(no subject)
I am going to continue the posts about dissecting motivation and emotional snarls, just...
There's some sort of high drama going on across the hall. Apparently someone called the police on the neighbours for being too loud, and the police came in expecting to break up a party. The rest is garbled, but I could hear a good portion of it through the door, and I have to say that what I heard from the police was so foreign to what I'd been raised to expect of them and what I'd seen from them in the interactions I've witnessed elsewhere - the tone, the phrasings they used were terribly aggressive, threats like "Don't make me go get a warrant" were slung around from the beginning, and when it escalated, because of course it escalated, they were slinging curses , threatening to take people to jail, and I'm sure there was at least one arrest. I caught snatches like "hook her up," and "you can think about getting a lawyer later," and, most disconcertingly, the repeated "you can follow your bitch later."
And that level of vehemence, that sort of vitriol... correct me if I'm wrong, but that shouldn't be coming out of the mouths of people whose job is to protect and serve the body of the public. Yeah, I know, people sling words like "bitch" around all the time, but for a person in authority to start using that on someone they're levering force on, or about someone they're levering force on... that leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. Standards of conduct should apply when you're dealing with the public. Honestly, cocooned here in the everyone's-friendly Midwest, I've never seen that sort of ugliness from a uniformed cop before.
Maybe the policeman was just having a bad day. Maybe he really was provoked past rationality, and I just couldn't hear any of that. But call me cynical; I feel like it's no coincidence that this took place in a much poorer-than-average neighborhood, by a white guy backed up by two more, against a black, black-vernacular-speaking family.
There's some sort of high drama going on across the hall. Apparently someone called the police on the neighbours for being too loud, and the police came in expecting to break up a party. The rest is garbled, but I could hear a good portion of it through the door, and I have to say that what I heard from the police was so foreign to what I'd been raised to expect of them and what I'd seen from them in the interactions I've witnessed elsewhere - the tone, the phrasings they used were terribly aggressive, threats like "Don't make me go get a warrant" were slung around from the beginning, and when it escalated, because of course it escalated, they were slinging curses , threatening to take people to jail, and I'm sure there was at least one arrest. I caught snatches like "hook her up," and "you can think about getting a lawyer later," and, most disconcertingly, the repeated "you can follow your bitch later."
And that level of vehemence, that sort of vitriol... correct me if I'm wrong, but that shouldn't be coming out of the mouths of people whose job is to protect and serve the body of the public. Yeah, I know, people sling words like "bitch" around all the time, but for a person in authority to start using that on someone they're levering force on, or about someone they're levering force on... that leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. Standards of conduct should apply when you're dealing with the public. Honestly, cocooned here in the everyone's-friendly Midwest, I've never seen that sort of ugliness from a uniformed cop before.
Maybe the policeman was just having a bad day. Maybe he really was provoked past rationality, and I just couldn't hear any of that. But call me cynical; I feel like it's no coincidence that this took place in a much poorer-than-average neighborhood, by a white guy backed up by two more, against a black, black-vernacular-speaking family.