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Michael Wood

Ms. Eisner

English 4 - Period 4

13 March 2023

The Good, the Bad, and the Police

“Serve the ball”, said my older brother as we played our made-up game called Slennis.

All of a sudden his phone starts to ring and he answers it. “Hello mom”, “Get yourself and your

brothers home right away there are riots going on downtown near you” she quickly urged us.

My brother replied and then hung up the phone saying that we had to get out of the tennis courts

right away. We rushed home with only the information of a riot occurring. A day later I found

out the reason for these riots and the brutal death of George Floyd. I could not believe it, how

could my world go from peaceful one minute, to guns shooting and looting going on around

town. I found out that there were four police officers that were restraining a seemingly helpless

black man. Excessive force was used to calm him down with one of the officers putting their

knee on his neck. Multiple times Floyd stated that he could not breathe, he was not fighting, and

he was not going to run.

In the end Floyd suffocated and medical assistance was not given until much later. A big

police mistake. Later, there was the part that intrigued me most. The Black Lives Matter

propaganda and the turning of this police mistake into a racist act by the police. The turn of this

action into racism was so instantaneous, the act got me thinking that this could not be the only

reason for the jump into Black Lives Matter and the accusation of racist towards the police by
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the public. This occurrence got me thinking of the possibilities of potentially racist and some

assuredly racist acts by the police and then some of the false accusations of racism to the police.

As an aspiring police officer myself, I seek to find more knowledge about the subject of

suspected police bias and where it comes from. My interest in the field of police work goes back

for as long as I can remember. The dream of every child is to be a fireman or a police officer and

like every child I had those dreams, only they stayed with me past my childhood. The public

seems to obtain a bias towards the police which discourages my aspiration because why would I

go into a field that is disliked when I want to be the hero that saves people and is out in the field

helping people everyday? The world changes everyday and with the new actions of the world

and the new intel, insightful information increases public knowledge and I want to be a part of

that information made public which is why I want to research: what are the factors that

contribute to the perception the public maintains about the bias towards police officers?

The purpose of the police is to, first and foremost, protect the public, then enforce the

law, and prevent crime and civil disorder. The police are the people who sign up to be okay with

being put in high risk and pressure situations, but all through this they must protect society as

best as they can. The police need to be unselfish and take the risks that may mean injury or

worse, but might save another. In an article called Proud of the Police Culture, Olham says, “We

are the ones who people call when they need help, we are the ones who run towards problems

and we are the ones who keep our domestic enemies at bay”(Oldham). Oldham explains the fact

that when people look for help, they look to the police who, no matter what the problem, always

show up to the situation. Their drive and consistency to show up when needed is something that

the police always maintain and is hard to see anywhere else. Now just because the police
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officer’s job is to protect the public, doesn’t mean they don’t feel fear for themselves. A police

officer has to think about others and put them before his own life. In the article An Empirical

Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, Fryer explains, ““Fearing for my life, the

lives of the citizens in the area and my fellow officers I began to fire my rifle at the

suspect”(Fryer). This quote from the article tells of an officer who is in a high speed car chase

and the car starts to shoot at him. Being the reason for someone else losing their life is tragic,

but the police want to protect others so they will fire their gun to protect society. Being a police

officer means being able to keep one’s head in high pressure situations and instantaneously think

through the problem, come up with a solution, and see the outcome, all in the outcome to do the

right thing. In the article Proud of the Police Culture, Oldham continues to explain the bravery

of a cop saying, ““Look at any number of officer involved shooting incidents and we do not see

the police retreating, we do not see officers throwing down their badges and walking off the job

at the moment of truth”(Oldham). The article tells of the need for the police and their bravery in

doing so. The police’s job is to keep the public safe, but also their individual mindset is towards

the safety of the public as their first priority.

Police are given weapons and put in a position of risk everyday, and the importance of

having a good cop who will do the right thing for the benefit of the public in these high pressure

situations is crucial. In an article entitled Police Catch One Gunman In Va. School, there is a

dire circumstance where a man with a gun gets close to an elementary school. Now if the

gunman had shot and killed any one of these poor kids in the elementary school, the police

would have been berated from the public as to how they didn’t do their job. But consider the

police, in this moment, and their going after a man with a gun who could shoot and kill them. As
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it is, these police showed incredible intelligence and the article says, “‘The police stopped

shooting when they got onto the school grounds,’ said Doug Poretz, school system information

officer. ‘The administration thinks they showed fantastic wisdom and caution.’ …’He ran in and

down a hallway about 50 feet to the boy’s locker room.’ Police were close behind and arrested

