Even before the city of Memphis released video of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols’ brutal beating during a traffic stop, the five city police officers involved were given a familiar moniker: bad apples.
So it was in Baltimore following the in-custody death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in 2015, and in Cleveland after an officer there shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, and in Louisville, Kentucky, following the 2020 shooting death of 25-year-old Breonna Taylor during a “no knock” police raid, and even in Los Angeles when video showed officers beating Rodney King in 1991.
It’s always the bad apples. So many bad apples.
The full metaphor is “One bad apple spoils the barrel.” A moldy fruit infects its companions. The rot only worsens until the whole bunch is a loss.
That risk should be sufficient incentive to root out the bad apples quickly, lest the whole barrel be spoiled. Yet, as the nation has seen time and time again in these excessive force cases, the “bad apples” in American police departments are not removed, not drummed out of service, but allowed to inflict their brutality on more civilians each year.
Black and brown people frequently suffer disproportionately as a result, but they aren’t the only victims. White people aren’t immune to police violence and the communities where these officers serve face a profound loss of public trust when incidents such as in Memphis occur.
Everyone has a vested interest in getting problematic police officers off the street, no more so than the men and women who wear the badge. They know, better than others, how an extrajudicial killing or other form of unjustified police violence diminishes their profession, erodes trust with their communities and ultimately makes their jobs more difficult.
That is why, before Memphis released the Nichols footage, police chiefs moved to separate their departments from the actions of those officers. Virginia Beach Chief Paul Neudigate released a statement on Friday saying he was “outraged, heartbroken and disappointed” and that “the actions of those involved are not representative of the policing profession.” Other area chiefs expressed similar sentiments.
Neudigate is correct that the vast majority of those who serve in law enforcement do so with good intentions and sincere commitment to the public’s safety. But, as in every workplace, those who bend, and break, the rules are known to their colleagues. Officers are aware which of their coworkers are problematic. They know who the bad apples are.
Rooting them out is a different matter entirely. Oftentimes high-ranking officials, front-line officers and unions fiercely resist efforts at reform, such as independent oversight boards, even when they would be helpful in separating the dedicated and faithful from those who are unfit to serve.
That’s not to say that all reform efforts lack support among those in uniform. Many departments have embraced deescalation training and other strategies to resolve incidents without violence, and nearly everyone in blue agrees that better salaries would attract a higher caliber of recruits.
There is too permissive an attitude toward those who aren’t worthy of the uniform. But the risk of inaction contributes to a larger crisis: the erosion of the trust between a community and its law enforcement, which is necessary to effective policing and improved public safety.
Police officials routinely say they are asked to do too much, and communities should assist their work by narrowing their scope of responsibilities. Adding mental health teams to respond to people in crisis is one way to do so, but there are countless more.
Communities, including those in Hampton Roads, need officers themselves to be proponents of reform, to change the culture of policing and to turn their outrage over what happened in Memphis and too many other places into action. To do nothing — to let despicable, malevolent violence like this to stand without self-introspection and concrete proposals to improve — is to condemn the “good apples” to rot alongside the bad.
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