I am a former U.S. Marine and police officer who has come under gunfire and confronted many fleeing suspects both armed and unarmed. Regardless of the severity of Jones' alleged actions, his having been set upon by a mob composed of law-enforcement agents indicates cowardice and a lack of professionalism by the officers involved. A courageous, physically fit police officer does not behave like a bully or lose control of himself when things become tense.

For many Americans not of color, what happened to Thomas Jones is an aberration. For people of color, in particular black people and Latinos, Jones' beating is commonplace police behavior. Another group that knows it's commonplace is police officers themselves.

Sadly, in our early tenure as cops, we are instructed on the "code" of the police subculture. These are norms that are almost always perverse. Two such norms were operable in the Jones mob attack. The first is that if a citizen runs from one of us, we are to beat him severely.

Another is that if a citizen physically hurts one of us, we are to hurt that citizen even more before we bring him to the station. And if that citizen has killed a cop, he shouldn't make it to the station alive. This is well-documented in research literature about policing (including the work of Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni and Jonathan Rubinstein) and in public testimony by police officers.

The police say Thomas Jones hurt a cop - shot him in the hand, says the police report. As that information was passed by police radio from officer to officer, the police subculture sprang into action. Officers turned on lights and sirens and accelerated to the site with total disregard for the community. Time to carry out the subcultural mandate.

Some police officers, fortunately, decide to resist such norms. We are the code violators. We testify against fellow officers and routinely interrupt beatings of the Jones type. Too many of our colleagues, however, choose to be strict adherents of the code.

Prosecutors fail to realize that the police subculture provides justification for Jones-type beatings long before the beatings ever occur. It teaches police officers how to have a ready excuse to explain away bad behavior. Meanwhile, lay people - DA's, judges and juries - are willing to accept authoritative versions of what happened on a police scene without question. Such automatic deference, coupled with lay ignorance of the police code, allows police brutality and racially discriminatory policing to flourish.

Imagine the success we as Americans, good police officers included, would have in stamping out police brutality if we took the police subculture seriously.

No surprise that civilians who report mistreatment at the hands of police are often made out to be liars. Black and Latino people report weapons being planted on them, report being beaten for merely questioning an officer's inquiry. Their accounts are deemed "unbelievable" and the products of wild imagination.

That view is supported by many white social scientists. Unlike their colleagues of color, they assert that police officers' actions are seldom if ever motivated by race. When officers gun down an unarmed man in a barrage of 41 bullets on a Bronx street, or when officers beat a man viciously on a Philadelphia street, these scholars assert that it's the ineptitude of the officers or an "adrenaline rush," but never a crime with the ingredient of malice. If anyone is to blame, they point to automatic weapons that fire too quickly, supervisors who didn't supervise, a training course that was never delivered.

A different perspective is held by people and academicians of color, as well as some whites. We recognize that American policing suffers from a perverse subculture, and that all too often, individual officers lack the courage to stand up to that code. The result is a too-frequent lack of integrity and respect for human life, a lack of respect that all too often exacerbates the racial tensions that still exist in our society.

Christopher Cooper, a lawyer, is a former Washington D.C. metropolitan police officer. He is on the board of directors of the National Black Police Association and is an associate professor of criminal justice with a specialization in policing at St. Xavier University in Chicago.

Copyright 2000 Philadelphia Newspapers

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