the man in the locker room. They said no further shots were fired and no children were present

in the locker room when Allamon was arrested”(Omang). This is an example of the police

putting the public at a higher importance than themselves. They charged after the gunman,

knowing that they themselves would not shoot on the elementary school ground. The police

even managed to arrest the man before anyone was hurt, especially one of the kids. This

situation was an example of having the right officers on the job. Now these were good cops on

the job, but it does not always turn out that way. There is another occurrence where bad cops

were on the job to arrest a man who had tried to pay for cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty

dollar bill. The police were called to arrest this man, but the man did not want to be put into the

car because he said he was claustrophobic. This man’s name was George Floyd who many

around the country know as the man who was killed accidently when the police tried to restrain

him. This act got a crazy amount of media to it, as George Floyd was black, and the act was

deemed racist. In the article How George Floyd Died, and What Happened Next, the situation is

stated and the punishments for the tragedy were stated, “Mr. Chauvin and the three other officers

involved in Mr. Floyd’s death… were fired and charged with a variety of crimes”(The New York

Times). These were bad officers on the job, who dealt with the problem in one of the worst ways

possible, by killing the suspect. There are times when this can be necessary, and save those

around the area, but this was not one of those times. George Floyd was not showing any
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aggressive behavior, along with not actively resisting against the police. Now if the officers who

dealt with the elementary school situation were put into this affair, the outcome would have been

different. The need for a good cop on the job is vital, and the people who hire the officers need

to know how the officer will think when a high pressure situation is thrown at them.

The police have had bad experiences, where bad or inexperienced officers were on the

job and as a result, the best outcome for the public was not obtained. An active police officer

explained in an interview, “So it’s more important to have good people on recruiting and

development type jobs of bringing people in that are right and good quality types than to just hire

somebody that you’re kinda iffy about and then later at the end you gotta fire them and they may

have to be prosecuted, like those knuckleheads with Mr. George Floyd”(Milner). Even officers

can see that this occurrence was not the right response to the Floyd incident. Now this speculates

that the right men for the job are in the police department, but there are also bad men for the job.

The best thing to find out which is which, is to put them in all sorts of different high pressure

situations, and see what the result is. If you better the training and its diversity in covering all

types of occurrences, the odds are better that the cop will do the right thing when push comes to

shove. Another time when the police had the wrong man on the job, was in the article Racist

Police Violence Reconsidered. In this article a man who had mental issues called the police,

because he was doing drugs and afraid that he might do something to himself. The police

officers showed up and tried to calm him down. They ended up putting him in a restraining

position where his body was pinned, flat on the ground; one of the officers had their knee on his

upper back, close to his neck. None of the other officers were concerned about the one officer

killing the man, and as the article goes, “ …the police officers made him lie face down on the
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grass, and one of them pressed a knee into his back. He remained in this position for 13 minutes

until he suffocated”(McWhorter). This man’s name was Tony Timpa. He was a white man with

mental complications. This was a terrible example of the wrong officers on the job, who didn’t

know the correct amount of force to deal with the situations.

Since the police are in a role of protection for the public, they are seemingly called by the

public to be perfect and do nothing wrong; these views can lead to possible policism. The term

policism means to obtain a certain hate for any sort of person belonging to law enforcement. In

Oldham’s article, Proud of the Police Culture, he explains, “For the last decade, there has been

the steady beating of the drum for officers to ‘not give in to the culture.’ This has come from

many corners including the media, which will usually cry that the ‘police culture’ represents a

threat to something or other that they hold near and dear to their ever changing heart”(Oldham).

The article tries to denote a belief that the police culture is a good thing, and there has to be a

camaraderie among the people who go out to fight criminals and enforce the law everyday. Now

the media is the platform in which many folks get their news from, and Oldham is saying that the

media has done nothing but bash the police culture for the last 10 years. This constant degrading

of the police without proper investigation is something that can contribute to policism. In a

study called, An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force, Fryer

describes, “Taken alone, officer-involved shootings are the most extreme and least used form of

police force and thus, in isolation, may be misleading. Second, the penalties for wrongfully

discharging a lethal weapon in any given situation can be life altering, thus, the incentive to

misrepresent contextual factors on police reports may be large”(Fryer). These rare occurrences

of an officer actually pulling out their gun are so few and far between that the media jumps onto
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any situation where this happens and gives it massive media attention. Fryer tries to explain that

these penalties for officers wrongfully shooting their gun are so horrible that the media wants to

bring society along in these events and dramatize them for massive public attention. The way in

which only the bad of the police gets massive public attention, results in the media’s incentive to

broadcast just that. This is one of the biggest causes that leads to the policism that the public can

gain.

