A California professor berated a student for suggesting that the large majority of police officers are heroes and don’t deserve the hate they are getting:
The professor (female) is the one who started the discussion by asking the student about him bringing up the police several times in his speech. But before he could even answer her question, ‘what is your concern’, she just went off on the subject saying:
Since, I mean, the whole reason police – it’s systemic, the issue is systemic because the whole reason we have police departments is because in the first place – where did it stem from, what’s our history, going back to what Jeremy was talking about, what does it stem from? It stems from people in the South wanting to capture runaway slaves.
Another student chimes in, presumably Jeremy, agreeing with the professor and says ‘maybe they shouldn’t be heroes, maybe they don’t belong on a kid’s show’.
Then the main student in question responds saying that he disagreed with Jeremy and adds: “I think cops are heroes because they have a difficult job..”
But before he could respond, his anti-cop professor says “all of them?”
“I’d say a good majority of them, yeah. We have bad people in every business and in every part…” responds the student before being interrupted gain.
He tried to get the professor to wait so he could finish his answer, but she insisted, saying “yet a lot of police officers have committed atrocious crimes and have gotten away with it and have never been convicted of any of it.”
Then she tried to bolster her credibility saying “And I say this as person with family members who are police officers.”
The student continued, noting his opinion isn’t popular to say: “This is what I believe, this is my opinion and it’s not popular to say but I do support police and we have bad people and the people who do bad things should be brought to justice. I agree with that.”
Anti-cop profess interrupts again, saying “they haven’t.” The student reiterates to her that he agrees with her that they should.
But she then demands to know his bottom line point, saying “you’re saying police officers should be revered, viewed as heroes, they belong on TV shows with children?”
He responds saying “I think they are heroes in a sense and that’s because they come to your need and they come and help you. They have problems just like every other business and we should fix that. But they are heroes.”
The video ends with her jumping in saying that it’s not a business and that they are there to protect and serve and then the video stops.
I don’t want to make this post too long, but I’ll just note that the student should have challenged the professor’s assertion that “a lot of police officers have committed atrocious crimes and have gotten away with it” by asking her for examples. She’s making a specific generalization that’d I’d bet she can’t prove. And if she throws out things like ‘Michael Brown in Ferguson’, I’d nail her on it.
And lastly, the professor’s claim that policing only exists because of slavery is ludicrous. The first official police department in the country was in Boston in 1838 and had nothing to do with slavery. And long before that, there were informal police departments in places like Boston that began as early as 1636. And again, it wasn’t about slavery. Sure, there were slave patrols in the South to round up escaped slaves. But to say that policing in America is solely a product of slavery is absurd and emphatically incorrect.