The One with Marissa and Emily
Two Girls, One Earnest Conversation About Policing
I’ve done a lot of things in my life simply because someone underestimated me. If everyone I knew was jumping off a cliff, I don’t know if I necessarily would as well. But if the last person to leap turned to me and said, “I bet you wouldn’t do it, too,” I would be at the bottom of that valley before they finished their sentence.
This, of course, is how I ended up a vegetarian for four years and a Dodgers fan for the past two. (Oh, I’m not a real Dodgers fan just because I got this joke hat that has Live Laugh Love written around the LA logo??? Guess who’s tracking their scores every night because they can’t watch the games due to the MLB blackout? HUH!!! Looks like I’m the real fan now!!!!!)
This bizarre intro is my way of explaining that recently, my sister prompted me to try to have a conversation here with someone who holds a different opinion than I do on a major issue. I wouldn’t say that I have gone out of my way to only talk with those who agree with me, but I have made a conscious effort to never platform any person whose beliefs are or can be harmful to others.
Today’s guest couldn’t be harmful to others if she tried, and yet, we hold distinctly different opinions on policing. This week, I talked with Marissa Cecca about how she formed her views on policing, where I stand with mine, and what we could each learn from listening to one another.
Um hellooooo!!! My name is Marissa Cecca. I am a 21 year old student at the University of New Hampshire studying Psychology!!! I’m originally from Belmont, MA which is just about 15 minutes out from Boston. I’m a sucker for a good episode of F•R•I•E•N•D•S (can recite kid you not, EVERY single episode—it’s unhealthy). Not only that, I love rom-coms (guilty pleasure for sure).
I have a deep admiration for police officers which is why I was so excited to be interviewed for THE E4P newsletter. Both of my uncles as well as a few of my friends are all police officers which makes my beliefs so close to my heart. I hope you guys enjoy!!
xoxo
Rissa :)
Women Talking About Cops (2022)
As someone who loves talking to people but hates transcribing, I have established a pretty nifty system for conducting interviews here at E4P. However, I thought this conversation would both flow and function best if Marissa and I did what we’ve been doing in person for the past year which is why the bulk of today’s piece is just our chatting back and forth.
I kicked things off by asking:
Emily: Can you briefly explain your background and your relationship with policing?
Marissa: Yeah, I grew up in Boston, Mass. My grandfather was a sheriff at the Middlesex Sheriff's Department. He retired when I was 12, and then that's when my Uncle Matt became a Belmont cop in my hometown. He's been on the force for 12 years now. And my Uncle Mike, his brother, is also a Belmont cop. Other family members have been in law enforcement, but those are the three I'm the closest with.
Emily: How has that shaped how you learned about policing and the institution of law enforcement?
Marissa: I feel like it shaped my opinion because I got more firsthand stories. I also never really asked until it became such an issue and I wanted to get a proper opinion about what was going on behind the scenes. Because of that, I feel like having such close relationships with cops has allowed me to see both sides and understand certain things that they may have to do. But at the same time, I might not necessarily always support it.
Emily: I was going to make a joke about how most of what I know about policing was from watching Law and Order: SVU.
Marissa: I remember watching NCIS when I was little and thinking that's just how everything was solved. And it's just not that.
Emily: You were saying that you now see both sides of this issue. Have the opinions you held about policing growing up changed at all recently? If so, why and in what way?
Marissa: Yes and no. In terms of my opinion towards policing, I am still someone who “backs the blue” and I think this is because of the stories and situations I have heard or encountered throughout my life in terms of police. Obviously, I wish there were some modifications to the training they undergo, but I totally understand how it is important for them to have such intense training to protect the communities they are serving in, as well as themselves. For a split second, depending on the conversation I am involved in, I can see my thoughts and ideas on the policing system altering, but I usually always end up reflecting on them and resorting back to my original beliefs.
An example of this was when a peer of mine posted a private story talking about how the cops involved in the shootout with the Boston Marathon Bomber were “just doing their jobs but that shouldn’t change the fact that police still suck.” I took this really close to heart, because my uncle was one of the cops at the shoot-out. He didn't fire his gun, but he witnessed everything. That was a time when his life was 100% in jeopardy, but he was not even worried about himself. He was worried about protecting the citizens of Watertown, where it took place.
My friend posted the story right around the time of George Floyd’s murder (due to police brutality), and I was continuously feeling like a horrible person for still supporting the police. I remember bringing it up nonchalantly to the person in conversation and defending the police involved in the Boston Bombing shootout, as well as my uncle in particular, and again got roasted for my stance on the matter.
