Flutterby™! : Police T-shirts 2014-12-17 18:45:40.344297+00

Police T-shirts

2014-12-17 18:45:40.344297+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

What cop shirts tell us about police culture.

It occurs to me that somewhere around a decade and a half, maybe even two decades ago, we software developers dropped "lusers" from our lexicon. We realized that the people who were looking for our services didn't see the world in the same way we did, but they had needs, and it was up to us to build software and methods that worked to fill those needs.

Seems to me that policing needs a similar cultural attitude shift. The adversarial attitude doesn't work, and must be fixed.

Lusers =~ Higher paying clientelle. Or at least a revenue stream. It changed our perspective.

I understand the law enforcement humor, sometimes. But recognizing that the attitude is wrong, from the top down and the bottom up, and removing it from acceptable behavior will be hard. It's a tough, risky low paying job. It has complex personal and social dynamics. That attracts a certain type of person: some of the best of us as well as some people that may not be suitable.

The issue is, we are a country of two societies. One is mostly law abiding, works hard, pays taxes and occasionally makes a stupid mistake. We'd like to think we are all those people and we judge law enforcement behavior on that standard. The other is... a problem. Our problem is we do things that tend to push people in the middle towards the problem group more than raise them up out of it. That is partially because of the pervasive attitude expressed in the humor mentioned above.