The author, who works many hours per week as a volunteer in his local Police Department, argues that, unlike virtually every other government agency (except the military), the Police are actually discharging appropriate constitutional duties — and doing so in a responsible manner.

Thanks to the never-ending series of Republican presidential candidate debates, the American people are being exposed to a hearty dose of skepticism about the role of government in society. Nevertheless, I believe all would agree that a proper and fundamental governmental role is the protection of the people and the homeland. At the national level, this of course involves the military and at the local level, the Police. It is the latter that I will address here. I will suggest, based on personal anecdotal evidence, that the answer to the question posed in the title is no.

When I retired a little over two years ago (from a university faculty position), I began volunteering in my county’s Police Department. I have spent up to four half-days per week working in three different units in the Department. Having had (fortunately) almost nothing to do with law enforcement throughout my life – other than some cursory interactions with the Campus Police during my time as an academic administrator – I bring an objective and dispassionate eye to an assessment of the Police Department.

I live in Montgomery County (in Maryland, just outside Washington, DC), which has a population of roughly one million people. The county Police Department – or MCPD, as it is universally known and referred to – has approximately 1150 sworn officers and 400 non-sworn employees. While not comparable to New York or Chicago in numbers, MCPD still represents a major police force in size, scope and operation. Incidentally, the ratio of officers to residents is rather low compared to most jurisdictions. This reflects both the socio-economic nature of the county as well as the fine job that MCPD is doing. In fact, I believe that MCPD is indeed doing an excellent job. But before I try to justify that assessment – as well as to highlight a few areas in which improvements could be implemented – let me describe a terrific feature of MCPD as well as offer a comment on the nature of its senior personnel and their attitude toward their role.

I have been fortunate to have received assignments in three high profile units within MCPD: Media Services, Major Crimes and Special Investigations. Oh don’t mistake me, the cops have not entrusted this sexagenarian volunteer with any dangerous responsibilities. Rather I have been involved mainly in document preparation and database maintenance. But in principle, my efforts free up the time of police officers – and that is the point of the program under whose rubric I serve: using the talents of volunteers and interns to enable sworn officers to devote more time to the most crucial aspects of their job.

My association with MCPD began with an 18-week course in its Citizen Academy (one night per week for three hours). The course is open not only to volunteers and interns, but in fact to any citizen of the county who wishes to familiarize himself with the workings of the Police Department. The course was phenomenal. Each week we had an in-depth introduction to one of the units of MCPD. The presentations – by sworn officers, some at very high rank – were thoroughly prepared, professionally delivered and mesmerizingly interesting. They were also very hands-on. In particular, I: spent a Saturday evening in a police cruiser while the officer patrolled the county streets (I wound up directing traffic as she dealt with an accident); sat in at a 911 call center; went behind bars at the County Detention Center; participated in a mock trial at the County Courthouse; witnessed a mock suspect apprehension; fired a Glock at the county range; engaged in an electronically simulated shoot-don’t shoot exercise; and observed a canine unit training session. I have since learned that the thoroughness, imagination and professionalism that characterized the Citizen Academy are representative of the operation of MCPD as a whole.

I have been fortunate to get to know quite a few of MCPD’s senior officers (Captains and Lieutenants). And most interestingly, because of a geographical accident and a special visitor, I have made the acquaintance of the Chief. The Chief is an amazing fellow – a local boy who rose through the ranks (of neighboring jurisdictions) to assume the top spot. Like many who rise to the leadership of a big organization, the Chief is intelligent, self-confident and incredibly charming. But I also sense a deep commitment to MCPD, to the public he serves and most of all to the men and women under his command who risk their lives to keep our streets safe. This attitude permeates down and is reflected in the senior personnel who lead the various Departmental units.

