MCAM seems more in line with human nature than ACAB

I've loved Lebron James since I first saw him put on a Cleveland Cavaliers uniform, and it confounds me how many people seem to hate the guy. More than just the fact that he has haters, what gets me is who the haters are. I get it if you're a fan of a team he's taking apart and you're sick of seeing him score against you. I hated Michael Jordan in a limited sense back when he used to tear up the Cavs. But fans who rip on him for everything from his hairline to how square he is to how he's 3-6 lifetime in the finals--never mind how without him, none of those teams would have even been in a finals--make no sense to me. Lebron James should never be getting real hate from his own community, whether than community is Black people, people from Ohio, or basketball fans. 

Lately, he's also been getting some hate from outside his community, namely whatever politically conservative pseudo-celebrity Fox News can get to say something negative about James in front of a microphone. James, if you don't know, has been mildly critical of police and American systemic racism in general. He isn't really that radical in what he's said. For example, he doesn't condone violence toward police at a time when some really are claiming it's time for violent struggle against the enforcers of state control. Still, because James is the best player of his generation, when he takes a stand like criticizing the police who shot Breonna Taylor, people pay attention to him more than they do to other players. Which means when some UFC fighter wants to play to his base, he goes after James, calling James a spineless coward for being woke. (I'm not linking to a story about this idiot. James has dealt with it with the same dogged perseverance and ability to ignore haters that have made him the best.) 

I don't understand why any politically conservative person would attack James. If you're conservative, you have no beef with James. He's the opposite of everything you worry about. He's a family man. He respects women. He doesn't wear his pants low. (These are, by the way, all reasons he sometimes gets grief from his own community.) He might disagree with you politically, but if you are on the side of maintaining order, you want people who disagree the way James disagrees. You ought to promote James, ask why more people objecting to police can't do it in the civil way he does. 

Why some white people are so incensed with James

I was just talking to a relative from Ohio who said she was more concerned about racial tension in America than coronavirus. She told me she "hates Lebron James" and hates all athletes, because she's tired of athletics being a platform for athletes to make political statements. I think the hatred comes from two places. First is the maybe understandable and instinctive dislike for what sounds like complaint from people who are better-off, financially, than the fans watching the sport. But that's always been true, and it's only now some people are suddenly waking up to it. The second reason, though, is deeper, more convoluted, and based on assumptions that are harder to confront head-on.

Okay, Lebron maybe works the refs a lot, although maybe his feelings of being picked on on the court are an overflow of how picked on he is off the court. 

Traditionally, we have rightfully respected those who do dangerous jobs on our behalf. That healthy respect, though, has occasionally broken containment and gone right into hero worship. First responders are heroes, and the thing about a hero is that if you say anything bad about heroes, they can't be heroes anymore, which means to make any kind of criticism doesn't just mean you're saying they're human, you're saying there is nothing about them to admire at all. 

The prevalence of slogans these days like ACAB ("all cops are bastards") is itself an unintended consequence of our culture's long worship of first responders. When people learn, through ubiquitous video footage previously unavailable, that police aren't perfect, the way we expect heroes to be, they sometimes assume that only the opposite pole is possible: if cops aren't heroes, they must be evil. 

That flies in the fact of human nature

But any kind of assumption that follows the formula "all _____ are ___" is likely to be untrue. I don't have to be either naïve or an apologist for police to think this. It's not an ideologically extreme position; it's a position that comes from even the most casual observance of human nature and the most basic understanding of statistics. 

What is true about human nature is that most people are somewhere in the statistical middle of ability and effort that combine together to give output. They exhibit average amounts of moral courage and ethical integrity. That's just mathematical reality. It's tautological, even. An average human is average at most things. All cops aren't bastards. All cops aren't anything. But most cops are mediocre, just like most people are. 

You can sometimes cheat statistics by providing an environment where you only attract those who are good at certain functions. The New York Philharmonic doesn't have 100 members of average ability such that only one of them can play anywhere near well enough to perform at the level needed. They have screened for the best of the best of the best, music-wise, and even a bad player in the Philharmonic is better than almost anyone else in the world. It's like that in the NBA, too. The guys Lebron makes fools of every night are people who would destroy an average division-one college player. They'd score on me without even knowing I was there trying to stop them. "Average" in the NBA isn't "average" in absolute terms. 

