Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  “Police” and “policy” are cognate: our liberal political tradition has focused on the second. The most revealing juncture in classical liberalism may come in a rare discussion from Adam Smith, in the 1762 lecture given the title “Of Police.” For Smith, what matters to civil government as “police” possesses sufficient dignity only when it speaks to what we would call economic policy. The constabulary is acknowledged as a necessity for its execution of the criminal law but is beneath political notice:

  Police is the second general division of jurisprudence. The name is French, and is originally derived from the Greek πολιτεια [politeia], which properly signified the policey of civil government, but now it only means the regulation of the inferiour parts of government, viz. cleanliness, security, and cheapness or plenty. The two former, to witt, the proper method of carrying dirt from the streets, and the execution of justice, so far as it regards regulations for preventing crimes or the method of keeping a city guard, tho’ usefull, are too mean to be considered in a general discourse of this kind.

  “The proper method of carrying dirt from the streets” and “the method of keeping a city guard”: twin practicalities.

  Liberal and social-contract theories of democracy—those that begin from Hobbes and Locke and that form the official philosophical background to the American Republic that was constituted in 1789—do have a central place for punishment, but not for police. This is perhaps because, on a strong version of contract theory, police ought not to exist. How could democratic agreement fail to be self-enforcing in its daily practice if the agreement is real, sustained by each individual’s consent? Social-contract theory does include the discouragement and rectification of error after definite breaches of the contract, as punishment will address the convicted wrongdoer who either gave in to the temptation of interest or was perverted to it by some personal flaw. But the right agency for requital is penal law. Crime and punishment belong to judicial proceedings and courts, where the cause can be unfolded after the fact. There is no location alongside or outside the citizens and their contract, for a supplementary force or additional locus of authority and violence, for mediation or interruption. There is no place for any intervening agency with political force, except as a kind of collector or picker-upper of persons—hence, one very much like a trash picker or one who carries dirt from the streets, as Smith proposed.

  With the growth of the role of police in democratic societies, a theory of their presence and place in government has simply not emerged in proportion to their power and variable function. The only really worthwhile thing we have is empirical description, from the late-twentieth-century field of police sociology—and this research has been most useful in dispelling illusions, not creating comprehensive philosophy. An impressive number of practical things have been studied and yielded surprising findings, on such topics as work hours, organization, decision making, dramaturgy, constituencies, professional attitudes, and differential application of the law to people of different identities and situations. The radical theorist Mark Neocleous gives some results:

  Both the “law and order” lobby and its Left critics have failed to take on board the implications of a mass of research on the police….The overwhelming majority of calls for police assistance are “service” rather than crime related: in an average year only 15 to 20 percent of all the calls to the police are about crime, and what is initially reported by the police as a crime is often found to be not a crime by the responding police officer. Studies have shown that less than a third of time spent on duty is on crime-related work; that approximately eight out of ten incidents handled by patrols by a range of different police departments are regarded by the police themselves as non-criminal matters; that the percentage of police effort devoted to traditional criminal law matters probably does not exceed 10 percent; that as little as 6 percent of a patrol officer’s time is spent on incidents finally defined as “criminal”; and that only a very small number of criminal offenses are discovered by the police themselves. Moreover, most of the time the police do not use the criminal law to restore order. In the USA police officers make an average of one arrest every two weeks; one study found that among 156 officers assigned to a high-crime area of New York City, 40 percent did not make a single felony arrest in a year.

  The disillusioning thrust of this work on the usual mandate for police—stopping crime—had already been distilled forty years ago by the most famous and influential sociologist of police, Egon Bittner. As he archly put it in 1974: “When one looks at what policemen actually do, one finds that criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with the frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely.” Yet the next step of theorizing from this new knowledge, a task also authoritatively identified with Bittner, pushed this ironic mode into the theory itself. What even the most original sociology of police seems to show, again and again, is that police are paradoxical and their strictures unworkable. They don’t fit philosophically. As a stopgap profession poised between other philosophically grounded institutions, police are “impossible.” Perhaps police ought not to exist, thinking theoretically, since their behavior is inadequately supported by the democratic social order’s explicit justifications. Yet they must exist, practically—despite their errors—precisely because they have proved themselves in democracy as both “first responders” and a “last resort,” a mobilization of nondefinition and nonfixity for all sorts of situations: the agency thrown at anything in society that can’t be accommodated or that we don’t want to see. Bittner’s formulation is the one that has lasted, and haunts the field as the only really original and lasting philosophical contribution to what our police are:

  I propose to explain the function of police by drawing attention to what their existence makes available in society that, all things being equal, would not be otherwise available….My thesis is that police are empowered and required to impose or, as the case may be, coerce a provisional solution upon emergent problems without having to brook or defer to opposition of any kind, and that further, their competence to intervene extends to every kind of emergency, without any exceptions whatsoever.