Here are a few more concrete features that illustrate the excellent job MCPD does:

• Whether they are responding to a citizen’s plea for help, a criminal incident on the streets, a reporter’s request for information or a sister agency’s query about a suspect, the response is prompt, courteous and appropriate. I am always amazed, when working in Media Services, by the ability of the personnel there to formulate public information in the most useful way without divulging sensitive information on suspects or victims.
• The above represents only one aspect of the interaction with the public. From traffic stops to victim assistance to criminal pursuit, our officers never lose sight of who it is that they are sworn to protect – and they do so diligently, professionally and in the glare of the public spotlight.
• MCPD appreciates that the events which draw its attention are often played out over an extended period. I am impressed by the persistence and doggedness that is evident in MCPD’s approach to complicated crimes that are not quickly adjudicated.
• Police officers are engaged in dangerous work. One of the quivers in their arsenal is superior training. From the incredibly rigorous requirements of the Police Academy to the ongoing insistence on weapons and personal training, our officers must meet a high standard. Obviously, this serves them and the public well as they pursue their hazardous tasks.
• Finally, the methods and gadgets that our Department deploys are among the finest. Budget constraints are a problem, but it is reassuring to see state of the art crime labs, computer systems and police vehicles.

Admittedly, all of the above is anecdotal – determined by personal impressions. In fact, there is ample data on crime rates on MCPD’s web site to corroborate the impressions. Next, a few observations on personnel:

• I find the detectives the most interesting group of people among police personnel. They bear some resemblance to the characters who portray them on TV. Not only are they dogged and fearless, but their sense of humor is fantastic. Perhaps it’s a requisite of the job because of the slime they encounter on a regular basis – murder and mayhem require a high level of emotional detachment in order to survive. The cavalier way that they refer to perps and cadavers takes some getting used to, but they are a fun bunch to hang around with.
• There is an esprit de corps among the non-sworn personnel that is palpable. Actually in some ways, these folks remind me of the non-academic staff at the University. Most are dedicated to the mission of MCPD, take pride in having a job at a critical public institution and provide excellent support for the sworn personnel.
• Finally, there is the cop in the cruiser. Keeping her eye on the street, manipulating that complicated computer at her fingertips, staying in close contact with home base, never knowing whether the next public interaction will be mundane or murderous, boring or brutal, routine or riotous. It’s exciting, challenging and dangerous, and it requires a level of expertise that gives new meaning to the phrase “people skills.” From what I’ve seen of it, our guys and gals do a great job.

There are a few warts of course. Let me just mention three – and I would say that all of them arise as a consequence of the fact that the Police Department is a government agency and that police personnel are unionized government employees.

1. As in any government agency, there are employees who behave badly: shave work hours; manifest laziness and inattention to detail; worry more about their breaks, lunch hours and quitting time than about doing their job conscientiously; become disgruntled when their step pay increases don’t match their expectations and consequently adopt poor work habits that inhibit their chances of promotion; lose sight of the fact that theirs is a service position; complain incessantly, cast aspersions on the work ethic of their more diligent colleagues and count the years until early retirement. Fortunately, this is not the typical employee.
2. Again, as in every government agency whose priorities and policies are set by politicians, there is a painfully evident problem of PC – political correctness, that is. There is too much pandering to minorities, coddling of illegal immigrants, genuflecting to “environmental concerns” and searching for ‘hate crimes.” Actually, it was much worse at the University.
3. I won’t belabor this, but there is too much waste. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, as with any government agency, those responsible for budgets are not spending their own money. Waste is inevitable.

Well, despite the aforementioned three, overall I would give my Police Department high grades for the honor and faithfulness with which it discharges its duties. To get a sense of what an achievement that actually is, allow me to quote from my speech as the class representative at the Citizen Academy graduation:

If you, as a member of the general public, are interacting with a police officer, you are probably not having a good day. You are a suspect, a victim or a witness and in any of these roles, dealing with a police officer was not high on your priority list when you arose that morning. Moreover, when the police officer looks at you, he or she likely sees someone who is injured, indignant, potentially or actually violent, frightened, confused or suspicious, and perhaps some or all of these simultaneously. In the face of such overwhelmingly negative a priori conditions, it is the police officer’s job to be professional, polite, thorough, forceful when appropriate and mindful of the myriad laws and regulations that govern his or her interaction with you. It seems to me an incredibly challenging job and one of my main motivations in taking the course was to try to get a sense of how our police officers meet and surmount that challenge. I am pleased to say that 18 weeks in the Academy have reassured me that the vast majority of our police officers are doing an excellent job in meeting that challenge.

