Last week I wrote a post about sports, race and what I called the politics of shirts. We now have another chapter in this evolving story. The Cleveland police union is demanding an apology from the Cleveland Browns because wide receiver Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt demanding “Justice for Tamir Rice And John Crawford III.”
That there’s a tension here is unsurprising and probably inevitable for a variety of reasons I discussed in that earlier post. But the tone of denigration and disdain in the police union official’s letter bears quoting. “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law,” the statement read, as quoted by WEWS. “They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.”
It’s somewhat different. But there’s also the call from the head of a NYPD police union urging officers to tell New York City Mayor de Blasio not to attend their funerals if they fall in the line of duty because he is, allegedly, not being supportive enough of city belief. That note strikes me as almost insurrectionary in nature.
What interests me about these confrontation is this: I think people who are part of or sympathetic to the movement tied to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others sometimes miss just what deep wells of support and trust police have in the population. Police officers are consistently among the most trusted professions in the country, as attested in numerous public opinion surveys. That said, respect and trust and deference to police is heavily tied to public perceptions of the threats they protect us from. And as we’ve discussed, crime rates have been falling rapidly for two decades.
Those comments are very aggressive. Any public criticism of the police, even in cases like the Rice case, where something really clearly went wrong, is apparently out of bounds. And athletes, who are at least in the great majority of cases citizens, have no standing to say anything. Just keep playing your sports and we’ll take care of the policing.
There is a level of entitlement there that I’m not sure folks like the Cleveland Police union can really sustain, based on where the public is. But I’m not at all sure. The kind of polarization these controversies lead to can be very destructive – and in the past usually for the folks asking for change.
