To Protect and Serve

Roughly twenty years ago, I lived in a small, southern Indiana town called Princeton while teaching at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. My two children, both in their early twenties lived somewhere else and had for a considerable amount of time. My wife and I had the two-story home on State Street to ourselves and our dogs. The police station, also on State Street, was less than two blocks away. Our name, McGarrah , was very familiar in Gibson County. My father ran a successful business there for four decades and I grew up there along with my sister. I’m giving you this information because this is all about context. Oh, I’m also white. That’s important.

Another contextual matter worth considering was the tragedy of 9/11. After those terrible terrorist attacks and the formation of Homeland Security, the federal government began allotting huge sums of money and truckloads of used military equipment to local police forces around the nation. Ostensibly, the money and equipment were to be used to “beef up” security and protect citizens from foreign terrorists. The cash provided extra training supposedly for officers unfamiliar with military tactics and counter-insurgent warfare. The equipment—body armor, gas masks, automatic rifles, grenades, and urban combat vehicles in some cases—allowed the police the firepower to defeat the Taliban should they attack local Wal-Marts.

Into this setting came many inexperienced, young police officers. Men and women who had grown up watching “reality” TV, especially shows like Cops. They had been added to police forces quickly with the extra money given to those forces by the federal government. It’s questionable how much training these new recruits received. What’s not questionable is how much experience in dealing with and discerning violent and nonviolent confrontations the new officers garnered in sparsely populated rural America. None. To my knowledge there have been no terrorist attacks in Southern Indiana’s farm communities, nor are there likely to be—EVER. There may be a march once a year, but most people call it the Easter Parade, and the protest comes from preschoolers that missed the candy train.

It is true that police are paid a terrible salary for providing a necessary service, especially when they put their lives on the line every day. But in this 21^st century, gun-crazed, right-wing whacko country the same could be said for schoolteachers. In 2013, one hundred and five police officers lost their lives in the line of duty. Thirty of those deaths came by gunfire. This is tragic, but about average for a year in this country. Beginning with Columbine several hundred people have died from shootings on school campuses in the US. Cops in small towns still have a pretty good chance of retiring without ever needing to point their weapons at another person.

Unfortunately, the influx of military weapons changed the mission of these small-town police forces from “protect and serve” to “attack and occupy.” I say changed the mission, but that’s not accurate, or that simple. What evolved was attitude, from Barney Fife to Rambo. Give a kid a new toy and that kid will seek play time for it. For the last few years, we’ve been living with county and urban police forces that have expanded their use of SWAT like tactics to unprecedented and unnecessary levels. There are now 50,000 SWAT raids per year. That’s an increase of 1400% since SWAT units were formed. Many of those raids produce no tangible results and can cause injury or death to innocent people. This isn’t a highly publicized fact. I urge you to do some research yourself, and I don’t mean watching Fox News. For the most part, gone are the days when policemen walk beats and converse with their neighbors as human beings rather than enemies.

Don’t get me wrong. We can all name large urban areas where these community servants have every right to be cautious and find themselves in almost constant danger from drug dealers, sociopaths, and gangs of criminals. They need extra weaponry and special tactics and they deserve a lot of credit for the work they do. But, do they need 93,000 machine guns, 435 mine-resistant combat vehicles, and 400 tanks? I have never had to cross a mine field to get to the liquor store. Let me share with you two examples that I have witnessed in my life that indicate things are out of control.

Somewhere around 1960, my father got himself elected as City Judge in Princeton. Major crime was an oxymoron, like bittersweet, alone together, or dull roar. One year we had to lock our doors because a killer named Lesley Irvin escaped an Evansville jail, one year Roy Swain beat up the fire chief, and there was always trouble with public urination behind the Three Aces tavern. But children played safely outside and walked to school with little fear of molestation. My father needed no serious jurisprudence, just common sense—a quality which he exhibited in most all things except for poker and martinis anyway—to be a city judge. He made a good officer of the court.

