Outrage and the Embattled Cop

Earlier reports of the death of outrage have been greatly exaggerated.  In fact, outrage is not just alive and well, it’s roared back to life bigger and stronger than ever!

Although he didn’t exactly originate the concept or even coin the term, William Bennett’s 1998 book “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals” certainly highlighted and popularized both in the common vernacular and as a rallying point for the future battlefronts in the “culture wars” to come.  A voice and champion of social conservatism, Bennett was dismayed not just by what he viewed as Clinton’s serious ethical and moral failings in both his public and (not really very) private lives but even more so by the apparent willingness of Americans to accommodate them.  On that note, at least, he may have been right: Americans were then, and have been increasingly ever since, willing to overlook certain behaviors in our public figures that were sure fatal flaws just a few years earlier.

But outrage isn’t dead, and was never really close to coding.  Pick up (or sign onto) any newspaper or magazine, peruse social media, tune into talk radio or cable news, and just listen to the chatter around us.  Pay special attention to the candidates throwing elbows now in the current version of our quadrennial American shout-fest, and what passes for discourse between each of their followers.  The outrage is louder and shriller than ever!  And while we may never return to the days Bennett mourned, we’ve found ample new targets about which to be upset.

And in 2016, YOU are one of those targets.  American policing has frequently come under fire throughout our history, and the men and women wearing the badge become the personification of all that is perceived as wrong.  Although it may not feel like it, what we’re experiencing now is nothing new; allegations of police corruption, civil rights violations, excessive and unjustified uses of force, and cops acting as political tools of the ruling class have long existed and, if we’re honest, have too often been true.  Unlike in the past, the sins of the few are assumed representative of the whole and what was once considered localized corruption is now assumed a system-wide cancer to be eradicated.  The wide reach of the internet and social media has fostered and fueled these beliefs, bringing distant events front and center to the lives of people unable to interpret them critically and dispassionately, unaware of the realities of policing, and susceptible to the emotions of movement politics. 

And in all this, we officers become less autonomous human beings and more walking, talking extensions of the uniform we wear and targets of misdirected outrage.  Increasingly, we see the political class respond to it, creating policy, passing laws, and trying to dictate when and how we respond to threats and calls for service regardless of what our experience and the known best practices tell us.  The result has been, unsurprisingly, outrage in return.

The Risks of Meeting Outrage with Outrage

There is little any single of us can do to dispel outrage directed toward us from the general public at large.  Individually, we can confront and challenge it head-on should we come face-to-face with it.  Collectively, we have the power to resist reactionary, ineffective, or dangerous responses by those who govern and/or decide policy and procedure, and should at every turn.  What must be avoided is falling prey to the easy lure of our own outrage, something cops seem increasingly prone to.

I see this in my own department.  I see it as a writer who fields comments and questions from readers.  And I see it especially online, as a consumer of social and news media whose moonlight gigs require I pay close attention to law enforcement-related topics as they break.  What I’ve noticed more than ever is how embattled we as cops feel, how very deep the frustration is with slanted, ratings-driven media, and how the pain of this hurts us individually and as a profession.  The outrage directed toward law enforcement is unprecedented but, as I mentioned, there is little any single one of us can do to change hearts and minds in the moment it is encountered or experienced from afar.  The natural response is to feel outrage in return.  This almost always proves not just fruitless but counterproductive and self-harming.

Anger itself is not the problem.  As we wrote in an article from 2010 (The Angry Cop, Part I)

“Anger is most commonly understood to be an emotion, or feeling, that can range from very mild irritation to all-consuming rage.  However, anger is far more than a mere emotional state of feeling; it is a highly evolved response to threats to our emotional or physical well-being and is necessary for our individual and societal survival. In addition to the emotional/psychological aspect of anger, there is a physiological component that is interconnected with the feeling component. When we feel angry we physically experience increased heart rate and blood pressure, and there is an increase in the production of adrenaline and noradrenalin (Harris, et.al). These physiological changes mentally and physically prepare us to defend against the threat to our well-being. 

Anger is necessary! It informs us of danger, and prepares us to defend our well-being. It is a message something is not right. Properly used, anger is used to confront and overcome the threat, and is then set aside. Safety is achieved and order restored. Unfortunately, for many of us anger is mishandled. We fail to correct the problem or threat and put away the anger or, if the problem or threat is just something we must learn to grudgingly live with, to effectively incorporate it into our lives while still putting away the anger. We continue to live with the problem, and the related anger, until it begins to harm us.”

But when we fail to set aside the anger, allowing it to become our static state, or appropriate anger gives way to outrage, we become physical and psychological threats to ourselves:

“Remember the physiological changes we undergo when angry? They are intended to be a temporary response. We are not meant to live full-time with elevated heart rate and blood pressure, and the adrenaline and noradrenalin that dumps into our system, if not dissipated, will begin to act on us much as a poison. Anger is no longer a warning; it becomes a way of life…

… Living with unresolved anger can lead to physical changes (high blood pressure, ulcers, etc) or turn into depression or anxiety disorders. Unresolved anger is the source of much substance abuse as people try to self-medicate their pain. Job and personal satisfaction slips, and the anger that began at work starts to infiltrate home and personal life. Soon even those who are supposed to bring you comfort, such as your spouse or children, become just someone else to distrust... they are only going to disappoint you like everyone else, anyway.”

Outrage, as opposed to appropriate and properly managed anger, is extreme and easily overwhelms objectivity and balance.  The word itself suggests an all-encompassing, reactionary response to stimuli we have little immediate control over but that make us feel endangered, oppressed, or marginalized.  We all know that pit-of-the-stomach burn outrage brings, how it defocuses and consumes us, and the visceral need to set things right.  In that sense, sometimes outrage is even appropriate when it spurs us to action in order to right a wrong.  The problem today is how frequently we find ourselves outraged, the cumulative effect of that frequency and how it leads to the sense of near-constant aggrievement, and the harm it does us personally and professionally, and even to our profession.  When the outrages come so fast and furiously, we find ourselves in that state of seemingly permanent and unresolved anger.

In out next column, we will explore techniques to manage and dissipate the growing outrage so many of us feel, especially in response to that directed toward us.