More generally, it is my assessment that my Police Department, MCPD, is doing a first-rate job of meeting its Constitutional responsibility to protect the public. National and local polls reveal that the public rarely reaches a similar conclusion about almost any other government agency, save the military.

I retired recently after a 40-year career in the Mathematics Department of the University of Maryland – the last eleven of which were spent as a senior campus administrator. My prior presentation here dealt with an article that I published in the American Thinker, which was read by Rush Limbaugh over the air, and in which I described my difficulties in surviving as a conservative faculty member in an overwhelmingly liberal campus environment. The short story is that, to my shame, I did it by staying in the political closet for many years. But as I approached retirement, I did three things: First, I wrote a book entitled Liberal Hearts and Conservative Brains, which is referenced on the handout. Second, I came out of the closet on campus. The campus response is described in the American Thinker article, which you can find on their website, at the link above, and also by following the links on the handout. And finally, I began to write for and publish regularly in conservative online magazines. Richard has asked me to speak today about two recent articles that I published. They appeared in The Intellectual Conservative and The Land of the Free – and, to continue the shameless commercial, you can also find them by following the links on the flyer.

The articles are entitled respectively: The American Train has Jumped the Tracks and Getting America Back on the Tracks. Let me begin by quoting the opening of the first article:

Unlike virtually all other countries, the United States of America was founded upon a set of ideas. Its people did not coalesce around a religion, race, ethnic heritage, language or geographical area in order to form itself into a coherent, recognizable nation. Rather the US was constituted by an amazingly astute and prescient group of Founders who created an entity that would maximize individual liberty and endow the people with the greatest chance to have a life of freedom, justice and prosperity. The ideals that undergird this nation, unique in the annals of world history, are enshrined in its founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To be an American is to subscribe to and strive to embody these ideals.

The founding documents laid out the track that Americans were to follow in order to preserve our freedoms, our just society and our unparalleled prosperity. Alas, America has jumped the tracks. It is my purpose here to explain the derailment more concretely and to pose an overarching strategy for returning to the rails.

Now I assert in the piece that the tracks that our beloved country has jumped are laid out along three rails: political, moral and idealistic. In the first of these (the political), I refer to the ideas of a republican government with limited, enumerated powers, individual liberty, rule of law and equal justice, consent of the governed, and the other founding political principles bequeathed to us by our Founders, and from which we have been fleeing at an alarming rate. The moral rail refers to the idea, completely understood and enunciated by our Founders, that the experiment in limited government could only succeed if the people were generally “good” – meaning that they had a clear understanding of and could distinguish between good and evil, just and unjust, honesty and dishonesty, responsibility and irresponsibility. If the people made the right choices when confronted with moral opposites, the system would work well and the nation would thrive; if not, then corruption, vice and malfeasance would surely follow, with tyranny the ultimate outcome. The people would learn to make the right choices because they were embedded in a society that prized strong families and communities, charity and good works, universal education, a powerful work ethic and the fear of God.  I hardly need remind you that such ideas would be found laughable by far too many of America’s current leaders. And finally, the third rail, the idealistic, is summarized, perhaps a bit glibly, by asserting that the Founders were the first believers in American exceptionalism. They saw the American people as the “new Hebrews,” a people chosen by God to provide, by their example, a light unto the nations in regard to how a just and free society should be organized and governed. The Founders understood that they were creating something unique and revolutionary. They expected that their descendants would guard it zealously and hold it up as a beacon for the peoples of the world to emulate. The “descendant” who currently resides in the White House is not waving any beacons.

Americans rode these rails for more than a century. But beginning in the so-called Progressive Era a century ago, continuing through the New Deal and the Great Society, and culminating today under the Prophet Obama, the American people have been abandoning these tracks. In all three strains, the train has been diverted onto a route that bears less and less resemblance to the path laid out by the Founders. We might ask: How and why did this happen? And if we can formulate an accurate answer, can we make use of it to get back on the rails?

