Turning an insensitive remark into a teaching moment

Police chief's thoughtless rebuke to a heckler should be a goad to do better, not an erasure of all the good that's been done

Police Chief Bernadette DiPino and member of the Sarasota Police Department listen to an outdoor serenade by singers from the Sarasota Opera on November, 18, 2020. [Sarasota Police Department photo]

In recent days, a great deal has been made of a thoughtless remark Sarasota Police Chief Bernadette DiPino reportedly made during an informal concert by singers from the Sarasota Opera outside Sarasota Police Department headquarters back in November.

According to local news reports, after a homeless man known to have mental health challenges heckled SPD officers during the serenade, DiPino allegedly turned to her colleagues and said, “Anybody have a Taser they can give me so I can get rid of him?”

Obviously, DiPino’s words were inexcusable and alarming. For anyone to suggest that use of force is an appropriate response to verbal jousting is offensive, whether or not the comment is made in jest and whether or not the heckler has a mental health condition. (I suspect DiPino would have made the comment regardless of who it came from.) For it to have been spoken by the city’s top law enforcement officer is especially abhorrent.

But the rush to condemn not just DiPino’s irresponsible remark, but her entire career, as well as to dismiss the SPD’s concerted and ongoing efforts to interact with the homeless population in a less confrontational manner, is unfair and unhelpful. This was a stupid, knee-jerk comment, but it doesn’t undo the real progress that has been made over the last decade in local law enforcement’s effort to to treat Sarasota’s homeless population with greater dignity, compassion and assistance.

It’s unjust to suggest her remark recasts Sarasota as “America’s meanest city,” a title that might have been justified when it was bestowed over a decade ago, but no longer is. Calling for the chief to be fired and holding her up to ridicule (do we really need to mock the fact she once carried a poodle in her purse?) does nothing to address ongoing misconceptions about mental illness or a culture of confrontation and punishment that lingers in some law enforcement circles.

What DiPino said was legitimately distressing to anyone who holds SPD and the community as a whole to a higher standard. But I, for one — and I’m someone who’s long been established in this community as an advocate for the mentally ill — cannot call for her head on a platter. And here’s why:

I know too well how easy it is to respond quickly and irrationally in irritation and frustration rather than with patience and politeness to someone with a mental health condition who is harassing, haranguing or pushing your buttons. For proof of this I’m deeply ashamed to say that all you need to do is ask my own son, who has far too often been the recipient of my own irritated, insensitive gaffes.

Does this mean making a remark like DiPino’s is excusable? Absolutely not. She totally blew it on this one and she still owes the community and her officers a public apology.

But an isolated comment is not the same thing as a pattern of behavior or a template of practice. And in many cases and many ways DiPino, SPD and the city have held to their commitment to improving law enforcement relations with the homeless and mentally ill with more than lip service.

Many of us grew up at a time and in geographic locales where there was little sensitivity to or compassion for anyone with a mental illness. “Special ed kids” in school were mocked and ostracized; the man on the corner talking to himself was “crazy,” not ill. It’s only been in the past decade or so that our society has become more enlightened and informed, and we still have a long way to go.

At the same time, we’ve become a culture so quick to condemn and judge and indict — to destroy characters and careers and lives over a single stupid but all-too-human remark — that we’ve eliminated the possibility of redemption. If I’d been similarly held accountable for all the mistakes I’ve made in my child-rearing, I’d long ago have been stripped of the title of parent.

Is there a way, instead, to use this lightning rod to ignite more discussion, greater awareness, better reforms, more humanity? As eternally-flawed human beings, we will always make inconsiderate mistakes. Our goal should be not to repeat them.