EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
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In Praise of Public Safety
Police officers and sheriff’s deputies and other public safety workers often have an antagonistic relationship with reporters. Journalists are, it’s true, often inclined to look for the shocking and sensational.
Law enforcement officers know that, and tend to worry that reporters want to find a story that involves scandal, and one that may make them or their departments look bad. So they clam up and circle the wagons.
Reporters mutter about stonewalling, and then sometimes resist writing anything good about the police, even when they do something great.
The result, too often, is sort of a cold war-style standoff.
And that doesn’t serve anybody very well — especially the public.
The fact is that the police and the press do in fact need each other, and both sides need to realize that more. Forty years ago, I was working in Toledo, Ohio when all the police and firefighters went on strike. I know how I felt – scared — and other reporters and editors I knew were too.
A world without law enforcement is a dystopian world of anarchy, sort of like the one imagined by Thomas Hobbes. Life would indeed be nasty, brutish and short. We need the police. And police, fire and sheriff’s departments need the media, to get out their messages to the public, to honestly portray what they do.
And, sometimes, they need us to expose corruption in their ranks. There are dishonest reporters, as much as it pains me to say so.
There are crooked businessmen and politicians and athletes, and naturally, there are a few crooked cops as well.
But unlike those in most other jobs, public safety officials have a license to carry a gun and use it, and sadly, in a few cases, bullies and sadists in police forces have misused their authority. The good news is that it is harder for them to do so these days, not just because of dashboard cams and body cams, but because there are video surveillance cameras everywhere.
Most public safety officials are good and decent men and women, risking their lives for jobs that are, in my view, outrageously underpaid.
What we often forget is that our concept of “news” assumes the good is normal and not worth remarking on. If I go home tonight, as I plan to, eat dinner, clean up the yard and watch Netflix, nobody will pay any attention. If I go berserk and shoot up the neighborhood drug store, I will indeed be on the news.
In my perfect world, we would have tougher standards to weed out police who are bullies, and we would pay the good officers at least twice what we do now.
