FEW doubt that there is something seriously wrong with policing in America. Far too many people, chiefly young black men, are dying at the hands of police. Every new police scandal invites more hand-wringing over a law-enforcement system that often seems racist and unjust. In Baltimore over the weekend protests over the mysterious death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year old man who died while in police custody in Baltimore on April 19th, turned violent. Yet few also doubt that most police officers are decent people who “risk their own safety for ours every single day,” as President Barack Obama put it recently. According to one poll, three quarters of people, including a majority of African Americans, say that they approve of the job being done by their local police department. Police officers in general seem to be thought of as decent people doing good work—and yet policing, as a practice, is widely distrusted. What explains this contradiction?

In the Atlantic, Ta Nehisi Coates argues that part of the reason is simply that police officers are expected to do too much. “At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system,” he writes. “Vexing social problems” such as homelessness, drug use and mental illness are now handled by armed men and women, who are trained to enforce compliance, not offer therapy. “Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, ‘You deal with this’,” Mr Coates observes. Naturally this creates problems. In New York over the weekend, police officers killed a robbery suspect with a history of mental illness.

I have a lot of sympathy with Mr Coates’s view. Certainly police officers cannot solve social problems. And better regulation of cops and a proliferation of body cameras will not make America’s dark history of racialised oppression go away. But I think Mr Coates’s take—that the problems of American policing are structural and inevitable—is ultimately too pessimistic. It discounts the importance of police training, which can have a big impact on when and how often officers pull the trigger. So it is worth asking whether there is something in particular about America's policing culture that leads an over-reliance on violence.

In search of an answer, I set out to interview a rough cross-section of American cops. I wanted to know what they think of the debate about policing that has gripped the country since the protests in Ferguson last year. My research led to this piece in the paper. But having transcribed six or seven hours’ worth of interviews with half a dozen cops from police forces across America, I felt I could add a little more. I particularly wanted to get across what ordinary street-level cops think, because their voice seems so absent from much of this debate. (As an aside, line-level cops are generally barred from speaking to the media; the ones I spoke to insisted on their anonymity, including the force they work for.)

My first, inescapable finding is that almost all cops think they get a hard time from the media. As one lieutenant from an urban Midwestern force put it, “it sometimes feels like the only voice you ever hear is criticising you… If you watch the TV news, our good work only gets two seconds. When we do something bad, it gets two minutes.” Another officer, this one a veteran from a north-eastern suburban force, says that he thinks that the media—and the rise of smart-phones—makes policing look worse than it is. “The ten seconds you see of a man being hit with a baton, it looks horrible,” he says, “but you don’t always know what that man was doing. Any use of force looks horrible even if it’s completely necessary.” A third cop says that media coverage of abuses in some places undermines cops everywhere: “The media take one incident and they magnify it to the point where people think that must be all law enforcement and it really hurts officers”.

Second, cops think that the public underestimates the threats to their life—and why the use of force is sometimes necessary. Most of the officers I interviewed say that guns poison policing in America. “They’re literally everywhere,” says one. “And the problem with dealing with guns is that if I’m talking to you and you’ve got a gun, action always beats reaction.” One female street cop points that having to carry a firearm automatically escalates violent situations. “If I take a punch and I’m knocked out, they could take my gun,” she says. “We need to stay a step ahead of them, so we sometimes use a higher-level of force.” Another worries that the fear of being criticised or indicted for using force may make cops put themselves in danger. “I think what’s happening now is that some younger officers are more reluctant to use force and they might lose a tactical advantage and be killed.”

Third, many cops seem to largely agree with Mr Coates's view that the public have unrealistic expectations of what they can do. One from a Californian force argues that police officers cannot be expected to deal with social problems, like mental illness or drug addiction, without resorting to force. “If the person is not receptive and is not willing to be coherent all of the training in the world will fail.” Another says that mental illness is a particular problem because cops do not know how to identify it. “Sometimes an officer feels they are left with no other choice to use force and they find out after the fact that the person was bipolar or whatever and they didn’t recognise it.” Cops who are expected to be tough enforcers of the law are not the right people to deal with people who are mentally ill, most concluded—but they have been made so by cuts to other services.

Several of the half a dozen cops I interviewed argued, in one way or another, that if people did not resist arrest, they would not be hurt by police officers. “If somebody is fighting with the police and they end up getting shot, I guarantee you, there is a point where the officer gave lawful orders and you have to stop resisting,” says one. Another argues that people need to get used to cops acting forcefully: “I would say that we need to train the public.” These cops—a significant minority—seemed to suggest that the use of force is always justified when people resist arrest or disobey orders.

Can things be improved? Part of the problem, admitted one officer, is that a narrow focus on criminal behaviour sometimes misses the big picture. “We arrest drug users and dealers and people who do all of these awful things. The problem is that those people don’t always do those things all of the time. They’re also people who are loved by people,” she says. This would seem to strengthen the argument for community policing, whereby officers get to know not just the criminals on their beat but also the business owners, teachers and local families. This approach to law-enforcement, which often involves getting officers out of their cars and on the streets to mingle with the community they are working to protect, can build trust and reduce crime. But many cops in America are deeply sceptical of community policing (“boutique policing”, one called it to me).

Another problem is that officers are often judged according to how many people they arrest, not how many crimes they prevent. “It’s all about numbers now”, laments one suburban cop. “Does an officer spend two shifts working on a burglary or does he go out and write 20 speeding tickets?” There are few incentives for trying to solve problems, explains another: “The people who get promotions, the people who get specialised jobs, are the people who get arrests.” New ways for assessing performance, with data that measures crime prevention, could encourage new and less violent forms of law enforcement.

It seems to me that the biggest challenge will involve changing America’s police culture. In Britain, and across Europe, police officers also spend a lot of time dealing with mental illness, drug use and the rest of it. But the number of deaths in custody per year across Britain is rarely more than handful. The annual number of people shot and killed by police has, in recent years, typically been zero. Some of this cannot be replicated: Britain is a small country with extremely tight gun-control laws and, as a result, extremely little gun crime. But some of it I think is the result of a better police culture. Since the early 1990s, when the Metropolitan Police in London was accused of being institutionally racist in an official inquiry, police services in Britain have become much more community-oriented. Problems remain, but cops increasingly do think of themselves as performing a social service.

Not all of America's 18,000 police forces suffer from the same problems, and there are certainly good examples of reform. Still, America's police forces are largely made up of people who think of themselves as “a thin blue line” against the bad guys. Only when that mentality changes will policing really be able to move past these scandals.

(Photo credit: AFP)