The police force needs well trained officers on the job as much as possible. There is

good and bad in the history of the police, but the right cops have always done what is best for the

community. Of course accidents happen, but with better training and the pursuit of bettering the

officers, the mistakes can be severely cut down. In the article How George Floyd Died, and

What Happened Next, The New York Times explains the aftermath of the George Floyd incident

saying, “The death of George Floyd… drew widespread outrage after a video circulated online

showing Officer Derek Chaucin holding his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck on a Minneapolis street

corner as he gasped for breath”(The New York Times). Better training for these police officers

would have bettered the result, including maybe never hiring these officers in the first place. In a

different article, Racist Police Violence Reconsidered, another incident occurred where poorly

trained officers accidentally killed a man who wasn’t struggling, “Tony Timpa was 32 years old

when he died at the hands of the Dallas police in August 2016…Not many people have seen this

video, however, and that may have something to do with the fact that Timpa was

white”(McWhorter). This article reinforces the need for better training, however, it discourages

the idea of the media covering this fact because the man was white. This circumstance wasn’t

widely known because the media thought the public wouldn’t react to it as much because the
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man was white. From this, the investigation of the George Floyd incident should be further

continued to question the conclusion of racism as the reason for the death of George Floyd. In

my Thomas Milner Personal Interview, Milner described a man who he and his squad were

ordered to arrest. The man wanted to struggle and resist being arrested. The man was a fighter

and was on drugs that were enhancing his strength, so he was able to actually toss officers

(including Milner) out of his way. Milner explains the situation as a victory, where the right

force was used to not hurt the suspect and keep the public safe, “Well in that instance lethal force

of using a firearm and shooting this person would have been way too much, and just using our

weaponless defensive tactics with our hands was insufficient. So we had to use a combination of

all of us working together, some of us striking him with baton in appropriate areas, not headshots

or anything like that, just in body limbs and chest. Then, we finally used a technique, which is

used on people who were PCP (drug) users back in my day of dogpiling”(Milner). The man was

struggling and needed to be restrained. The way to do that was not killing him, but effectively

restraining him to where he wasn’t in any danger; neither were the officers or the public. This is

an example of the right officers just doing their job, the right way.

The factors that lead to the public bias towards the police, has to do with the media, only

giving the bad information. The public generally acts negatively towards the police because the

media knows that only major police mistakes will get the publicity wanted. Looking into all the

evidence that disregards overall police racism, there seems to be mistakes made with blacks and

whites alike. Being a police officer takes a certain sort of person. One has to be ready to face

life and death situations while keeping their head to make the best decisions that benefit

everyone including the suspect. Mistakes happen, but the good happens too. The problem is the
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media biasedly only putting out information against the police. An easy way to change the

public’s perception of the police is to simply and equally put out all the occurrences of police

successes and mistakes. When this is achieved the public will lose their bias towards the police

and will be seen as the good guys fighting crime to keep society safe.

Works Cited

Bass, Sharon. “Despite Law, Police Fail To Report Bias Crimes.” The New York Times; Proquest

Historical Newspapers: U.S. Major Dailies. April 23, 1989. Accessed February 22 2023.

Fryer Jr, Roland. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force”

Washington Post. Retrieved from

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf. July

2017. Accessed 9 March 2023.

McWhorter, John. “Racist Police Violence Reconsidered” Criminal Legal News. Retrieved from

https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2021/nov/15/racist-police-violence-reconsidered

/. November 15, 21. Accessed 9 March, 2023.

O’Connor, William. “A Black Cop Infiltrates the KKK: While he was a Colorado Springs police

officer, Ron Stallworth successfully infiltrated the KKK, even though he was black.” The

Daily Beast, New York: The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. May 27, 2014.

Accessed 22 February 2023.

Oldham, S. “Proud of the Police Culture” Law and Order, 54(5), 18-18, 21. Retrieved from

https://www.proquest.com/docview/197252677/A9F5155E846742D5PQ/7?accountid=41

498. Accessed 9 March, 2023.

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Omang, Joanne. “Police Catch One Gunman In VA. School” The Washington Post. May 18,

1974. Accessed 22 February 2023.

Sager, Mike, and Athelia Knight. “Suspected Killer of Officer Slain By District Police.” The

Washington Post. February 15, 1980. Accessed 25 February 2023.

The New York Times, “How George Floyd Died, and What Happened Next.” September 8, 2020,

Accessed 25 February, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/article/george-floyd.html

Milner, Thomas. Personal Interview. February 25, 2023.