Where Predators Feed : Police: Russell Kuster paid with his life for the deficiencies of the rest of the justice system.
The murder of Detective Russell Kuster during a shoot-out with a parolee, an undocumented alien felon, is more than a brutal crime. It’s a grim reminder of the twilight world that cops work in, this place where predators feed on humankind.
Russell Kuster served 24 years in the Los Angeles Police Department. Like every other homicide officer, he became hardened, cynical. Spending one’s career in a world ruled by the worst human impulses, constantly reminded of mortality, cops become pessimistic. In this universe of brutality, psychopathy and rage, they become inured--perhaps a better word is insensitive--to calamity. It’s a defense mechanism. Once, at the scene of a homicide, I stared in horror at the bullet-riddled corpse. “You’re not staring at a person,” a veteran detective said calmly, making notes on his clipboard. “The suffering is over and that’s just something that was left behind.” A healthy way, I thought, of dealing with murder.
The mind-set of the veteran cop is that the horror always happens to someone else, that victims are the naive, those without the ability to sense danger. But when a cop is killed, the wall of protection shatters. The impenetrable shield has failed and the infidels are inside the castle.
So, yes, cops use insensitivity as a way to keep sane in an upside-down world. But the broken-down judicial process is another matter. Police see the system as insensitive at its very core, a victim of the “God complex.”
Overburdened district attorneys convince themselves that there is no alternative and heedlessly justify plea-bargaining even in murder and child molestation cases. Who’s to complain? Certainly not the accused. Judges, weighed down with cases and benumbed by the system, eventually decide to make it easy on themselves and begin dispensing lighter sentences. The defense attorneys appearing in their court start to speak well of them and the stress eases.
Defense lawyers, officers of the court, show their extraordinary dispassion concerning right and wrong by making the courtroom an adversarial game, an arena for solipsistic argument and clever tricks. Parole officials, dealing with thousands of felons over long periods of time, simply give up and go along with the program, which calls for releasing lifetime career psychopaths back onto the street. After all, they didn’t create the laws or the sentences. And our politicians, anesthetized by complaints and crime, tell us that the problem is getting better. As for the rest of us, we simply choose the avoid the issue. Like the apathetic functionaries in the judicial system, we of the middle class are generally afforded the luxury of distance from the crime problem.
Police officers are afforded no such distance. They get no time for deliberation, no chance to consider the arguments, no time to refer the matter to committee, no opportunity to ignore crime. There was a call for help, and as a cop, Russell Kuster met his duty alone, without benefit of judicial robe, three-piece suit, magic, religion, sheepskin or clever academic precept. He lost his life and he got his man.
The cops--his friends, those men with hardened hearts, cried. But their tears were as much for an unfeeling, decayed judicial system as for a fallen hero.
