The Sound of the Police

By Kevin Garnica / Spring 2021

I am not a great driver. I am not a bad driver by any means either, but I don’t feel as though I’m perfect either. I sometimes go a little too fast when I’m late, I don’t come to a complete stop at stop signs, I even ran a red light once without realizing it. Despite this, I try to be the best driver I can be, but I’m not perfect. That being said, my father is a fantastic driver. He has driven commercially for almost 35 years, he never speeds, and always comes to a complete stop at a stop sign. He drives so carefully that my mother pokes fun at him sometimes for it, her being no better of a driver than I am at times. Despite this, my father is the only person in my family to ever be pulled over by the police. He has been pulled over in his car, on his bike, even while on the job in his truck at work. My father is a six-foot-tall Mexican man, and I am very white presenting compared to him, as is my mother. Normally, the fact that my father is a Mexican man and the fact that he’s been pulled over by the police so much shouldn’t have any correlation, however, given the amount of racial profiling misused by the police and the mounting evidence of over-policing of marginalized communities, I believe that the correlation has made itself clear. There is an urgent problem in the way that our police force operates in our society and I believe the solution to seek out is ways that we can hold our current police force accountable in the line of duty while also allowing them the necessary liberties to effectively protect people from threats in our community.

From where I stand, there are several superficial ways of seeing this problem. The first of which being that people believe that it’s an issue of marginalized communities disrespecting the police force, and if they only “didn’t act out” or “respected the badge” then nothing bad would happen to them. I find this is a very popular response from people because it comes from a place of believing that the police have everyone’s best interest at heart, that they are always there to protect you, that they are the good guys. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, I believe the benefit of the doubt police get is a symptom of the overwhelmingly positive view police get in TV shows and movies combined with white privilege limiting the interactions these people have with the police. According to the course lecture on Day 6 we spoke about how, in a capitalistic system alongside sustaining competitive individualism in the masses, the police force as we have come to know it in our modern age has always been to “protect the property” of the “Landowners, Capitalists, Industrialists, and those of the ‘White’ class.” This is evidenced by the fact that our police force, in its early years, was once tasked with incarcerating black people and other marginalized communities at an alarming rate and did so under the veil of a section of laws called the “Black Codes.” According to History.com, The Black Codes were designed “to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.” Despite being abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, negative attitudes towards racial minorities by large portions of the police can still be seen today.

I also believe it is a misconception to believe that all cops are bad. Given everything in the previous paragraph, it is very easy to see our society’s police force as an oppressive relic of the past that is completely out of control, that employs people based on their ability to shelve their empathy and commit atrocities in the name of a badge and a ticket quota. But despite my negative experiences, I do not believe this is the case either and it is based on the same propaganda that was referenced before. In American media, the police are shown as protectors, pillars of the moral high ground in our society. Police officers are among the top ten list of things kids want to be when they grow up and it isn’t hard to see why, they are the real-life equivalent to being superheroes. I believe it is this modern view of what it means to be a police officer that results in “good cops” people who genuinely want to do right by the communities they live in. Despite the systemic negatives that are built into our police force, these are not at the forefront of the mind of every person who becomes a police officer and I have a few friends who work inside the force that understand the systemic biases at play and work incredibly hard to act as the antithesis to those biases and improve the force from the inside. I believe this is important to keep in mind as we move forward to try to create a better police force because people don’t become police officers to incarcerate minorities. We as a society need to remember that the task is to fix the system in place, not necessarily the people.

This leads us to another misconception surrounding this problem, that people don’t want to admit that there is a problem with the system that employs the police, not any individual police officer. The issues surrounding our police force are systemic, not on the shoulders of any individual police officer to redeem or surrender to. The problems in place today are the same problems that have been in place for decades, the only thing that has changed is the lens through which we see these problems. What is acceptable now is very different from what was acceptable twenty years ago, and this is especially true of our police force. Our society has evolved in the past ten years to be able to document the actions of the police with our smartphones and the police need to rise to that level of accountability. That being said, there is only so much personal accountability you can grant to people who operate as arbiters of a defective system. If the current police force is not allowing their officers to make decisions in the best interest of the people they are sworn to protect without judgment or ridicule from their fellow officers and superiors then there needs to come a time where we as a society re-examine that system instead of just the individual police officers.

However, this does not mean that getting rid of the police altogether is going to solve all of our policing issues. I believe we need to reframe how the current resources allocated to our police force are being utilized without completely surrendering the idea of a police force altogether. I feel this needs to be mentioned to clarify the phrase “Defund the police,” which has gained traction in criticism of the police force. This is often misconstrued as people calling for the complete abolition of the police in general, but what it actually means to defund the police is to re-examine the budget that is being allocated to the police and identify whether or not those funds are being used to their full effectiveness. For example, according to ABC7 News, In Petaluma, a city in northern California, the police received “more than $1.3 million in military surplus equipment over the past decade” included in this surplus are armored vehicles that are built for active warzones. In a county like Petaluma where violent crime is very low, it is hard not to imagine that the $1.3 million allocated towards military gear couldn’t be spent wiser, put towards resources that would benefit the community. Such as better fire fighting equipment to better combat the wildfires that have ravaged northern California over the past decade. Perhaps even creating a more robust task force of social workers to deal with unemployment, low business retention, and mental health needs. The point being, if we were to search our society’s police force with the same level of scrutiny that Petaluma is now examining theirs then I believe we could find more instances where funding is not being utilized properly. This would not only allocate the necessary funding to resources and facilities that need it, but in allocating that funding properly you are taking that strain and responsibility off of the already over-relied upon police force.

