opinion

After latest police beating, who are the real bad guys?

The whole "cops on tape, beating an innocent person" motif is getting so tired, so enraging, that it's hard to tell anymore who we should trust, and who we should fear.

How many cops are actually the criminals? And how can we have peace, or civility, when those charged with protecting it are the violators?

Last week, it was news of Inkster police officers yanking a black man from his Cadillac and throwing him to the ground, then choking him and pounding on his head to get him to submit to being handcuffed.

For 57-year-old auto worker Floyd Dent, what difference did it make that the two men who beat him were police? They might just as well have been drug dealers or thieves or any other kind of criminal. Dent did nothing to provoke the attack. Didn't even appear to be resisting arrest on the video, captured from the officers' in-unit camera.

And that's increasingly the problem, it seems, when we see these kinds of attacks.

I'm wont to put incidents in policy context, to search for the legal or administrative lever that can be pulled to rein in the excesses that lead to eye-popping behavior. Outrage can be useful, and productive, when properly channeled.

But far more effective, usually, is a focus on real change. Tweak the law. Amend the constitution. Put policies in place.

It's hard to see, however, how any policy rubric could have produced this kind of thing in the first place.

Don't police departments have rules against hiring thugs? Aren't protocols already in place to restrain those who protect and serve from beating and stomping?

I had lunch earlier this month with a group of police chiefs from southeast Michigan who are interested in having me address them about ways to cultivate and nurture better relationships with their communities. They're an earnest bunch — good cops who are concerned that a few hot incidents are overshadowing both the good work that police do and the majority of their ranks, who don't overstep their bounds.

But, in the wake of the Inkster beating, I'm sick at the prospect of facing the chiefs again.

The frustration, at this point, has to be that these incidents are supposedly being committed by "rogue" officers, but the consistency with which they are happening suggests more commonality, and internal acceptance.

That's beyond dangerous.

Take, for instance, the record of one of the officers in the Inkster beating. We learned Friday in the Free Press that, shocker, this isn't the first time William Melendez has been accused of excessive force. In fact, he has been sued 12 times in just the last 20 years, dating back to when he was an officer in Detroit.

So what is he even doing patrolling anymore?

Shouldn't we expect that police agencies weed out troubled officers who overstep their bounds?

The whole issue has gone beyond the realm of policy discussion to the point of basic common sense and rational governance. Police departments are obviously not enforcing policies that are already on the books to prevent their officers from behaving like overseers whose job it is to compel submission rather than provide protection.

It's pretty obvious there's a fundamental breakdown in the covenant between authority and the citizenry.

And the fact that this happened in Inkster adds a few aggravating factors.

Inkster's mostly black, largely poor population is policed by a force with too few officers who look like them — one of a few communities where that dynamic is true.

And Inkster is one of the area's most financially troubled cities, with a school district that has been dissolved because it was no longer viable and a city hall that is under a consent agreement that imposes drastic cuts on city services.

This brutal beating stokes concerns about how African Americans are policed, not just here but nationwide, and it raises real questions about the effects of state intervention in local governance. Could Inkster not afford to lose an officer like Melendez, because it has to take what it can get? Would the city have had more intervention strategies — and maybe better training for officers — if its coffers were a little more flush?

People in places far flung from Inkster have a right to be asking those questions now.

For Dent, this incident will almost certainly be a demarcation, between his life before the attack, and after.

But it ought to be a marker for the rest of us, too.

I've had it with these incidents, with the excuses that come from police departments after them, and the continuing denials, in some quarters, that there's a systemic problem.

If policy changes aren't the way to rein in out-of-control police officers, we should all fear what will be coming — and necessary — to restore the balance of justice.

Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Detroit Free Press. He is the host of "Detroit Today," weekdays at 9 a.m. on WDET(101.9) and "American Black Journal," which airs at 12:30 p.m. Sundays on Detroit Public Television. Follow Henderson on Twitter @ShendersonFreep, or contact him at 313-222-6659 or shenderson600dp@freepressdp.com.