If we watched enough “CSI” and “Law & Order,” we know pretty much all there is to know about police work.
Right?
Of course not. So it’s no wonder fully a third of the posts on the website officer.com in December 2014 and January 2015 include something of the notion that the average citizen has no idea what it takes to be a police officer and that “civilians just don’t get it.”
They don’t, in fact — get it, that is. None of us ever fully knows someone else’s job until we do it.
Unlike the average butcher or machine shop worker, though, a police officer’s job often plays out in the media, leaving his or her actions — right or wrong — open to speculation by media, politicians, race baiters and average citizens.
This especially has been the case over the past half year as, increasingly, incidents in which a white officer kills a black suspect have become spectacles on which to take sides.
But it’s not limited to police shootings.
Members of the media, as public watchdogs and in order to report the news, often ask probing questions of politicians and seek hidden public information to present an accurate picture for readers and viewers. The politicians may not want to hide anything but believe the revelation of information could present a distorted view. So neither the worried politician nor the journalist trusts the other.
Politicians, meanwhile, are elected to speak for the people. Since they have no way of polling every member of their constituency on every vote that comes before them, they have to make up their minds about how to vote based on the best information they have. No matter how sound their reasoning, they will be second-guessed by someone who doesn’t have the information they do.
State Sen. Todd Gardenhire and his Senate colleagues who voted against Gov. Bill Haslam’s Insure Tennessee proposal in a special legislative session last month are learning that with the advent of hate-filled calls and graffittied buildings.
Though we supported the Insure Tennessee pilot program, we are astounded and ashamed at the abuse — beyond mere criticism — heaped on these legislators.
“You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” Harper Lee wrote in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” echoing an American Indian proverb and suggesting the empathy we all should have.