The problem with arming morons.
"Who people are is not the important thing. People are interchangeable within systems."
Folks, apparently the coronavirus is no joke. I felt bad two Fridays ago and decided to call in sick. I have not worked out since. I tested positive the next day, and while every day is better, the runway ahead looks long. The life I put together for myself to get myself through the pandemic has fallen apart. The walk to Walgreens today exhausted me. I need to add the components back in one at a time: meditation, yoga, calisthenics, kettlebell. Tomorrow, I am going to try to go to work.
Today, I’m doing this. Call it an experiment. Can I keep an idea in my head long enough to follow it to the end? Can I physically sustain the effort? I guess we’ll find out.
But first, did you ever see the 1994 Paul Newman movie Nobody’s Fool?
Paul Newman plays a charismatic curmudgeon named Sully in upstate New York where he squabbles occasionally with the local gendarme, especially one hapless officer portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. At some point in the story, Sully misbehaves stubbornly — the movie is called Nobody’s Fool, people — and Hoffman’s character fires his handgun haplessly. Things look bleak for old Sully. He’s trying to make a go of things as a competent grandfather after whiffing as a dad, and his criminal exposure could put the whole kibosh on the story right as a second act was winding down. This was, we are meant to understand, Sully’s last straw.
Sully need not have worried. Philip Bosco, playing the judge, lets Ollie, the police officer’s lawyer, have it.
“Ollie, you know my feelings about arming morons,” says the judge. “You arm one, you’ve got to arm them all. Otherwise it wouldn’t be good sport.”
I have forgotten many things about Nobody’s Fool: the plot, the fact that Bruce Willis played a major, yet uncredited supporting role, how the movie made me angry in a way that I wouldn’t understand until about five minutes ago, or how Melanie Griffith bared her chest in a brief moment of resonant comic pathos. Not a year has gone by, however, when police have done something dumb and I haven’t thought, “That’s the problem with arming morons.”
My latest opportunity to relive that joke was late last week when five Austin police officers filed a lawsuit against the city of Austin, Mayor Steve Adler, Travis County District Attorney José Garza, and the companies that sold beanbag rounds lead shot to the Austin Police Department, as well as some social justice groups including Black Lives Matter. The thing that you have to know about these five officers is that they are currently under indictment and are being sued for police brutality during the protests after George Floyd’s murder.
Sometimes a fella screws up. Sometimes a fella does a good bit worse that that. And sometimes he commits an act of such towering nincompoopery that you just gotta stand back and admire it.
Let’s start off with these officers suing the district attorney who is prosecuting them and the mayor who has settled seven police brutality lawsuits brought by injured civilians for almost $15 million already. Strong move, gents. I don’t know if we’re making a lick of sense yet, but strong move lashing out blindly beats sitting still, I suppose.
But for my mind, suing Black Lives Matter really parks the car in the middle of traffic and throws the key into the gutter. Damn their eyes for protesting? We wouldn’t have hit them if their faces weren’t so close? How were we supposed to know their skulls weren’t impervious to rubber bullets and beanbag rounds lead shot ? If only they had not been protesting police brutality, then we would not have committed quite so much police brutality.
This is the thing about arming morons. You arm one, you’ve got to arm them all.
***
Last night, S and I started watching David Simon’s We Own This City, a non-fiction coda of sorts to The Wire. Half way through watching the second episode I shouted in surprise. Jamie Hector, the actor who played the menacing drug dealer Marlo Stanfield in The Wire, was now playing an honest, even mild-mannered detective. The switcheroo made me feel like I’d exposed myself to danger by trusting the police.
As Simon tells it, that’s kind of the point.
When you flip people — when you have Marlo, but then you cast that actor as a homicide cop trying to leave his past behind — what you’re saying in a subliminal way, perhaps, is that who people are is not the important thing. People are interchangeable within systems. That is the political reference point: What’s going on is systemic. There are shows that’ve done the bad-cop anti-hero, and it’s been laid out like a banquet. Are they going to catch the bad cop? How will they catch him? How many people will he take down with him? I don’t really give a shit. What I’m interested in is, how did this become policing in Baltimore? I’m not saying it was some halcyon thing, but the clearance rate for murders used to be 70 percent, and now it’s 35 percent. The why is way more interesting than the who, what, when.
A quick aside about systemic racism: I worked in the Mayor’s office in the pre-George Floyd days when the notion of bad apples had not lost its grip on us, and what we thought were isolated incidents took place regularly: officers would beat up a jaywalker, a cop shot and killed an unarmed, naked teenager, an officer would beat a 2nd grade teacher like a rag doll at an otherwise unremarkable traffic stop.
And no sooner would the Mayor offer words of measured outrage at the racial violence than the head of the police union would call to demand if the Mayor was calling all cops racists. No, the Mayor would explain, the system is racist. But if you are the system, what’s the difference?
There was a time in 2020 when it looked like America might be picking up on the distinction that the police union had resisted. For the first time, a majority of Americans told Gallup that they didn’t trust the police, though that movement was mostly among Black Americans. But as cities started re-examining their law enforcement budgets under the political slogan of defunding the police and the murder rate started climbing, people began to freak out. There are three ways to turn a liberal temporarily into a conservative: distract them, get ‘em drunk, or scare them. Two years later, pro-police attitudes among Black Americans had nearly recovered to pre-George Floyd levels.
Police departments started to use that fear, letting it be known that defunding the police meant they couldn’t respond to traffic accidents, home burglaries, and other smaller crimes. The rise in the murder rate was the fault of defunding the police, they said, as was their inability to solve those murders. A Reuters investigation reached this conclusion: “After Floyd's killing, Minneapolis police retreated, data shows.” “LAPD after George Floyd: Fewer officers, fewer arrests,” read one headline. Went another, “Why violent crime surged after America retreated.”
We, the non-policing public, were fed a steady stream of grievance. The police were hurt by the lack of respect we showed them. They didn’t get thanked in public anymore. Active duty troops get preferential boarding on airplanes, after all. What do police officers get when they show up to work? At a ceremony to honor police officers, then-Attorney General William Barr said the quiet part out loud when he admonished Americans to “start showing, more than they do, the respect and support that law enforcement deserves. And if communities don't give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.”
***
People have decided to call the police who didn’t rush into Robb Elementary cowards, and Dan Patrick’s proposal to spend $50 million to buy all public school cops bullet-proof shields doesn’t do much to dispel that. And I’m sure I would have been scared, too. It’s normal to feel scared when you’re the good guy with the gun and your job is to go get the bad guy with the gun.
But what if you have internalized that about half of this country doesn’t think you’re the good guy with a gun, anymore? What if to a lot of people who seem to dominate national politics and media, you’re an interchangeable cog in a racist system? What if the only people you felt like you could count on anymore to have your back are a few politicians and each other?
If you felt that way, would you risk one of your guys to save the child of someone who resents you anyway?
Police are doing a lot less policing these days in ways that can’t be explained by budgets that don’t come close to being defunded. And I can’t even find comfort in the joke that the only remedy to arming one moron is arming them all. This is Texas, where there are enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have two apiece. If the thing that stopped bad guys with guns were good guys with guns, then Texas would be the safest place on Earth.
To paraphrase David Simon, “How did this become policing in America?”
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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