When cases pop up in the media regarding police brutality, I want to emphasize, I do NOT support those police officers—I support the ones who truly want to protect and serve their communities. So my opinion on policing has not changed, but I am more confident in being able to express how some officers who misuse their power are the main reason these issues are escalating. Now that…pisses me off.
In a June 2020 interview with ABC News, Wall Street Journal language and linguistics columnist (a real job?????) Ben Zimmer explained the roots of the “bad apple argument” that cropped up very frequently in the wake of the George Floyd protests. The argument stipulates that there are only a few bad police officers, the bad apples in question, and “the police” as a whole should not be judged based on their bad behavior. However, as Zimmer explained in the interview, the phrase is actually being used out of context: the origins of the sentence go all the way back to “1340 in English and probably earlier in Latin,” with
the original phrase being, “A rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor…” The idea of the proverb was to take this image of rotting that can have a corrupting influence on the apples nearby and using that as a kind of a metaphor to say, “You have to be careful about a bit of wrongdoing in an organization or it could have this overall corrupting effect on an entire system.”
Think of it this way: if a few people in your book club committed murder and you went to the next month’s meeting without reporting the murders because, well, it was hard to find a good group, and also Janet puts together the best charcuterie boards every month, you wouldn’t necessarily be innocent yourself. You would be better fed and better read, but not fully innocent.
In a darker but more clear-cut example, if fraternity members knew a few of their brothers had committed sexual assault—maybe even watched it happen themselves—but did nothing about it, you wouldn’t necessarily think, “They’re just being a good friend.” Just because they didn’t commit the assault or you didn’t murder Janet’s husband doesn’t mean you didn’t create a space where it was safe for this behavior to take place.
But I still wanted to know why this theory has always been and remains so appealing to those who are pro-police, so I asked Marissa:
Emily: Do you subscribe to the bad apple argument, or do you think it’s the inverse—that there are just some really good people trying to do the best they can in a really bad institution?
Marissa: Yes. 100%.
Emily: So you think it’s that one and not the bad apple argument?
Marissa: Correct. I can see the bad apple argument being validated in the sense that there are bad people here and there, but that can happen in any workforce. It just sucks because they have a weapon, so it’s easy to say, “Cops are power-hungry, and they abuse their power.” I’m not denying that is a possibility, but I wouldn’t put that towards every single police department in every single area.
Emily: But that is not what I’m saying. What you’re saying now is more in line with the bad apple argument. My opinion is that the roots of the institution itself and the whole history of “a police” are not good, and so bad things are guaranteed to happen—it’s just that there are good people who became cops, became sheriffs, that are now still trying to function as best as they can within an institution that was built on slavery, that gets all of this money without a lot of oversight or accountability. Does that make more sense?
Marissa: Yeah. That’s the part that’s so hard for me to grasp because every single person I know goes into this profession—it’s not for the power. I can’t even think of how people would do that, and why would you? You should want to protect and serve your community. You should want to make sure that there are children sleeping safely at night. But obviously, that’s not the case everywhere.
I feel like I have such a strong opinion when it comes to thinking that people have a negative idea of who the men I love in my family are. I think that’s why I get so defensive sometimes. It’s hard in the sense that it’s such a controversial area to talk about that when I know I can talk about it in a comfortable environment I will voice my opinion and I will defend my uncles and my grandfather, but I can only talk for them because I know who they are deep down. None of my family, none of the cops I know have ever had to fire their weapon—they never want to have to and I hope they never do because they’ll never be the same again.
Listen, I get it. If my family looked like Marissa’s did, I don’t know if my opinions on this issue would be the same. If that loses favor from some of you, so be it. But I know people are not their jobs and I can see myself also getting defensive over the fact that those that I love are good and kind and loving despite their profession.
Still, I also think it would be hard for me personally to not at least question the morals and motivations of someone willingly entering a system that habitually harms and fails to consistently protect.
I asked Marissa:
Emily: With all of the conversations that have come up over the past couple of years, have you ever questioned the character of the members of your family for choosing to go into this line of work?
Marissa: I’ve questioned one of my uncles. My grandfather, no, because he didn’t do the whole beat thing, like that wasn’t his job. I don’t really talk with him about it because he gets really into that stuff and I can’t sit there for 45 minutes and talk about the same story over and over again—still love him though!
