this a necessary escalation of force? Maybe, because vehicles move and non-compliance with an officer’s command to exit a vehicle usually results in the ol’ cuff and stuff. Floyd resisted in so much as he quarreled with officers and was slow to heed direction. Now, Floyd has painted himself as unruly, and in the eyes of an officer, such behavior is a greenlight to escalate.

There is a phenomenon in police work known as contempt of cop, and this little-known concept is evident in the behavior of the Minneapolis Police. Contempt of cop occurs when police, who are authority figures, experience disobedience to their field commands, and disobedience is, to cops, disrespect. Cops are big on respect for the badge because it is the root of their authority; without it, there would be no law and order. But some cops, especially the bullies on the force and every department has them, feel they must inflict a lesson in retribution for insubordinate suspects, whether that lesson comes in the form of a baton raining down upon a head, or an assassin’s bullet, depends on the kind of cop - bully or spectator. Police brutality cannot exist without the complicity - and cowardice - of fellow police officers who stand by idling while a murder is committed. Not only were there complicit cops during Floyd’s arrest, but they also were ready with a quick lie to the paramedics who responded to the scene. Their exact words were, “We had to do it. He resisted.” Police officers nationwide float this canard on a daily basis to justify shaky arrests, and the uncanny ability of this lie to never break under questioning by a defense attorney resonates with its durability as a staple of police officer-concocted-probable cause.

Derek Chauvin committed contempt of cop when Floyd refused to get in his vehicle because he, Floyd, claimed that he was claustrophobic. Funny that Floyd was not claustrophobic in his own vehicle, and Chauvin exacted retribution for this display of defiance while a bevy of cops stood by like tourists. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, it is said, is for good men to do nothing, and that’s exactly what those Minneapolis cops did. Nothing.

Lost in this collective outrage about police brutality is the fact that our nation’s prosecutors seem to have suddenly lost their collective legal abilities. How can you fail to indict an officer who shoots a fleeing unarmed man in the back? Or a woman in her own bed? A man jogging? If it were not so tragic, one might think it were an arcade game. It is no secret that cops and prosecutors are in bed together, in gross defiance of the district attorney’s duty to do justice, but to wholesale let Murder Ones walk is too much to stomach. And the list is long, and they are all black and that is no coincidence.

Police brutality exists because other cops let it exist. They do not have the moral courage to intervene because the brotherhood of officers depends on officers not ratting on each other. An officer who has the cajones to commit a murder in broad daylight before a crowd of witnesses tells you how confidant a cop can be that his buddies will all lie for him. There isn’t a cop alive who hasn't fabricated probable cause or lied on the stand and maybe we are better off for it, but standing around and watching a murder like it’s another day at the office is a grotesque malignancy on the honor of all policemen and women.

When inequality and power collide, there is no fair fight. The police will win everytime, and African-Americans suffer losses disproportionately to whites because they are disproportionately unequal in terms of poverty by a score of 1.8 times greater than the general population. If our police departments do not become more discriminating in their hiring processes, more bullies like Derek Chauvin will wind up in uniform. Furthermore, a strong community policing program in Minneapolis might have averted the whole calamity. We need better quality officers, period. The officer who arrested George Floyd did not even know how to spell George. What does that tell you?