On Bossier City Police and the Thugs of the Cosa Nostra

I've been thinking about Charlie Chan lately. He was my first favorite fictional character. I am a great fan of the old Chan movies. Played by several actors over two decades, this character was best portrayed, in my opinion, by the Swedish actor Warner Oland throughout most of the 1930s. A wise polymath, Chan would interact with the public with a modest respect. Before making a point of order, he would invariably begin with the polite interjection, "Excuse, please—but...." What followed was a hard-hitting, logical, and necessary point. Chan did not waste words.

Yesterday one of my students, a pregnant woman in her twenties, was visited by a Bossier City, La. Police detective named Thomerson. The highlights: She was met in the main (public) reception area by a man of Asian decent who wore a badge and gun. I, and several others, were present in the area. She was told that she was not under arrest, but that she was to come with him to another jurisdiction to answer questions. She was not under arrest, but, he insisted, she had little choice but to come with him. She politely refused, but offered to meet with him after class to speak. He agreed to this but continued to brow-beat and threaten her with arrest if she did not come at the agreed upon time.

After agreeing to meet with her later in the day, he began to publicly emote. He raised his voice and took on the body language of a professional wrestler. He told various people in the vicinity that she was "stalling" him. His tone was aggressive and confrontational. "I do this for a living, I know when I'm being stalled!" The student who was on her way back to class, stopped and turned around.

"I'm w-what?" She asked in apparent confusion. At this point some ten feet away from the officer, and he moved toward her with determination. I was standing between the two of them. He stopped when he got near me and snapped at me, "get out of my face!" Given the fact that he had walked up to me, I felt that this was an un-reasonable demand. In the meantime, the student went back to class while the officer continued to emote.

In her absence he fretted that he was going to "look like an idiot," if she didn't meet him at four o'clock. He asked petulant questions, harangued those of us still present, caused a scene, and then left.

I stood amazed by what had just happened, and I thought about Charlie Chan. Like many Americans I derive at least some of my moral standards from the "movies," and it was from the iconic Asian-Hawaiian detective that I had first learned to respect the cops. Considering the positive signification of Asian policemen in my mind, the experience was particularly jarring. Never had my childhood hero browbeat and intimidated a pregnant woman; never had I seen him stand in a public hallway griping about the motives of a potential witness; and never had the venerable Chan complained that he would look like an idiot if a person of interest didn't show up for questioning.

But if such behavior is unacceptable in an average person, it is beyond contempt in a public servant. This point has a practical as well as moral dimension to it: it is understood by anyone who interacts with a person who is armed with a handgun that there is an unstated, but ever present, power differential. The person with the gun has an enormous amount of influence. That the armed person is a police officer does little to comfort the citizen who must deal with him. A policeman who walks up to a teacher who has only a red pen in his pocket, and tells him to, "Get out of my face!" is not only engaging in appalling behavior, he is also chipping away at the remaining veneer of respect and trust that we all want to have for our constabulary.

The recent decades have shown that law enforcement is not always the highly moral protectors of safety and service that they champion themselves to be. In fact, no longer are the police assumed to be virtuous. Recent examples of police and persecutory criminal activity continue to confirm this unpleasant fact. Several years ago, Alex Kozinski, a conservative judge on the 9th Circuit Appellate Court, stated that the fact of police perjury is, "an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges." In Los Angeles last year, the ugly details of the Ramparts precinct drug division became a matter of public record. These details included the theft of drugs by police officers as well as the "planting" of drugs on suspects. In one case, members of the unit planted a gun on a man they had shot and who remains paralyzed by the attack. Similar examples of police misconduct were reported by New York's Mollen Commission which stated, "The practice of police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: "testilying"
(http://www.constitution.org/lrev/dershowitz_test_981201.htm#N_10_> House of Representatives Judiciary Committee ). University of Florida Law professor, Christopher Slobogin, has recently produced an extensive survey of law enforcement perjury which indicate that such practices are endemic. From a moral point of view, a significant number of law enforcement personnel appear virtually indistinguishable from the thugs of the Cosa Nostra.

When the police help, we like the police. When they bully and bluster, which is too often the case today, we reasonably look for ways to protect ourselves. A policeman's job is hard, and it is supposed to be. In 1958's A Touch of Evil, Charlton Heston famously quipped, "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." Indeed, unless we wish to pass on to the future a culture of Brown-Shirt authoritarianism, we should resist the idea of the moral exceptionalism of the police.