With one of my uncles, there were a lot of situations that have happened throughout the years with him. Nothing horrible, but like distancing from the family, making decisions that I’m like, “sometimes your impulsivity concerns me” but I never really tie it into his profession. At the same time, he’s the one who dealt with the Boston Bomber so he has PTSD. Right now, he’s not working. He made the judgment call after talking to a therapist and said, “I need a medical leave because I can’t be trusted right now” due to how bad his mental health was.
That helped with my judgment in a way, but if he wasn’t talking to the therapist, would he have been scared to do that because he’s a guy and his masculinity is so important? At the end of the day, when you have a weapon, that doesn’t matter.
Emily For President Family Values
No family is a perfect monolith of opinions. I mean, not only would that be boring if true, it also just simply couldn’t be true. How could you tell which sister was pink and which was purple if you didn’t have differing opinions?
Maybe that’s just me and mine. But still, I wanted to ask Marissa:
Emily: Does your family share some of your newer views? Where and why do you differ?
Marissa: The women in my family are very open to opinions. My grandmother doesn’t like that my uncles are cops. It stresses her out, and with everything going on right now, she’s always like, “I don’t know why you don’t just go back into business.” I will talk to my uncles about certain things I get so nervous because I’m literally trying to explain, like, facts that I feel like at least one of them is going to not accept because he’s going to…I’m basically telling him this system isn’t right and he’s actively working in it, so I—I don’t know.
There are so many other conversations that our family just can’t even talk about anymore. When it comes to law enforcement, I’ll hear him out and he’ll hear me out, but other things…can’t even get into it anymore.
Emily: Do you feel comfortable sharing any?
Marissa: Yeah, I’ll share the number one. the one that comes up—
Emily: —Read him!!!!
Marissa: A big one is the vaccine. I can’t talk about the vaccine with one of my uncles because I'm like, “It’s going to make me hate you and I don’t want to hate you.”
Emily: Have things ever gotten to that point with this conversation, about policing?
Marissa: No. He gets emotional when it comes to that, where he’s like, “I just hate that every time I walk in to grab my coffee, I’m looked at like a horrible guy.” That’s more where our conversations go. It’s more about his personal feelings. I find myself reminding him, “You know you’re not a bad guy.” It sucks that people are doing that.
One time, on Thanksgiving when he was working and we were all getting together, he went in to get his coffee and someone gave him a nasty look. My friend was in the coffee shop and witnessed all of this and was the one who told me—this person gave him a nasty look and then looked at the barista and said, “Thank you so much for working on a holiday.” And my uncle was like, “I have three kids at home that I would love to be with right now and I can’t.” I remember bringing it up to him and he just sat there and was like, “At this point, I’m getting used to it but it still sucks.”
I’ll talk to him about the news and I’ll ask, “Did you see?” and he’ll be like “Yeah. great.” He gets more worried now about what are people going to think of him, and I’m like: “You need to be the person to make a change!!” And then he says something like, “I know. I’m trying,” and that’s when the conversation ends because I don’t know what to do. I can’t give him all this advice because I don’t know what he can and can’t do.
Emily: Do you think there is something to be said for creating another form of law enforcement that is more in line with the needs of our country, what we need protection-wise, what we need economically, so and such? And then shifting into something more like that rather than trying to fix something that seems to be unfixable?
Marissa: I would hope so. I could see one of them being into that whereas the other would want to see how it goes and then join.
Emily: I’ve been in situations where you feel like fixing something that is broken is the only way forward, but there comes a point when you kind of have to look around and say, “There is no way to salvage this.” There is no way to undo what police have done. The damage is irreparable at this point—wouldn’t it be much more productive if there was a different way of going about things? I know I’m coming from this as someone who is pro-abolition, that thinks that there needs to be a new system and tear this one down.
I just hear frustration on all sides: I’m frustrated where I sit, you’re frustrated where you sit, your uncles are frustrated where they sit. The people that are ok with the way things are are the ones who are taking advantage of the loopholes and the problems and the history of policing. It’s not serving the majority of us, emotionally or safety-wise.
Marissa: I think that’s the hard part—it’s so divided right now. It’s going to just continue to divide piece by piece. I think it's going to come to the level of cops just have a no empathy towards anyone that they're communicating with. I saw a lot of racism by not only the people down in Alabama but from the cops, too, and I pray I never see that up here. I know it definitely happens up here. I'm not saying it doesn't—I just haven't seen it firsthand. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening downtown right now, and I'm just unaware of it. So I'm in support of a new system. There needs to be something that changes.
Emily: Do you think that there are other people in positions like you, who either are a part of a police force or have family members on one, and have as nuanced of a view as you? Or do you think that you're kind of a rarity amongst police families?
