Civilizations need rules because they require order.
These rules must be accepted and observed. But invariably, as people do, some people will break the rules. Civilizations therefore need a mechanism to deal with the rule breakers so that society does not fall into chaos and rule breaking is not rewarded.
In a system of accountability and consequences, there must be first points of contact, people charged with preventing and stopping rule violations.
In our society, those people are police officers. Their role, in abstracto, is essential. However, the way we constructed it is problematic.
We have created a civilization that is essentially unfair and unbalanced, and we have asked police officers to control the negative behaviors that cause and exacerbate the imbalance. We want to oppress the little people – poor people, people without privilege – and let them accept them peacefully. We want to punish people for rebelling against the discomfort and disillusionment.
I am by no means saying that we should accept and apologize for violent crime. I just find that there is much less violent crime among people who feel physically safe, financially comfortable, culturally valued and rightly hopeful.
In this way, policing is about controlling populations under pressure and protecting more affluent citizens and their property.
There are, of course, crimes involving the police that do not fit that model. There’s the white-collar crime and the murders in mansions and the like.
But don’t be fooled, the number of people being prosecuted for white-collar crime is only a fraction of all federal prosecutions, and even that small number is declining.
The criminal justice system – including law enforcement – is not meant to regulate the rich, it is meant to regulate the poor. In this way, the police are a means of controlling the powerful rather than a means of controlling the powerful.
Perhaps no one illustrates this dynamic better than Donald Trump. He set himself up as Mr. Law and Order to be elected, and he strengthened his rhetorical support for the police as people complained about police misconduct and brutality, especially as it targeted black people and those protesting in support of black lives.
Before Trump, the police put pressure on populations that people like him believed needed to be controlled.
However, when Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol, injuring and even killing police officers, Trump was silent. Days after the riots, he failed to acknowledge the death of Officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes in the wake of the Capitol violence.
Not only has Trump not approached Sicknick’s family, he has not sent a letter of condolence.
All he did was sign a proclamation that flags be flown at half-mast a week after the riots “as a sign of respect for the service and sacrifice of U.S. Capitol Police officers Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, and all Capitol police officers and law enforcement officers in this great nation.” The proclamation made no mention of the fact that they died after the riots, riots he helped cause, riots he continues to defend.
Trump has consistently minimized the uprising and indirectly minimized the trauma inflicted on the officers.
The officers protecting the Capitol, in the minds of people like Trump, were trying to control the wrong population.
But the entire episode exposes the lie such people tell about supporting the police on principle. In fact, they only appreciate the blade if they hold the handle and the blade is pointed away from them.
After Trump failed to mention Sicknick in the days following his death, one of Trump’s top campaign officials, Matthew Wolking, said, texted another, Tim Murtaugh: “That pisses me off. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie.”
Of course it was a lie. Much of the so-called Blue Lives Matter movement was a lie. It was just a reaction to Black Lives Matter. It was an attempt at silence rather than solidarity.
This week, Trump returned to Washington for the first time since leaving. And the speech he gave was another one on law and order, returning to the theme of empowering the police, calling for the execution of drug dealers and describing the country as a “cesspool of crime.”
In all of this, he encouraged cities to reintroduce racialized stop-and-frisk policies because “it works,” and called on them to flood the streets with more cops and back off on responsibility for the actions. of those agents.
trump card said“There is no respect for the law anymore, and there is certainly no order.”
The irony clearly escapes the man.
But his comments underscore another reality, beyond the fact that his support for the police is opportunistic at best, and it is this: In societies that harbor grotesque imbalances, you will reap grotesque resistance and violent outbursts. And when you add stressors like a pandemic and rising inflation, the problem only gets worse.
We as a country could address the underlying drivers of this violence, but we would rather take the easier path of punishing alleged pathologies. This relieves us of social debt.
We separate the criminal “choice” from the context of society, and we use police forces as tools to control the rebels and rule-breakers.
It’s all cynical and short-sighted, but in a society that is sucked into the control of other people’s bodies, where criminalization is racialized, where poverty is criminalized, unfortunately this strategy has proven time and again to win.