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Back to Editorial Table of Contents We are citizens, not civilians As Americans, do we feel that the local policeman living across the street is any different from us or our other neighbors and fellow citizens? Most of us would say emphatically ‘No,’ although we would likely give those individuals serving as police just a little bit more deference than the neighbor on the other side of our house. This is normal, and doesn’t necessarily imply awe of the individual so much as it does respect for the position held, a position that represents all of us directly and indirectly, and is authorized through us. But it is becoming harder for the person holding the public safety badge to feel the same equality in return. Unfortunately in recent years a combination of factors coalesced to make the public safety professions seem far greater than other callings. It is now all too easy for the natural deference we may show as a respect of office to be transposed into an expectation. In today’s world especially it requires a strong and self-confident personality to carry a badge and simultaneously acknowledge that he or she is only wielding authority on the behalf of other equals - other citizens - and not that somehow the individual with the badge or the appointed or elected authority over safety issues is different and somehow greater than his or her fellow citizens. In our view, the media shares a great deal of the blame for this phenomenon. TV is perhaps the biggest culprit, having given us an ever-increasing bombardment of police dramas for the past 50 years. And of course much of the information media – TV news, radio and the print press – has found it far easier to report crime and disaster than to delve into the variety of complex issues we all face each day. Police are set up by the media as more than simply other Americans who happened to have chosen a career in public safety. They are positioned as heroes who keep us safe from the onslaught of criminals and the results of accidents. The classic example of how attitudes have changed, and have served to begin to separate us, is how in the past decade or so we have allowed new terminology to develop and become part of the language of ‘public safety.’ The most egregious example of this is how we, the public, are now referred to as "civilians" by the police department spokesmen and public relations personnel. No one to our knowledge elevated the police departments to a para-military status. They are still civilians who are empowered by us, other civilians, to uphold the laws we create through our elected representatives, and to help us when we are involved in a crisis. They are civilians too! And that is why we should all become sensitive, as citizens, to a denigration of our position in a free society. We should be offended when in any context we hear a police spokesman - or an ignorant journalist reporting on police news - refer to us as civilians in regard to public safety issues. It is extraordinarily dangerous in a democracy to begin to separate the public service personnel from the citizenry, and we should start to reverse this trend now. We are not civilians to our own police and firemen, rather we are all citizens and some of us are empowered by the rest of us to work in public service. |