Marissa: For example, my sisters don’t back the blue. My sisters are not technically related to my uncles, but they’ve been in their lives since they were two years old. One of my sisters has a pig hanging from her blinds in her living room. That's just a cap on it. And it's hung with. What's the word?
Emily: A noose.
Marissa: Yep. I remember walking in and seeing that and feeling like I'm going against my family. I think that's what I've been trying to say. If I'm like so like, “Defund the police, do this, do that, we need a new system,” I feel like I'm going against my family and I'm such a family girl that that thought pains me. But then again, I realize we need changes focused on the safety of everyone in this country.
Emily: What if you flipped that logic? What if you said your uncles and your grandpa should want to change an outdated system that does protect people and that does not harm others and if they don’t that, they’re going against you? Aren't they going against you as a family?
Marissa: Yeah, I guess you could say that. I’m thinking of how one of my uncles said, “I go to places where they told me to draw my gun. I don't. I don't want to touch it.” He says, “I'm trying to show them I'm not going to do anything. We just need to handle this situation.” So in a way, he is making the changes.
Conversations around policing over the past three years seem to always circle back to the phrase “defunding the police,” for better or for worse. It’s hard to gage how well people actually understand what the movement is actually calling for—a reallocation of funds away from “military-grade weapons and invasive technologies” and towards creating and expanding effective non-violent safety methods, with a push to repeal racist and harmful laws still on the books around the country today—because the way it is often portrayed elicits reactions rooted in fear, and the conversations tend to stop short.
In full honesty, I never thought much about the police prior to the summer of 2020 because I didn’t have to. As a white woman, I was not raised to fear the police but, rather, I was conditioned by society to fear the things that could and would happen to me without the police. After having countless conversations here and in private, after doing research and fact-checking sources and even reading Fox News to see where they get the information they share with their followers, I have found that it’s not scary for me to think of alternatives to policing. It is, in fact, really comforting to think of what our country would look like if all Americans felt safer.
But that’s me. And that’s also me after years of diving headfirst into researching and talking about and developing my own opinions on this topic. Other people might not have the time, resources, or empathy to sit with this conversation and others, which is how we end up with information bubbles and rampant misinformation and $787.5M defamation lawsuits.
It’s not a cop-out—pun not entirely unintended—to say that many Americans don’t know how to discuss without debating. That is a really harmful precedent because it drives people to surround themselves with others who think like them and prevents us from learning any different ways of thinking.
I’m not advocating for us all to indulge our local conspiracy theorists because I’m certainly not saying everyone’s opinions are rooted in real facts. What I am saying is that sometimes, when talking with sane people we merely disagree with, our own arguments can be strengthened by actually learning what it is we don’t agree on without fighting.
All of this is to say, I asked Marissa:
Emily: We started having this part of this conversation the last time we talked privately, but do you think what defunding actually means and abolishing actually means kind of get misconstrued by people making bad faith arguments? You're going into education. The idea behind defunding the police that the police get billions of dollars in most cities and towns around the country is: wouldn't it be better if we put some of that funding back into our communities, we bettered our schools, we bettered our hospitals and mental health facilities, we better like stuff like that. If that's the crux of the defunding argument, why do you think that so many people that do support the police don't like that idea?
Marissa: I don't think they know what it fully means. I think they just hear defund the police and think the police are going to be completely abolished. And I'm like, “No, like, do your research.” You hear one thing, but in reality, there is so much more to it like you just said. If people actually knew that, I would hope a majority of the people I know would be more willing to be like, “Oh, okay, I get it now. Like, yes, our town actually needs this, we actually need to hire more IEP-trained teachers.” There are so many towns where students with disabilities can't even get access to individualized education programs, whereas the police station is getting redone and it got done like five years ago.
I know what you're talking about when you talk about defunding the police. When I first heard it, I was terrified. You and your sister taught me what it was. I originally said, “No, I don't like that. Why would I want my uncles to lose their jobs?” And now I understand.
Emily: How do you think we—we being people that support changing the way policing exist—can better communicate what defunding the police means? How can that be conveyed better to people that are scared when they hear that phrase?
Marissa: I think it would make a big difference if the cops would get a little more educated on this conversation, because they could speak for it. I remember there was a big conspiracy and people thought that if cops got defunded, all of their weapons were going to get taken away. That's not going to happen, and anyways, they might not need it. There are so many other aspects of our country that need fixing, and if they are, a lot of the issues handled by law enforcement will also go down.
