Harry's Freedom Foxhole - Cops Are Dick Pig Assholes

Cops are dicks. This has always been one of the immutable laws of civilization, from that asshole who point-blank pepper-sprayed those kids at UC Davis to the jerks who hammered Christ onto the cross and then went out to drink passum or whatever. Maybe getting a badge and a little bit of power turns regular people into dicks, or maybe there’s a self-selection process by which assholes and bullies are naturally drawn to a career that lets them hassle people—that’s one of those chicken-or-egg questions that we could argue forever.

Exhibit 25,877 in the “Cops are dick asshole pussies” museum is the Facebook group that some of New York’s finest created to say racist stuff about the West Indian Day Parade in their spare time. For those of you who aren’t in New York City, that parade is probably the wildest tradition remaining in the five boroughs now that the Halloween Parade is no longer filled with heroin-addicted transvestites and gang members. It’s basically a massive roaming party that happens every Labor Day where islanders dress up in crazy colorful costumes, listen to dancehall music, and occasionally get a little rowdy—there were a reported 16 arrests and 14 guns seized by police at the 2011 parade.

The 2011 event was also a showcase for cops’ dickishness. There were the officers who accidentally arrested city officials, and there were the cops caught on video freaking-slash-dry-humping with some of the dancers, which I guess isn’t all that jerkish, just unprofessional.

The discovery of the Facebook group was a little different than either of those two bits of unpleasantness, because it couldn’t be excused away as a mistake in the heat of the moment. Cops were openly calling parade-goers “animals” and “savages,” a nasty reminder that racist cops aren’t just in movies from the 70s.

Where this becomes a rights issue—and where the New York Civil Liberties Union stepped in—is that it’s not illegal to be racist. Once you take your uniform and badge off, you’re free to say whatever you want just like anyone else, even if what you want to say is that the world is run by lizards or that Jews drink blood. Putting up with that kind of speech is the price we pay for living in a country where I can say unequivocally that all cops are dicks. And loose, occasionally offensive bar talk has been around for as long as speech itself has been around—who hasn’t said something ugly after a bad day on the job?

But thanks to the internet, it’s possible for loose talk to be saved forever and available for the public view, and saying something publicly is very different than slurring it to your friend late at night, especially when it comes to your job. If I worked in ad sales, for instance, and decided to hop on Twitter and talk a bunch of shit about my client and how he’s got a small dick and his product causes cancer, I’d probably get fired, because my job is to keep the client happy and I clearly fucked up. Same goes for a Starbucks barista who starts going around publicly saying that she puts her pussy hair in the coffee—you’ve got the constitutional right to say that stuff, but your employer has the constitutional right to reprimand or fire your dumb ass if you embarrass yourself. Some companies even have their employees sign contracts outlining the kind of speech that you can get fired for—that’s what was behind NPR’s famous firing of the freelancer who took part in Occupy Wall Street.

So those cops are in the shit, and they’ll almost certainly get disciplined, and possibly fired. But the cynical way to look at this is that the cops weren’t published for what they said, but for letting their faces and names get attached to what they said. Anonymous free speech is impossible for employers to police, and if you step into certain forums, you’ll find that cops (or at least people who say they’re cops) are saying the exact same stuff that got the Facebook cops in so much trouble. When it comes to the intersection of free speech and your job, the general rule is the same general rule that criminals follow: Don’t get caught.

Previously - Sex and Kids

@HCheadle