A Path to Some Alleviation of Bigoted Police Attitudes

            As I was reading through “Two Shades of Blue”, I was struck by the depth of the bitterness held by many of the interviewed police officers. I had not expected them to be particularly virtuous or pleasant, but I had assumed that they would feel sympathy for most of the victimized people and high-crime communities they work with. What instead seems to be true for these Baltimore police officers is that their frequent exposure to the most socially dysfunctional areas of their city—especially during their earliest, formative time as police, when they are all assigned to work in these places—causes many of them to maintain or develop discriminatory views of the people who live in them. They come to see residence in high-crime neighborhoods and exposure to the illegal activities that go on within them as personal choices, and become frustrated that their aggressive methods of law enforcement do not tend to root out the sources of criminality.

            If these are attitudes that police officers in other American cities hold as well, initiatives like Street Outreach and Operation Ceasefire may be even more beneficial than they initially seem. Smith indicates that these initiatives can sharply curb crime rates in unstable communities; by therefore lightening the work load of local police forces (which are often understaffed) they could help to erode the resentment that some police officers develop when they begin to see high-crime communities as ‘hopeless’. The discriminatory attitudes that individual officers held before police work may not be changed, but Moskos’s article left me with the impression that much of the bigotry that policepeople hold toward the citizens that they are bound to protect stems from frustration with the unchanging landscape of crime that they necessarily witness.