The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Say No To Police Profanity"
An interesting column by one of my favorite commentators, Prof. John McWhorter. An excerpt:
Precincts across the nation do, in fact, have rules against profanity on the job. However, they are barely enforced if at all …. This casual cursing at people is not a mere matter of the informality of our times and it must stop. It is a much more serious matter than it may seem….
Profanity can be a form of hostility. To be sure, I am skeptical of claims that injurious words always constitute "trauma" (just as I am that "silence is violence"). However, profanity can still be a game changer. In interactions with cops it influences public perception. One study (of many similar) showed that, when presented with a silent video of a person detained by a police officer with captions in which the officers' profanity was left out, observers judged the interaction as more reasonable than when the profanity was included in the captions. Other studies similarly document that, when it comes to the cops, profanity matters—profoundly influencing how citizens view their interactions with police….
On the other hand, we must not fall for a crude, blanket notion that police officers must never be caught in a recording using, say, the word "fuck" on the job for any reason. This would operate upon an almost willfully uninformed sense of how language actually works. Any word remotely interesting likely has a lot of meanings….
Fuck—subject of one whole study on police interactions since it seems so fertile within them—has many meanings and functions. Rather a bouquet of them, in fact. It can be a passing, frustrated interjection, in the function of the Peanuts gang's "Rats." It can signal joy of a demotic flavor, a lexical kind of camaraderie, as when then-Vice President Biden used it when Obamacare was signed into the books.
We must also allow that speech norms are less formal than they once were. It's safe to say that, now, most people use four-letter words in work settings in ways that would have been unthinkable in the era of fedoras, camisoles, lawsuits over what got sent through the mail, and married couples sleeping in twin beds on television. We can't penalize police officers for being caught ever using profanity for any reason on the job.
Yet the issue here is not especially complex or subtle. In interactions with the public, police officers should not use profanity in ways that connote hostility, impatience, or dominance. More economically, the idea is that they should not use it in ways that are mean.
Seems reasonable to me, and indeed I expect that most government employers should and would forbid their employees from using profanity in an angry or aggressive way when speaking with the people they serve. (Certainly the First Amendment doesn't generally bar government employers from imposing such restrictions on speech that is part of the employee's job.) I appreciate that police officers may sometimes need to signal a form of aggressiveness; "drop the gun or I'll shoot" is aggressive, but justified. But I suspect that aggressive profanity generally adds a needless level of tension, hostility, and indignity to most situations.
Of course, mentioning the word in the course of describing facts (e.g., "In that altercation you were describing, who exactly was the person who said 'fuck you' to you?") is a completely different matter; and I also agree that there should generally be tolerance for some casual nonhostile profanity, given modern norms: "Fuck!" as an expression of surprise, or of annoyance at one's own minor mistake, is still unprofessional, but probably not an occasion for firing or serious discipline. But those, as McWhorter notes, are separate questions.
