Aug 1, 2017 3 min read

It shouldn’t have been surprising.

The president who urged supporters to “knock the crap” out of hecklers at one of his rallies during the 2016 campaign, and vowed that he would pay their legal bills if they were charged with assault, told police last week that they should not be “too nice” to criminal suspects.

“Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over (their head), I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK.'”

It’s been six months since President Trump became commander in chief, but among the most important lessons he is still struggling with is that presidential pronouncements carry a great deal of weight. They can muddy the putative policy goals of his administration or, on a more fundamental level, set a poor example for the country he is supposed to be leading. He simply can’t say things as casually as he would to someone sitting on the next bar stool.

How can we tell young people that bullying is not acceptable when the president seems to wink at it? How can we impart the value of due process and the presumption of innocence when President Trump suggests that it’s OK to knock around or injure those in police custody?

Fortunately, many police organizations around the country decided not to let Trump’s remarks, whether made flippantly or not, pass without comment. Groups ranging from the Police Executive Research Forum to the Police Foundation and the International Association of Chiefs of Police all condemned what the president had to say. The chief of the New Orleans police department stated that keeping the public safe and fighting crime “requires restoring trust with the community. The president’s comments stand in stark contrast to our department’s commitment to constitutional policing and community engagement.”

James P. O’Neill, the New York police commissioner, emphasized that the training regimen in America’s largest city – and, it should be noted, Trump’s hometown – allows only “for measures that are reasonable and necessary under any circumstances … To suggest that police officers apply any standard in the use of force other than what is reasonable and necessary is irresponsible, unprofessional and sends the wrong message to law enforcement as well as the public.”

The police department in Gainesville, Fla., also weighed in with a widely shared post on social media. The department stated that Trump “has no business endorsing or condoning cops being rough with arrestees and suggesting that we should slam their heads onto the car while putting them in.”

The statement continued, “The president’s remarks … have set modern policing back and erased a lot of the strides we have made to build trust in our community … It’s certainly possible to enforce laws and arrest very bad folks and do it with respect.”

In the years since the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the debate over the treatment of suspects, particularly those who are black or Hispanic, has too often been presented as an either-or proposition – you either support the police or support protesters. But it’s possible to recognize and applaud the demanding and often thankless work that police officers and other law enforcement officials undertake, while also acknowledging that the job carries with it power over human lives, and that power must be exercised prudently.

The reaction by police to what Trump had to say was reassuring. Simply put, they get it.