From the Editor: Police Series Update

By Jacob Rueda

For a while now, I've been wanting to do an interview series with active members of law enforcement to get a more balanced perspective on policing and all that it entails.

A video I posted on YouTube shows what is basically a sense of frustration with the two police departments I've spoken to. However, it's more than just being frustrated with those departments. It's really about them allowing the imbalanced perspective of police to continue through their silence.

Law enforcement has, and continues to be, a controversial field of work. It's not enough to say "there are good cops and there are bad ones." It's also not enough for them to have social media profiles where they only show glowing stories about police as it is for corporate media or fringe profiles to show the worst sides of policing. There is context that is missing and the series I propose would hopefully fill that context for greater public understanding.

In this era where police actions are under intense public scrutiny, it would behoove departments to go beyond traditional media narratives and talk about things like disciplinary actions, budgets, technology, mental health, drug use among officers, job dissatisfaction for those who experience it and how those things affect policing because they do but nobody knows about it to appreciate how they affect it.

While the reason given in the past (at least to me) has been "We don't want to reveal information that may compromise an investigation," talking about how societal, governmental, financial, technological, and personal pressures is hardly the stuff that reveals the name of witnesses, discoveries, or anything of the sort.

If anything, such “compromises” are often used a rhetorical shield to avoid scrutiny of the system itself. So the question becomes: what kind of information do institutions treat as dangerous—and why?

Because when departments refuse to talk about training culture, morale, or public responsibility, it's more about protecting a narrative than it is about protecting a case. And since most people don't trust police anyway, their arguments fly out the window, again without context being provided for greater public understanding. Watch the video below to learn more.