MY TURN-Someone once told me that if you dropped a frog into boiling water, it would jump out. But if you put it into a pot and then slowly raise the temperature around it, it would boil to death. Whether this is actually true or not, it seems like a pretty good analogy as to the situation we have now put our police into. Los Angeles has always taken the approach to police work that a small elite force of professional police are better able to effectively function, because in the past, the vast majority of the public supported and respected the law.
Sadly, this is no longer the case because those in power at the city, state, and federal level have created a present reality where we no longer socialize our population with enough of a public education to understand their own key role in maintaining social order. Simply stated, you can never put enough police in the streets to maintain social order, if the citizenry itself does not understand the importance of supporting the police and what they are there for.
Rather than foster a public education system that creates an awareness in our citizenry as to what their rights and obligations are in this society, we have accommodated to greater and greater dysfunction. Case in point: When I went to the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) during the 1950s and 1960s, the district not only had no police force, they had no need for a police force, since the vast majority of students showed up to school and would never have engaged in the violence, disrespect, and outright disobedience that is now endemic in virtually all but a few LAUSD schools.
Today, socially promoting students without fundamental skills and the resulting anti-social behavior they predictably exhibit, now requires an expensive LAUSD police force that wasn't necessary in the past, when student anti-social behavior was the exception rather than the rule.
Rather than maintain an acceptable level of behavior in our schools, those in power have accommodated and accepted a level of social disorder in our schools that subsequently is transferred to the society at large when these students get out of public school without basic skills or socialization.
This is a formula for disaster that has seen our prison populations skyrocket from 380,000 in 1978 to a present 2.4 million and with no end in sight.
While it is clearly unacceptable to have the abuse of prisoners that recently came to light in our LA Sheriff run jails, one must also wonder how reasonable it is to ask our sheriffs and police to deal with an ever growing population of predominantly poor and minority youth that have been pushed through LAUSD without any skills or social awareness as to how they can function as a positive force in our society.
The idle mind is truly the devil's playground. And as Michael Eric Dyson has said, "Intelligence always finds a way." That "way" can either be socially beneficial or socially disruptive and expensive for all of us.
With the discounting of the key roles teachers and police have performed in the past to maintain a continuity of social order, what we now see among teachers and police is a level of apathy where they clearly no longer see what they do as being valued by the society they are charged with protecting and serving.
Rather than enforcing the law, they have to function in a more and more dangerous environment that is the result of politicians and corporate interests being more concerned with money than the objective high standard of living for all people that should be the measure of our society's success.
When you see a police officer unnecessarily park his squad car in a red zone or pull over somebody and block a lane during rush hour, when it would have been just as easy to show respect for the law and people they are sworn to protect and serve, we should be concerned about the impossible position we have put our civil servants in for far too long that now evinces such anti-social behavior on their part.
Any resolution to this social issue will require those responsible for the shaping of our youth … parents, educators … to step up … long before the police arrive on the scene.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 29
Pub: Apr 8, 2014
