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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Norm Stamper
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December 9 - December 19, 2016
People talk about "bad apples" in police work. To me the whole barrel was moldy. Not once, growing up, did I have a positive contact with a police officer. I'm not claiming I was an angel, not saying my behavior didn't contribute to my "anti-police" attitude. It's just that I got neither protection nor service from my local police. All I got was no respect.
So why did I become one of them? I needed a job.
These are all good arguments for opposing capital punishment but my main objection is this: It's the coward's way out. How can we justify killing someone whose threat has ended with incarceration? In my mind it's an extension of the mentality of child abusers who know their victims can't fight back. Or of a cop who beats a handcuffed prisoner. I've felt this way since my second year as a police officer, back in the mid-sixties.
That rigid, top-down, highly centralized, militarily oriented "command and control" system simply does not work for policing-not in America, not in our multicultural, ostensibly pluralistic, democratic society. The paramilitary bureaucracy, or "PMB," as I've referred to it in my notes over the years, is a slow-footed, buck-passing, blame-laying, bullying, bigotry-fostering institutional arrangement, as constipated by tradition and as resistant to change as Mel Gibson's version of the Catholic Church. I cannot imagine other essential reforms in policing-improved crime-fighting, safety and
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There's one thing that the preceding cases, from accidents to willful misconduct, have in common: Almost all the victims survived. What if they had died, wrongfully, at the hands of police? Those multimillion-dollar settlements would have been pared down to the hundreds of thousands or the tens of thousands. Or to nothing. Financially speaking, in cold accounting terms, the city of San Diego would have been better off had Frances Maday perished in that accident.
