The Dangerous Freedom of the American Police

Today, a judge found three New York City cops not guilty in the massacre of a guy named Sean Bell outside his bachelor party at a strip club in Brooklyn. As often happens, three undercover cops precipitated an "incident," then pumped 51 bullets into Sean Bell's car, killing him and wounding a couple of his friends.

It was hardly a surprise that the cops were acquitted. The witnesses were Bell's friends but a lot of them had rap sheets and they didn't exactly conduct themselves as respectable citizens in the courtroom. That might not have been so damaging with a local jury of everybody's peers, but the lawyers for the cops moved to have the case heard before a judge.

As a result, there was no jury.

The cops might not have been credible either, but they didn't testify.

The issue underlying these kinds of cases is the higher level of aggressiveness that's developed among American police since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since the early seventies, the dominant image of freedom in this country has become the freedom of the police to commit crimes with impunity while they're at work. Movies like LA Confidential, police dramas like NYPD Blue, and reality shows romanticize the hyper-aggressive cop who disobeys orders, breaks the law, and kills people to pursue "justice." The Clint Eastwood/Mel Gibson cop needs freedom from red tape, freedom from supervision, freedom from second guessing, and freedom from considering the costs of so much freedom in the hands of self-righteous, trigger-happy kinds of guys.

At the same time, other images of male freedom have withered on the vine. Who associates freedom with heading a family, working-class leisure, cowboys, or John Wayne anynore? As a result, the freedom of the police has become the pre-eminent image of freedom in our society.

And the invasion of Iraq gave the cops more license than ever. Now, almost any excuse can trigger a violent outburst by police officers. About five years ago, one of my colleagues got screamed at for getting out of his car after he was stopped for inadvertently running a new stop sign. According to the cop's rationalization, the fact that the guy got out of his car led the cop to assume that he was a danger. In my view, the police officer was looking for a reason to intimidate someone and got what he wanted when my colleague got out of his car.

It used to be that blacks and hispanics got all the righteous violence from cops. But they're starting to generalize their intimdation to "respectable white people" as well. To give a minor example, two of the students in my freshman honors class have been tasered and another one was thrown to the ground after a traffic stop just last weekend (without being charged with anything). In fact, reports indicate that police have adopted tasering as a kind of recreational form of torture.

In the current atmosphere of police license, there was no chance that Sean Bell's family would get justice. In fact, there's little chance that anyone would get justice in relation to the police.

Who knows, maybe Peggy Noonan will get tasered next.