Ideally, we'd like it to be that way in all professions, but I'm guessing it isn't like that in the profession you, gentle reader, work in. It's certainly not true in mine, although I work for a company that does a lot more screening than most. Most of us have at least a few truly average people at our work, people who aren't any more suited for what we do than a person randomly picked up off the street might be. 

What kind of "average" are the police? 

If the police don't do a good job of screening, then an average police officer is more or less an average person, which is to say, pretty mediocre. That's not the case, though, because the police screen candidates. The question, then, is how tough the supply of officers relative to the demand allows police departments to make the screening. Are the police like the NBA, where even their worst are so much better than normal people at the skills that go into police work we regular folks couldn't even begin to question their ability to do the work?

I doubt it. There are a few hundred NBA players. There are a few thousand professional musicians in city orchestras in the country. But there are about 800,000 sworn police officers. It's hard to image that many people spent their whole childhoods trying to perfect the skills that go into police work the way pro basketball players or musicians did. With greater repercussions for screwing up than most of us face and pay that is a living wage but not enough to get past mid-middle-class, the police just aren't going to be able to make "average" for a cop mean what "average" for an NBA player means.

I've heard a lot of folks these days who are critical of police compare police to airline pilots. They say that the repercussions of a police office making a critical mistake are so dire--involving human lives as they do--that we have to get to a place where no critical mistakes are made. 

I understand where this thinking is coming from, but it also runs against facts, facts having to do with sticky things like averages. An average airline pilot can go her whole life without a fatal accident. An average police officer, however, is less able to avoid mistakes. This isn't a judgment of police, it's just a very obvious statement of facts. There are many more accidental shootings of people who weren't a threat than there are airplane crashes. 

When I explain what systemic racism means to me, I say that for me to go to college and end up in the middle class means I just did what nearly everyone I went to high school did, but for the students Mrs. Heretic taught to do that means they'd have to do what almost nobody they knew did. You can't use a few high performers who beat the odds as examples and say that proves there isn't a problem with the system. Your system is only working if it works for most people, if an "average" person can succeed in it. 

The same is true of police work. If an average cop has to do work that requires more than he can deliver, is the fault really with the officer? Or is the fault with a society that sets up an average police officer to fail? Have we tried to fix issues in our society with the cheap band-aid of police work, then ended up wringing our hands when our cheap fix doesn't work? 

We can criticize cops like this, but don't we all have days at our work like this? And don't most of us still succeed? Police work has to be such that an average officer can succeed at it, just like our work is. 

The effect of average cops on good ones

The police try to set themselves up so that an "average" officer can succeed through regulations and rules. There is a standard procedure for everything. But the procedures are meant for the mediocre police, and even more for the bad ones. For good police--and there are good ones, just like there are high performers in everything--the rules are just another impediment to doing work well. They're there because some dumb guy ruined it for everyone. We all face this in whatever work we do. Of the many things a good police officer likely has to deal with, bad co-workers are probably at the top of the list. 

I've heard a lot of people claiming that good police are just as complicit as bad ones if they don't spend their whole lives trying to stop the bad ones, but I don't find this realistic. It's one thing to report clear bad behavior when you see it, but trying to change an entire culture that's not really working (and does anyone work in a job where the culture doesn't seem set up to keep everyone from accomplishing the main objective?) is a lot to ask of someone. To be able to both perform well at one's core function in a system that makes it difficult, then also to pay attention to all the other bad performers who are a big reason why your job is so hard, well, that's something only the very best of humanity can accomplish. And we've already established that people like that are going to be rare in a police force. They're rare anywhere. We can't criticize cops for not being the superheroes our society has always claimed they are. The idea isn't to have a job only heroes can do. It's to set up the work so an average worker in that field can do it. Ideally, you'd like to have the average ones succeed while not messing everything up so the good ones can't do it better. 

That's the society people are really calling for when they're advocating for police reform. Not one in which police are unrealistically forced to be heroic everyday, but one where they can do the work needed at a sustainable level for the average person the police are capable of recruiting. This probably would mean fundamental change all over society. It could mean reimagining whole facets of civil society. It will almost certainly mean higher taxes. 

Simply calling for greater accountability won't cut it. That's like demanding your city's basketball team play better when I'm the point guard.