This commentary is by Michael Pill, a lawyer who lives in Burlington.
We recently bought a house in Burlington to age in place with younger family who live in the city. I am a confirmed leftist, a staunch anticapitalist with a doctorate in Marxian economic theory, a supporter of gun control and a Jew who believes that every human being is charged with the social mission of repairing the world in which we live. The struggle to eliminate all forms of prejudice that divide us is both an individual and collective responsibility.
We live in a class society where we middle-class folks do not always see and fully appreciate the darker underside of our society. I got my own rude awakening doing court-appointed criminal defense legal work when I began practicing law. I learned that while police officers are as human as the rest of us, they routinely put their lives on the line with every traffic stop and domestic disturbance call. One of my law partners was a former police officer, and another was the wife of a police officer. She lived in fear every time her husband left for a tour of duty. Her real-life nightmares included waking up at 2 a.m. and realizing he was not home even though his shift ended at 11 p.m. Turned out a major bar fight required holding over his shift to deal with multiple arrests. Another time she was awakened by a phone call from the police chief saying, “We are at the hospital, and he is going to be all right.” Her only consolation was knowing that if he had been killed or mortally injured, the chief would be at her door in person.
At all hours of the day and night, including holidays and weekends, in all kinds of weather, police officers are out there in cruisers, waiting for our 911 call. They are the reason we sleep soundly in our beds at night. They wear vests they know are not really bulletproof. Even if the vest stops a bullet, the impact can cause serious internal injuries. An officer who draws a weapon must make a split-second life-or-death decision that will be second-guessed at length by citizens, pundits and lawyers. They know the pistols they carry are no match for organized drug dealers’ semiautomatic weapons.
My immigrant grandfather used to say, “There are really three sides to every story: your side, my side and the right side.” Many criticisms leveled at police departments around the country are well founded and must be addressed. Problems such as racial profiling, lack of adequate training and police officers losing their tempers are real problems. One way to minimize unjustified police shootings is more and better training.
We must be especially careful about generalizing and simply assuming that because some police departments have serious problems, the same is true of every police department. In my book, passing judgment on people because they are police officers is no different from judging people by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or some other category. To borrow from the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, we must learn to judge police departments and police officers individually, not by the uniform and badge they wear, “but by the content of their character.”
We must also realize that, like all of us, police officers are human beings and therefore less than perfect. There is good and bad in all of us. Our task, as the fabric of our society unravels, is to strive to work together to bring out the good, both in ourselves and in our fellow human beings.
Burlington must face the fact that reducing the number of police officers from about 100 to around 60 now was a mistake that threw the baby out with the bath water. There is a correlation between gutting the city’s police department and the current sad state of Burlington’s downtown and public spaces. Adequate funding for the Burlington Police Department is an essential — albeit not the only — action necessary to make the city’s downtown and public spaces safe and usable for all once again.
