I was talking to my mom recently and she said, “I think pretty much all big city cops have PTSD.” That statement really struck me and I can’t refute it.
We’ve created a hopeless underclass and then created a police force to keep them suppressed. We’ve created a mythology on TV and films where “renegade cops” finally buck the system and “get tough,” and then are heroes.
I sawed off my finger with a table saw and I had post traumatic stress disorder for a few years after that. I could be talking with friends or in a restaurant, close my eyes and hear the saw and see the blood. It was totally involuntary. I couldn’t break away from it and I would be slack-jawed and speechless. It wasn’t dreamlike, it was more real than whatever I’d been doing before.
PTSD is no joke. It’s like someone hit me in the head with a bat. Given the stuff cops must see, I can’t imagine they don’t suffer as well. The people they’re policing probably also suffer from PTSD, given many of their circumstances. From my comfortable vantage point, I can’t imagine how tough it must be to get on with day-to-day life in the underclass.
PTSD isn’t a joke. Let me say that again. PTSD isn’t a joke. We’ve created enough trauma to go around. Cop violence is a real thing. I used to have very difficult interactions with law enforcement students in my year at community college. Maybe our mythology attracts some bad actors.
Sensitivity training isn’t going to fix this because, like everything else, I see this as class based. We need to lift people of color out of the underclass, especially African Americans. We need to stop talking about helping “the middle class” and start talking about helping the poor.
When black people own houses at the same rate as white people and have backyard pools at the same rate white people, we won’t think of them as less valuable because they won’t be in terms of money. Like it or not, in almost every conversation one of the first things that comes up is “what do you do for a living?” That’s like saying “how much money do you make and what sort of an education do you have?”
We might as well just cut to the chase and tell people our net worth right away. We need to stop patronizing movies and TV shows like “24” that show tough guy cops beating or torturing detainees and finally solve the crime. The action movie where problems are solved with guns or fistfights are our national myth for men.
But, back to my mom’s point. I think she’s right. I think city cops are on a tour of duty that never ends. I think a lot of them are ex-military because the vets are traumatized and being a cop is the closest thing to combat we have, and it’s pretty close. I think that the military way of policing is a byproduct of the conveyor belt from the deployment overseas in the army to city streets.
Sensitivity training won’t fix this. Like seemingly every problem, from the pandemic to global warming or income inequality to the surge of plastic, we need to step back and fix a whole host of problems that are complex and interrelated. We need to be real live grownups to do this. We need to be people that can hold contradictions in our heads and work methodically through steps. We need to be prepared to sacrifice for the common good. We need to be better than we are.
Adam Novitt lives in Northampton.