Words&Dirt

“‘You came here because you’re one of the people who study these monarchs,’ she said.

‘You are exactly right.  I spent the day doing a quick census up there.’

Quick, she thought, as in nine hours.  Had he counted them all?  ‘So, you do what, experiments, or observations?  And write up what you find out?’

He nodded.  ‘A dissertation, articles, a couple of books.  All on the monarch.’

‘A couple of books,’ she said to this man, recalling his look when she’d informed him, They’re called monarchs.  So there were worse things than feeding meat loaf to a vegetarian.  Like blabbing wiki-facts to the person who probably discovered them in the first place.  She was in the same camp with her blithe, cheese-covered daughter here, acting like a toddler with food on her face.  Minus the good excuse of actually being one.

Preston, on the other hand, appeared keen to crawl into the man’s lap, and Cub wasn’t far behind him.  Only Cordie remained aloof, putting the finishing touches on her composition, getting her hair into the play.  Ovid Byron did not seem insulted by any of it.  He was helping himself to seconds on the casserole.

‘So,’ Dellarobia asked, ‘what kinds of things would you study, on a monarch?’

He finished chewing a mouthful before he spoke.  ‘Things that probably sound very dull.  Taxonomy, evolution of migratory behavior, the effect of parasitic tachinid flies, the energetics of flight.  Population dynamics, genetic drift.  And as of today, the most interesting and alarming question anyone in the field has yet considered, I think.  Why a major portion of the monarch population that has overwintered in Mexico since God set it loose there, as you say, would instead aggregate in the southern Appalachians, for the first time in recorded history, on the farm of the family Turnbow.’

They all stared, to hear their family name at the end of a sentence like that.

Dellarobia’s eye caught the remains of a pink balloon dangling from the fixture over the table, the months-old vestige of a birthday party she had overlooked in today’s cleaning binge and many others.  Small, limp, and shriveled, it looked like an insulted testicle, and although she obviously didn’t have those, she could guess.  It pretty well went to her state of mind.  You get racked, you keep going, but merciful heavens the hurt.

‘Mr. Byron,’ she said, ‘why did you let me rattle on like that through half of supper?  When you ought to have been telling us about the monarchs?’

He laughed and hung his head, feigning remorse to put her at ease, she could see that.  ‘Forgive me, Dellarobia.  It’s a selfish habit.  I never learn anything from listening to myself.'”

––Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, pg. 121-2

“In a 2006 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written in reaction to the killing of twenty-three-year-old Sean Bell––who went down in a storm of fifty bullets fired by NYPD cops––Joseph McNamara looked at the gradual change in the average cop’s mind-set since he walked a beat in New York.

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed.  An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.  Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds.  Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with sixteen high-caliber rounds, shotguns, and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances.  Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

Yes, police work is dangerous, and the police see a lot of violence.  On the other hand, 51 officers were slain in the line of duty last year, out of some 700,000 to 800,000 American cops.  That is far fewer than the police fatalities occurring when I patrolled New York’s highest-crime precincts, when the total number of cops in the country was half that of today.  Each of these police deaths and numerous other police injuries is a tragedy and we owe support to those who protect us.  On the other hand, this isn’t Iraq.  The need to give our officers what they require to protect themselves and us has to be balanced against the fact that the fundamental duty of the police is to protect human life and that law officers are only justified in taking a life as a last resort.

On the other side, it’s difficult to even get an estimate of the number of times police officers shoot citizens.  Some states require police departments to keep those figures, but national data is difficult to come by.  The New York Times reported in 2001, ‘Despite widespread public interest and a provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the attorney general to collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the cooperation of local police departments.’  The paper added, ‘No comprehensive accounting for all the nation’s 17,000 police departments exists.’  University of South Carolina criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert called the lack of reporting ‘a national scandal,’ adding, ‘These are public servants who work for us and are paid to protect us.’  The Las Vegas Review Journal also looked for national figures for its 2011 series on a rise in local police-involved shootings.  Little had changed since the New York Times report a decade earlier.

The nation’s leading law enforcement agency collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force.  In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life.

‘We don’t have a mandate to do that,’ said William Carr, an FBI spokesman in Washington, DC.  ‘It would take a request from Congress for us to collect that data.’

Congress, it seems, hasn’t asked.

Americans, then––both police officers and others––are regularly reminded about the inherent danger faced by police officers, even though the job is getting safer.  But not only aren’t figures about how many times cops shoot at, injure, or kill citizens publicized, the figures themselves haven’t been tabulated.  The federal government has been arming American cops with military-grade guns, vehicles, and other weaponry, but has little interest in knowing if all of that is affecting how and when police use lethal force against American citizens. Cops are told all the time that the public presents a threat to them, and that the threat grows more dire by the day.  But as for what sort of threat cops pose to the public, the public isn’t permitted to know.

These policies have given us an increasingly armed, increasingly isolated, increasingly paranoid, increasingly aggressive police force in America, and a public shielded from knowing the consequences of it all.”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 273-5