"The Obligatory Caveat"

"Still, it’s a problem in that trying to avoid one misimpression leads to another.  The obligatory caveat suggests that there are two groups of cops, a large “good cop” one and a small “bad cop” one.  This further leads to the mistaken belief that if we could just get rid of the small “bad cop” group, everything would be hunky dory.  Not so.

There aren’t two discrete groups.  There are cops and cop culture.  The same police officer who will risk his life one day to save that of another, and the next day beat a black man for disrespecting him.  So is he a hero or a villain?  It’s all according to which day the video camera is on him.  It’s all according to whether you are the person saved or the person beaten. "

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/12/15/the-obligatory-caveat/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%206/21/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Remembering to escape the simple narratives.

I read this and planned to post it before the two incidents of police officers being shot, in Dallas and in Baton Rouge. And I still don't know how to process those moments. They scare me, for a collection of reasons, and to me they fall into that category in my head of "the American Mass Shooting Phenomenon". And given the "AMSP", it felt inevitable that at some point this would happen, that there are a lot of men who are on the cusp and just need some rationale.

And the AMSP causes this special kind of fear that has caused divisiveness and reverberating violence in every case, while people argue about the reason the man (always a man) did whatever it was and while they argue about how to prevent it and while they argue about who is actually sad and who is trying to profit politically. 

And these two shootings scare me because they amplify the problems described in this article, they make it so much harder for us to avoid the simple narrative, they make me feel like I need to be giving this "obligatory caveat" and it scares me that any of the people I communicate with might need me to do that, might think that I somehow want police officers to die.

I am not a member of the law enforcement community, nor are any of my family or friends, so I don't want to pull attention away from their pain and take up space by proclaiming my sadness for them (like when people continents away post about "thoughts and prayers" "my heart goes out to..." and clog up my newsfeed before I can see what has actually happened or encounter the words of the people actually affected). But, on a human-to-human basis, I hope that we can resolve and heal so that the law enforcement community does not have to feel this fear again.

Related: “For police accountability, look beyond individual racial bias”; “Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes says moments of silence in the House are an abomination”; Many school shooters, one common factor: a warped view of masculinity”