Los Angeles police officers on duty at a skate park. (Photo/Michael Dorausch via Flickr)
(TheAntiMedia) Everyday, cops get away with murder. This is no surprise. In New York City, only 2% of cops over a 15 year period were so much as indicted for killing citizens. They under report their homocides and grand juries across the country let murderous cops walk free. Modern police are emboldened to kill.
They also bludgeon, taser, and intimidate citizens every day. A cop in central California was put on leave for not using force against a suicidal college student. Another was not charged for beating a handcuffed woman. Still another was not indicted after killing a young man with Down syndrome.
What police are routinely charged for is indiscretion with drugs and alcohol. Police around the country have been caught selling cocaine, weed, and heroin. They have been caught stealing drugs from suspects to sell on their own, smoking and accepting marijuana and failing to turn it over to evidence, and one cop couple was caught stealing and selling painkillers. This happens on a regular basis, and cops are prosecuted (or at least fired or forced to resign) for these crimes (though enjoying lesser sentences than a civilian would).
They are also prosecuted for drunk driving, though the punishment is less severe because unlike cocaine, weed, and illegally obtained painkillers, alcohol is legal. While they are prosecuted, one cop who killed a man while driving drunk was allowed to return to work. An off-duty officer who drunkenly opened fire on strangers was charged with attempted murder, but not fired-only suspended. An Oklahoma sheriff was recently arrested for driving drunk in his patrol car-it was not his first time.
Though cops must go through the motions of receiving a DUI, they are spared the ordeal of a narcotics conviction and rarely lose their jobs. Because the state says that alcohol, one of the most dangerous drugs on earth is okay, police are not harshly punished.
Whether cops are harshly disciplined for drugs or slapped on the wrist for alcohol, however, both scenarios entail less punishment than when police murder and use violence. They are more consistently jailed for substance-related crimes than when they wantonly take lives.
The reason police are so often prosecuted for drugs is because violating these laws is an insult to the state’s authority. The government declares that drugs are bad (“for our safety”), so it is unacceptable that representatives of the law would use, steal, or sell them. It is a threat to law and order. It is an assault on a civilized society. It is a humiliation to the government to have its enforcers flout the rules they are armed to enforce. To violate drug policy–no matter how ineffective it is proven to be and no matter how much violence it creates–is to expose the sham of attempting to control what substances people put in their body.
Police are not trained to get drunk and high and make a buck off of it. They are, however, trained to kill. They are educated to use aggression to solve problems. There is no question about this, from the law enforcement establishment to the govenrment or most of the people they claim to serve. Citizens blindly defend police violence, blaming the victim at all costs–even if that victim was unarmed and not a threat.
While not prosecuting drunk, high and drug dealing cops gives the appearance of undermining the system, to prosecute government agents who commit senseless acts of violence is to actually undermine government authority. To acknowledge that officers are not justified in using force is to admit that the very foundation of government–a monoply on “moral” violence–is illegitimate.
As long as the state purports to fight violence with violence, the violence will continue.
As much as the government and its law enforcement henchmen are to blame for abuses of power, however, the bulk of responsibility rests on American citizens. Many Americans still accept the irrational notion that a drug offense is worse than a violent one (as least when committed by cops). Americans have, for decades, sat quietly by and rationalized police violence and abuse. They refuse to indict officers who kill.
As much as cops stealing drugs and selling them is shameful, it cannot compare to brazen assault and murder. But Americans and the system can more easily accept an officer killing a suspect than an officer selling drugs… Because law and order.
So long as Americans believe they enjoy a representative democracy that provides justice, it is their responsibility that justice has disappeared.