A grand jury indicted Prince George, Maryland’s County Officer Jenchesky Santiago on Friday on charges including first-degree assault and misconduct in office after prosecutors say he held a gun to the head of a man who hadn’t committed a crime. He had been suspended with pay since police investigation of the incident began last June, and is now suspended without pay.
According to prosecutors, Santiago was patrolling a Bowie neighborhood in May when he informed two men that they were parked illegally outside of a home, when in fact they were not. The driver then explained that he was dropping off his cousin. Santiago ordered the man to return to the car.
When the man failed to return and attempted to enter his home, prosecutors say that Santiago blocked him, pulling out his service weapon and holding it against the man’s head. Santiago also pointed the gun at the man’s mouth, prosecutors allege. He also said to the men, “We’re PGPD; we shoot people,” according to the authorities. Prosecutors stated that the driver of the car used his cellphone to record video of the officer pointing the gun at his cousin. After an internal investigation, the police turned over evidence prosecutors, who then took it before the grand jury.
Abuses of power are nothing new when it comes to the police, but not many create the shock-waves that this one does. The idea that some officers could possibly have such a distorted view of their duties when they put on their uniforms is disturbing to say the least. It may be difficult to comprehend how we have gotten to the point where officers view their job as one where they “shoot people,” but upon further analysis, it is easy to understand why.
Government has created a lose-lose situation for police. Through legislatures (federal, state and local) creating so many thousands of pages of incomprehensible regulations, officers are placed into a difficult situation. They must either do their job and further ridiculous ordinances (like one dictating where citizens are permitted to park) or abstain from enforcement and jeopardize they and their families’ financial situations. After all, no newspaper reports about the police officer who did the “right thing”; they only give the front page to the officers who make the big arrests. Furthermore, promotions (and therefore, economic incentives) are based upon this same perverse incentives.
On top of those very “real-world” and concrete reasons why police may become lost in the minutia, there is an underlying societal change that comes with the enforcement of so many draconian and unjust laws. Police are forced to enforce laws “by the books,” taking any human element out of the equation. If they wish to achieve the regard and glory which was previously mentioned, they cannot be “just another person in the neighborhood”—they must instead take any of their personal biases away from potential incidents and become nothing more than an arbiter of the state.
While this may seem good on paper, it has the effect of disconnecting police from the local populace and turning them into nothing more than pre-programmed robotic beings who dispense nothing more than the iron fist of the law. There often becomes no room for kindness or empathy; the state must take precedence. For this reason, it may be easy to fall into the belief that it is the job of the police to “shoot people.”
Because of the numerous contentious incidents that have occurred over the years, the citizenry has begun to feel like that is just the case: that it is not the citizenry and the police versus the criminals, but rather the citizenry versus the police. However, the only occurrence that could exacerbate this situation is if this belief does not get proven false and discredited by the men and women to whom we are supposed to look for protection, but rather adopted by them as well.