Emily: I think it’s interesting because you're not necessarily for abolition, but at the same time, we agree that there needs to be a new system. Abolishing the police is not what Tucker Carlson will have us believe, which is anarchy. I'm not pro-anarchy. I am pro-let's-build-a-system-that-actually-works-for-us. And then because we have a system in place that works, we can let go of the old style of policing, the one that's entrenched in racism and violence, we can let go of the system that we can't seem to fix.
Marissa: Since I’m graduating in a month and know the career path I'm going into, I’ve been thinking a lot about which other areas in our society need to be fixed and what they have to do with law enforcement to a certain extent. Like, gun control. I ended up deleting it, but I filmed a whole TedTalk after the Tennessee shooting. I remember saying, “This is ridiculous. Instead of abolishing or altering gun control laws, you want to tell me I can't have an abortion. In the state of New Hampshire, I can go into a Walmart and purchase a gun and just go to the next school. I see that makes no sense to me.”
I'm going into a school for 180 days out of the year, and I'm going to be with children. I don't want to be sitting at my desk one day and hear something and think, “Shit. It's happening here.” I know myself. If a gunman was to come into my room, there's no way in hell I wouldn't jump in front of my kids. But I shouldn't even have to worry about that.
How many mass shootings have happened in the past three weeks?1 Oh, God. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Emily: The root of what you're saying is the most horrifying fact, which is that this could all be prevented. Everything we're talking about is preventable. One of the questions I had is how do you view the relationships between policing and gun violence.
The idea that people with guns are the ones protecting us from other people with guns feels like there are too many guns. It's like one of those weird math problems: if this person has like 30 grapes and this person has 75 grapes but gives the first person 20 grapes, then there are too many grapes in this situation.
Marissa: I have friends who, since the moment they turned 21, were all so excited to get their LTC [license to carry]. I truly respect my right to bear arms, but I want to apply and I want them to test me to make sure I actually can get one. The only reason I would ever want it is because I'm a woman who is going to be living alone in Roxbury next year. It's not a safe area, and I just want—
Emily: But why is it an unsafe area? Why do you not consider it safe? I think it comes back to funding: instead of money going into communities to actually make and keep them safe, they're going into the police precincts. But who are they keeping safe?
Marissa: There are biases and stereotypes with towns like Mattapan and Roxbury, which are Boston towns. Just because those cities have high crime rates, doesn't mean that the city's actually bad. But like you said, where is their funding going? What are the cops doing? I don't know. I don't know those cops.
Emily: I think that you just hit a nail on the head, which is that you shouldn't have to know the cops of where you're living to trust that they're not going to cause more harm than good.
Marissa: I think that's actually the first time I've ever realized that.
Emily: You are in a unique position. But the system of policing should be set up so that everyone feels safe everywhere, that you know that there are people serving who have gone through bias training, who are not going to make impulsive decisions with a weapon, who probably don't even need a weapon in most situations that they encounter because the more violent situations might dissipate. You shouldn't have to personally vouch for a cop in order to trust them. I don't know every person in the publishing world, but I can vouch wholeheartedly that they like books.
Marissa: Yeah. I can't vouch that every single cop out there is a good person committed to taking care of their community. It sucks because everything society talks about the most with police is all because of the fact that they have weapons. And I'm going to bring it back for a second to school shootings and guns. People are saying teachers should have guns—I don't freaking want one in a classroom. Are you kidding me? That's not a solution.
Emily: Guns don't make people safer necessarily.
Marissa: Guns are dangerous. There’s a reason why you're supposed to keep them in a safe where no one knows where they are.
We largely ended our serious conversation here before the audio devolves into us giggling and texting my sister about some petty gossip which I think, in a lot of ways, is the point of this. No one is mad at the other, no one is fighting. This is just one conversation in the thousands Marissa and I have already had, and an even smaller blip if we factor in all the eventual ones to come.
I have had so many fights with loved ones over the past eight years, desperate for them to take me and my beliefs seriously. But I can’t solve every societal issue and I can’t change anyone’s mind but my own. I can only learn where the line gets drawn between my opinions and someone else’s and figure out where to go from there.
Marissa and I could have covered more, I could have brought in more facts and stats, we could have ended our call on a much different note. But regardless of the could have’s, I walked away from this call and the experience of turning it into this piece having learned something new which is all I ever ask for from this newsletter.
That, and the satisfaction of doing something that at least one of you thought I would never do.
THANK YOU SO MUCH TO MARISSA!!!!! Everyone congratulate her on graduating later this month!!!!
Since April 10, there have been 31 mass shootings in America.