Privileging law enforcement over other important work
A hearse carrying Santaquin Police Sgt. Bill Hooser enters the Santaquin City Cemetary on Monday, May 13, 2024. (Kyle Dunphey/Utah News Dispatch)
A Channel 5 news reporter called Sgt. Bill Hooser’s funeral procession gathering point in Orem on May 13, 2024 “a spectacular sight.” A spectacle is apparently what organizers were aiming for.
What bothers me is that Utah puts such a huge amount of public money and time into valorizing the law enforcement profession over that of teaching, health care, social work, retail food, auto repair, newspaper work, and anything else it seems. Democracy assigns all workers and all people the same value at birth and at death. So does the Judeo-Christian scripture. Are our funeral pageants a sign that democracy is slipping away in Utah?
It must be mentioned kings and other autocrats historically took great pains to glorify themselves and their dynasties with regularized civic pageantry devoted to solitary individuals, including annual birthday celebration holidays and celebrations around the day the king ascended to the throne. Monarchs also glorify themselves with brick and mortar rather than with great contributions to the literature of the world. Not much is needed in the way of written law or scientific treatises to sustain a dictatorship. The king says something today, and everyone must do it today. When he says something different tomorrow, everyone must forget what he said yesterday, and do what he says today. The king had a palace police guard and local sheriffs beholden to him to make sure his will was done. The Dark Ages lasted a long time due to this tidy little political arrangement in Europe.
History teaches that one of the enduring memorials of autocratic rule, other than the choking-off of free enterprise and the repression of free expression, is a nation’s burial monuments. The Judeo-Christian Bible chronicles the repression of life under the Pharaohs of Egypt, who left behind gigantic burial tombs known as pyramids. With fanfare and monuments sapping up all the public weal and wealth, how could history possibly remember any other citizens of that once storied nation other than their own grand exalted leaders like King Tut and the gang? The twelve tribes of Israel had to make an exodus from that political environment in order to create a self-governing society. Once they did, they produced a bounteous literature that the world is still benefiting from three thousand years later.
Utah has been getting ever deeper into colossal brick and mortar structures as well. I am not referring to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ temple-building program, but rather to Salt Lake City’s program to bring more professional sports arenas to the town. Billion-dollar projects to build Romanesque style coliseums for professional hockey and baseball are proposed for Salt Lake’s downtown and northwest quadrants, for example.
The wife of one of many officers paying respects on May 13 was asked what could be done now to ensure there will be fewer funerals like the one for Sgt. Hooser in the future. She answered, “Better people . . . more love.” This is the standard answer from a Utah electorate who regularly express little awareness of actual prevention and deterrence measures, actual public policy. This is the favorite answer from a citizenry who show little respect for secular processes of any kind other than occasional patriotic displays.
In fact, the national news story some years back of University of Utah student Lauren McCluskey’s murder laid bare the very poor handling by city and campus of her pleas for help before that fateful day. Little has been done by the legislature or the city to prevent and deter crime in Utah since then, just as little has been done to prevent homelessness, poverty, and civic ignorance. But boy we sure are into building taller skyscrapers downtown and louder sports stadiums to drown out the pleas of our many hurting citizens.
Is it really so bad to argue for making greater investment in actual democracy infrastructure like public education and criminal justice reform rather than the patriotic trappings of democracy, like law-enforcement funeral processions and monuments to sports heroism?
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