Better And Better: Accountability: Acting like the good guys should.

I am a career peace officer. So far I only have 26 years of work experience, and years of training before that. My late father was a peace officer for 45 years. I was reared with strong ideas about the comportment of a peace officer sort of baked into how I try to do things.

A large tenet of being a good cop is ACCOUNTABILITY.

Now, I know that this concept goes against every macho cop movie from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. In the Dirty Harry series, Inspector Callahan is being forced to kowtow to a liberal department that is more worried about doing things by the book than it is in catching criminals or worse yet: shooting them at the time. The 1980’s Stallone flick Cobra embraces this genre whole-heartedly: Stallone’s character kills a hostage-taker before he can execute the hostages, but is admonished for disregarding police procedure. No cop in the series Walker: Texas Ranger ever filled out a Use Of Force Report. Ever.

While the idea of a rogue cop slashing red tape and dispensing with policy and procedure (and often the law) may hurry the plot along and appeal to the self-selected audiences for such shows, I invite you to ask yourself: What if that same cop was wrong? “Wrong about what?” you might well inquire. Well, wrong about everything. Or anything. He fixates on a suspect for the crime, and picks the wrong one, and believes that he has the perpetrator. He dispenses with policy and the law, and violates the rights of the person whom he believes to be a Bad Guy. In this scenario, you have a dangerous person empowered with the office of police, powers to arrest, and force options, and he is not being held accountable for it. If you’re an innocent person that he sets his sights upon, you are suddenly in a nightmare. In such a situation, the hero is in fact a villain.

When I or any officer in my department use force beyond “a firm grip” or handcuffing a person, we have to fill out a Use Of Force report. We have to identify ourselves during investigations and contacts with people in the community while in the course of our duties. We have to present credentials when asked for them. We have to notify our supervisors of critical events, and later document them for review, knowing that the report will be subject to public scrutiny later, and that intentionally misreporting the facts on a report is a felony offense.

We follow laws and policies that state that we cannot make stops and detentions made solely upon race, ethnicity, country of origin, or religion.

We do not disproportionately apply enforcement to a person because that person expressed criticism of us.

We do not exceed the authority granted by law or policy, regardless of our desire to catch whom we perceive as a lawbreaker. And if we mess up and do overstep, then we do not attack a party for pointing it out. We don’t cover our faces, patrol without identification, attack citizens who are critical of us, and enter residences without criminal warrants or permission to come in. We don’t stop people because they look foreign to us. We are accountable.

I’m not saying that we are infallible; we do get it wrong sometimes. Hell, I've made errors, and paid for them. My dad (who retired as an internal affairs lieutenant) used to say, "The only cop who never screws up is the cop who never does anything." And when we get it wrong, we should own it, and figure out how to do it right.

When we have to use deadly force, we invite a third party to investigate the use of deadly force, even when it clearly was justified. Why? Because that’s how questions of justice and accountability are satisfied. If there is no investigation and we just immediately declare an incident to be a clean shoot, then we are casting doubt upon ourselves and our profession at large. It doesn’t matter that the cop who did it was a good guy. It doesn't matter that he was on the side of the angels. If it’s a good shoot, then a good investigation should clear that. This is how the public trust is earned and maintained. This is how you keep peace officers professional. They should DREAD having to use deadly force.

This is not what a peace officer looks like.

For starters, real cops doing interviews and engaging in detentions should have body cameras whenever possible. They should be identifiable. No face coverings unless there is a compelling specific reason. (Gas masks, an undercover agent on scene, or the like.) They should wear identification.