She was livid.
I had not cleared her daughter to play sports due to a significantly elevated heart rate and had referred her to a cardiologist for an evaluation. She understood that decision but when I went back in the chart and saw that the heart rate was also elevated at a visit a year earlier, understanding evaporated. She lost it.
“How could that happen?” she demanded. I did not have an answer. We should have caught it. It was an inexcusable mistake. Even though I subsequently made a change in the way we documented vital signs to make sure it could never happen again, the family left my practice. The mom wondered if there were other things we had missed. Trust had been lost.
I thought of this story this week as I considered the sad case of George Floyd. I found myself asking the same question. “How could this happen?” As did the mom, I wondered how many other things had been missed, how many other times police misconduct had gone unrecorded and thus unknown. I felt myself losing trust in the police.
Trust it seems, is the foundation of a society. All social contracts have trust at their core. When we go through a green light, we do so with confidence, trusting others to stop on red. We drop our children off at school, trusting that they will be not only educated but protected. When we say, “I do,” we trust the one we love to keep their promises and their vows. Without trust, everything falls apart.
I find myself wondering how many cases of abuse at the hands of police people can endure before trust is completely lost. We can say that bad apples are rare, and they are. But they are still there. Something has to be done to remove them.
Bart