On the night of Dec. 6, 2008, 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was killed by a police officer in Athens, Greece. Many witnesses claimed Grigoropoulos was shot intentionally, and without reason. Further mismanagement by the national police and the officer’s attorney after the incident fed the already volatile public sentiment.
Businesses were trashed and government offices attacked as rising sentiment against corruption and unemployment boiled over. Over the next three weeks, riots spread across the main cities of Greece.
One action, intentional or not, by one officer, led to civil unrest across an entire nation.
Law-enforcement officers are very much set apart from the rest of us. They wear uniforms, drive around in fast cars and (of course) are constantly armed. The power they are given over civilians can be both comforting and mildly alarming. It all depends on the particular officer wielding the badge.
Here in the U.S., many people dislike or mistrust law-enforcement officers. Be it for an arrogant attitude to blatant racism, the reasons to have ill will toward the boys in blue are certainly ample.
Yet, many do trust the police. We all pay for our police forces — local, state and federal — and expect them to fulfill their duties to protect society. Far more often than not, they succeed in this task. Despite corruption, limited resources and various other problems, America is a comparably safe place due to the various law-enforcement agencies protecting cities, towns and states.
Though ultimately, even in times of relative calm, the police can be … temperamental.
Take, for example, the border patrol agents who are apparently always convinced I am carrying Mary Jane whenever I cross the Arizona-California border. Rest assured, America’s thin green line, I am not the marijuana-equivalent of Johnny Depp’s character in “Blow.”
However, for whatever reasons, I am detained more often than not; my car is searched, and much to their disappointment, nothing is found. Sorry?
On the other hand, in my hometown, many of my dealings with Chicago’s finest have been quite witty. Once, I asked an officer (who happened to be black) if the North Side neighborhood I was in that day would be safe at night. He smiled nonchalantly and said, “Do you plan on looking like a black guy tonight?” I laughed, and responded in the negative, as I have always been a smallish, white man-boy. He then said, “You should probably leave when it gets dark.” And I did.
If you have 100 people, 99 of whom are guilty of murder, but just one of them is innocent, do you kill them all? Though you eliminate 99 hard-core killers, you’ve still got innocent blood on your hands.
I’m not sure what kind of a guy the officer who shot the kid in Greece is, but I can assume he’s probably not like the affable fellow I met on that warm Chicago afternoon. Yet because of that one nice cop, I can’t just write them all off — no matter how late for Christmas dinner at my brother’s house they may make me because of a vain, desperate search for pot that doesn’t exist.
Alex is driving exactly the speed limit, and can be reached at alexander.petrusek@asu.edu.