During his four-year tenure, we had one serious crime. Beckner’s Jewelry Store on the town square got broken into and robbed late one night. The alarm went off just as it should have. Two of Princeton’s finest arrived and rushed in the front door. As they did, the burglar escaped out the back door, jumped into his car, and fled out of town via Highway 41. Somewhere around Haubstadt, Indiana, the State Police pulled the car over and arrested him. When the trial was underway, my father called one of the two officers to the stand for testimony.

            “If you arrived while the burglar was inside the building, why didn’t one of you go in the front door and one of you go in the back?” He asked.

            “Well, John Bill, if we would have done that somebody could have got hurt,” replied the officer, and he seemed very sincere in his response.

Now, fast forward four decades. Remember what I wrote in the first paragraph. I was in my house one weekend on State Street, a block and half from the police station. The TV hummed in the background while I dozed comfortably in a recliner chair not far from the front door. My wife was out of town. I remember waking to flashing lights, red and blue, outside my window and wondering to myself in that daze of semi-consciousness that comes with a startling arousal from sleep, was this an acid flash from the sixties or a UFO? I think I had been watching reruns of the X-Files. The strobed lightning outside my window was followed quickly by several loud bangs on the front door. I had no fear for my life in Princeton, so I stood and opened it without looking to see who it was. Five young police officers littered my porch. Each one had his own particular Rambo-esque pose. Two carried rifles, one held a teargas grenade launcher, one had his hand on his pistol, and the oldest—maybe around thirty—began interrogating me. Interestingly, they were all clumped together in such a way that, even though they wore body armor, a hand grenade would have killed them all, to quote my drill instructor in the Marine Corps.

            “Where is Leslie McGarrah?”

            “I have no idea, possibly Cincinnati?” I said, smiling. “Why?”

            “We’re here to serve a warrant. Evansville has requested it.”

            “Well, Leslie is a lot like me. She lacks common sense about things sometimes, but I’ve never known her to engage in criminal activity. What’s the warrant for?”

            “I don’t know. They didn’t tell us.”

            “Who would know?”

            “You’d have to call the Vanderburgh County Court for that.”

The other four officers were beginning to pace on the porch like a group of housewives at Target waiting for the doors to open after Thanksgiving. Considering the armaments brought to my door, even I was beginning to get nervous.

            “Don’t you think that two patrol cars and five officers might be a little overwhelming since I’m only a block and a half up the street from the police department, and since you don’t know what crime she’s supposed to have committed but common sense tells you it’s probably a traffic ticket or something?” I asked. “Besides, you’re scaring the hell out of the neighbors.”

I must admit that at this point, the one in charge looked a little sheepish and didn’t order his troopers to rush past me into the house.

 “Sometimes we get bored just sitting around.”

With that reply everyone left, and no one died. However, the incident rattled me, and I thought about some things that night. What if I had been paranoid and well-armed myself? What if I had been black? The past year has proven that getting stopped for a misdemeanor traffic violation while being black can and does sometimes end in a death sentence. What if I had been aggressive instead of passive? What if shots had been fired and one of the neighborhood kids injured or killed by a stray bullet? Was the situation created by these officers, not me, worth the risk they imposed? I called the Vanderburgh County Court Clerk’s office the next morning and got angrier. I told the lady who I was and what happened.

She chuckled a bit and explained, “When your daughter lived in Evansville, she received a twenty-five-dollar ticket for a seat belt violation. It’s a non-moving traffic ticket, but she never paid it. So, the court issued a bench warrant.”

“Those guys came charging to my home for twenty-five bucks and a traffic ticket in another town?”

“Sometimes they call down here at night looking for something to do and we give them names of people with outstanding warrants.”

Fortunately, the police chief at the time was a friend of mine. We had both served in combat in Vietnam. I walked to the station and asked to see him. After I ranted for several minutes at the possibility of serious injury that could have occurred for twenty-five dollars, he held up his hand for me to stop and shook his head.

“I guess I’m going to have to quit letting them watch Cops on TV in here at night.”

So, dear readers, you tell me. Have we improved upon the motto “To Protect and Serve” by militarizing our police forces, or have we created one more situation in our society that will continue to bite us in the ass?