The deeper story behind this problem is that the police force has a very uncomfortable history of targeting minority groups and it is going to take reformation with this fact in mind to create an equitable task force that is designed to help everyone, not just wealthy white communities. According to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, published in 2019, “Police violence is the leading cause of death for young men in the United States.” The research article also concluded that about 1 in every 1000 black men can expect to be killed at the hands of the police. In addition to this, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Latinos are also more likely to be killed by police than white men and women. However, despite these well-substantiated findings, there is still a large portion of the population who refuse to see these as facts which makes moving forward on these issues in a way that benefits everyone so difficult. It is hard to debate and compromise when such a large portion of the people at the table refuse to believe that there is even a problem at all. According to Pew Research Center, 28% of white people in America oppose black lives matter and a third of Americans “don’t understand the goals of the movement.” This is especially troubling when the staggering amount of evidence in favor of these issues is more readily available than ever. But even still, such large portions of our populations still refuse to admit there is a problem at all or oppose the ideas completely.

One of the most prevalent obstacles that halts us from solving this problem surrounding the accountability of our police force and the way they treat minorities is most notably the amount of police propaganda in our media such as movies and TV. According to The Hollywood Reporter, 22% of all scripted shows on television over the last ten years have been crime shows. Shows such as NCIS, CSI, Blue Bloods, or other crime dramas that paint the police as our first and last line of defense against people in our community that would do us harm. But that can be a very dangerous message to send to people, especially when accountability needs to be called into question. These shows have been known to show police in situations where they go "off the record to get their guy" and that their behavior can be justified as long as they get the bad guy and prove their innocence in the end. Which can lead to people assuming the best of the police in situations where this is not the case. The parasocial relationships people can form with the police force through these tv shows and movies can be incredibly toxic. People need to understand that police are there to protect and serve their community, and when that doesn’t happen, they need to be held accountable for not acting within the best interest of the community. They are not your friends and they are not like the police on TV, no one should fear for their life at the hands of the police.

One thing that people can do to solve this problem is to prevent their opinions from being driven by only one source. Look deeper than just your nightly news station or your favorite social media app. There have been multiple instances where I read a story on Twitter and seek out the same story in the LA Times or the Washington Post to find out more information and more often than not, there is more to the story that is not being covered at the service level journalism that can run rampant on Twitter and Facebook. According to journalism.org, “Americans who depend on social media websites such as Facebook or Twitter, or Local TV stations are more likely to be less engaged and have an overall lower political knowledge than someone who actively engages with news websites and apps, radio, or cable TV. This is because when you go out of their way to try and understand the entire situation instead of basing your opinions off of already existing biases, you find information. After all, your biases will only close your mind. To understand the situation completely, sometimes one needs to read and hear things that they might not want to hear. But in doing so, a deeper understanding of the situation can be achieved.

Finally, this leaves the final crux of the issue being, how should we reform police if given the opportunity to do so. What does an accountable, safe, and effective police force look like and how would it operate. Well firstly I believe the first issue to tackle would be to take some of the funding from the police and use that to create better resources for homelessness, mental health, and animal control. I’m basing this idea on an interview with Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who stated in 2016 that society is putting too much responsibility onto the police in the sense that everything is left to the cops. “Not enough mental health resources, let the cop handle it, not enough drug addiction funding let’s give it to the cops.” With so much being left to these people is not hard to see why training police officers is so difficult. If you shrink the scope of what they are tasked with handling, you can emphasize details a lot more and focus on exactly what is expected of your task force in given situations instead of just creating a catch-all program and hoping that they know what to do when duty calls. This brings me to the second issue, redefining exactly when cops are needed to be called in, and when a different, less armed, task force can handle it. If police are reserved for situations where there are active shooters and active threats and leave mental health, public intoxication, drug addiction cases to a different task force that is more equipped to de-escalate without weapons rather than neutralize the situations completely, then I believe lives and resources could be saved.

After all that has been said, it is hard to escape the feeling of hopelessness surrounding this issue. None of the information cited in this piece is particularly hard to find, I’m sure one could produce equitable findings on any similar topic that will pop up in the coming months just by taking an hour of their afternoon to look. But I will attempt to answer the question of “Why should you care about this?” There are many people I’ve come in contact with who assert opinions such as, “This does not affect me, so why does it matter?” or “I’m too tired with everything going on to care about this right now” or even “I struggle too, where’s my statistics?” To those people I say, you should be concerned about this because, regardless of your perceived privilege, these issues affect us all. The people and the institutions that police your streets should be there to protect everyone in your community, not just the white people, and not just the wealthy few on top. Your protections and privileges will not go away by extending those protections to other people. I believe it will help us create an environment rich both economically and culturally. as well as sculpt a society where people on both sides of the badge don’t have to die for a routine traffic stop.

Works Cited

Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz. “Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable.” Pew Research Center's Journalism Project, 27 Aug. 2020.

Brown, David, director. Dallas Police Chief 'We're Asking Cops To Do Too Much In This Country'. YouTube, CBSDFW, 11 July 2016.

Edwards, Frank, et al. “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 20 Aug. 2019.

History.com Editors. “Black Codes.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 1 June 2010.

Porter, Rick. “TV Long View: How Much Network TV Depends on Cop Shows.” The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter, 20 June 2020.

Sierra, Stephanie, and Lindsey Feingold. “Petaluma Police Receive More than $1.3 Million in Military Surplus Equipment over Past Decade.” ABC7 San Francisco, KGO-TV, 30 June 2020.

Twohig, Niall. “Day 6 - A House Divided.” WCWP 100. 2021, UC San Diego, UC San Diego.