The answer is found in my articles. At the risk of oversimplification, it goes as follows. First I subsumed the second and third tracks under the single heading culture. After all, the components that determine a people’s morality and ideals are precisely the contents of their culture. The key point is then to acknowledge the insight of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci from the Progressive Era, who asserted: One need only capture the culture. The politics will follow. And that is exactly what the leftists did over the last century. Through an unremitting assault on many fronts, the Left took control of all the opinion-forming organs of American society: the media, educational establishment (lower and higher), the legal profession, foundations and libraries, the government bureaucracy and the unions, the seminaries, the marketing industry and (to a certain extent) the upper echelons of big business. Once the people’s mindset was converted from individual liberty to collective equality, security and order, it was easy to convince them to implement the political changes that enabled the conversion of America from a free society into a statist society.

The cultural assault by the Left was broad, sustained, relentless and purposeful. The Right – naively assuming that things would naturally stay the way they always had been – wasn’t even paying attention. A few noticed (e.g., William Buckley), but for the most part, traditionalists and conservatives did not appreciate that the fundamental organs of society that supported and maintained the traditional American culture were being subverted and diverted to something radically different. It is only in recent times that a substantial portion of traditional America has awakened to the radical leftist revolution that has swept the country and which threatens to kill the historic society that America embodied. The issue is how to resuscitate the latter.

The answer is in principle simple: we do it exactly as we lost it, i.e., by retaking control of the culture, reestablishing the moral and idealistic themes that animated the American soul for more than two centuries. Here are some concrete suggestions:

·       Fox News has proven a valuable counterweight to the mainstream news media. We need many more such venues.

·       Similarly, conservative newspapers like the Washington Times have provided some balance in the print news media. We need more such conservative newspapers, magazines, periodicals and online journals.

·       The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have arisen to challenge the Ford, Rockefeller and other left-wing foundations and think tanks (which ironically were established by conservative businessmen). The former must be multiplied many-fold.

·       In the same vein, Regnery has provided a conservative counter punch in the book publishing industry. More such outlets are required.

·       We need to have law schools that champion strict constitutional interpretation of the law; public libraries that display conservative books more prominently than liberal ones; movie producers that explore patriotic themes and other genres that extol the virtues of traditional culture; and highly successful businessmen (unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, e.g.) who promote conservative ideas and resist the lure of crony capitalism.

·       The next suggestion is more political than cultural, but the American people must return to the idea (most clearly articulated, ironically, by the arch leftist, FDR) that unionization of public sector employees poses a grave threat to the nation. Unions like SEIU must be decommissioned. When that happens we might be able to address our explosive and crippling entitlement programs in a rational way.

·       And finally – and most importantly – we must take back our schools. The damage that the Left is doing in our public schools is amply documented in Marybeth Hicks’ recent book, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid. Whatever the medium – charter schools, vouchers, or something else – we must break the back of the monopoly that the NEA has on the education of American children and enable schools to re-instill traditional American values into our children, and so into our future.

Two points to close: First, polls continue to identify America as a “Center-Right” nation. One sees percentages like: 40% Conservative, 20% Liberal, 40% Centrist or Independent. And the polls have reported such figures for a long time. How can that be? How can such a supposedly conservative country have so readily glommed onto the liberal/statist program that has dominated our politics and culture for decades? I think that there are two components to the answer. First, many who identify themselves as conservatives are not really so. For example, consider those who see themselves as patriotic, law-abiding and proud of their country’s history; but who at the same time, also approve of wealth redistribution, same-sex marriage, the United Nations and affirmative action. It does not occur to them that such views constitute proof that they are indeed not really conservative. Second, what exactly does it mean to be Independent? The competing visions for America held by the Left and Right are irreconcilable. It makes no sense to be “in the middle”; it does not reflect a coherent worldview, but rather a non-Solomonic willingness to split the baby. Alas, many in the middle are equally comfortable with the ideas that I attributed above to faux conservatives. Thus many are confused about where they stand in the political spectrum and it is dubious that we truly continue to be a Center-Right nation. But we can be again – if we find a way to implement the steps that I outlined above.