  And that’s all they are—that’s their essence. “The assessment whether the service the police are uniquely competent to provide is on balance desirable or not, in terms of, let us say, the aspirations of a democratic polity, is beyond the scope of the argument,” Bittner apologizes.

  In his analysis, the key term from his definition may well emerge to be “impose,” or “coerce”—and the sine qua non for Bittner’s picture of police becomes availability of force (or even violence). The apparently damning body of Bittner’s work has been embraced by police chiefs, perhaps because it furnishes executives with the only plausible apology in the face of continual criticism. One major professional association now gives out its annual Egon Bittner Award to a municipal chief who has survived more than fifteen years of service—not ironically, but in earnest.

  —

  Suppose, though, we did want to find the place of police in a democratic polity, in the sense of what version of their role can be desirable for democracy.

  Their feature of visibility might be a place to start. Police lift accidents, events, and gatherings into vision. They enhance situations but no one mistakes them for the main show. The officers are a blue aniline dye, poured into channels of society, down alleyways and interstates, sketching in blueprint the lines of public space, how we distribute dispersion, how we distribute assembly, how we distribute crime, how we distribute safety. Or in a sense police are the grease or gunk—the fluid or sand—that speeds or obstructs shifts in the constitution of social reality.

  Police are piped along the edges and borders of spontaneous or planned gatherings, installing for others, in the moment, the outline of public significance. One knows to walk toward anywhere that police are standing, where they mark the significance of something else: a parade, a concert, a demonstration, or an arrest, an abuse, a
n accident. One can go to enjoy them, their offer of theater and ritual to daily occurrences, as they establish a space of eventfulness. Or to watchdog them, to make sure that their handling of people can’t occur invisibly and unaccounted for.

  Secrecy by police in any public place always identifies them as suspect. Yet police departments hold tightly to their capacities for secrecy and claim them to be necessary for their heroic function of detection and investigation. Insofar as detection of crime is what police wish their job were about, police are likely always to strain for greater secrecy in a democracy.

  Where sight disappears, in the paddy wagon and the police station, abuse becomes possible. (And indeed these are the sorts of places, along with jails, a democratic police might seek to eradicate or open up.) One knows the hush that occurs in a crowd when an arrestee disappears into the closed, windowless wagon; the citizen, even as a criminal, has temporarily disappeared from the democratic public (until arraignment, the space of salvation by habeas corpus—then one looks for marks on the face, marks on the wrists and the body, from abuse). This is one of those gaps into which citizens fall where democracy can disappear.

  Yet the real rival of sight is not just secrecy but touch, which registers itself only between bodies that know what has actually been done but can’t prove it by other means. Police possess touch, citizens should possess sight. A question is why a third element that could stand between sight and touch doesn’t come much more to the fore, when we think of police, in some way that we would find democratically recognizable: talk. Talk is the actual basis of a democracy. It is the specifically democratic dimension of human relations. It restores the assurance of neighborliness. Talk is also what police actually mostly do in encountering the public; yet one doesn’t think of police as talkers and listeners first, but as bullies. What happens when citizens and police talk in the fateful encounter? How do they talk? And if they don’t talk, why not?

  —

  Suppose we say this: Police are negotiators, but without access to contract, law, or eloquence. Their medium is not law. They do not always use entirely memorable or wholly coherent words. Usually they enter situations of conflict which they did not cause, but which they are required to enter into as third parties. There, they are deliberately distracting, grandstanding observers. Turning the attention of other parties away from each other and instead to themselves.

  When you look at them in the right way, focusing on the middle range between space-holding inaction and violent attack, negotiating can be seen to be what the police do unendingly, habitually—but unfamiliarly, because in some way they generally refuse to recognize or care about the original goals of negotiating parties. They bring a separate set of criteria to bear, and not always appealing ones. Is this chargeable? Should this person be removed or transported temporarily? When can I leave, and how do I scare these citizens a bit so as to feel they won’t come into conflict again, and police won’t need to come back? Police negotiate without an obvious, single, unitary reference or goal—other than to end the necessity for their being there. And they are always asking themselves a separate question of whether to lift a person out of the horizontal conflict and into the vertical mechanism of criminal justice—a process for which the cop won’t really be ultimately responsible, and which he won’t have to enter himself.

  Even a traffic stop, for the most minor infraction at a stop sign or in a twenty-mile-an-hour zone, becomes a negotiation. Here the negotiated outcome may be a “warning,” when a warning is ostensibly a name for something official although in fact “the official” has been denied or put away. “Okay, I’m going to let you go with a warning.” The “warning” is not known to the statute book. It does not exist as a juridical category. But it is one of the major categories of police thinking, and one that—instead of objecting to its arbitrariness, or uneven application—we might want to preserve. Because it is a key moment when police, without breaking “front,” without admitting deficiency, acknowledge that negotiation has been won by the citizen.

  Police exist so we can see them on the corner, or on the subway platform, so that we know, when we move in public, that no other person can take us for unseen, to rob us or molest us without defense. They exist sometimes just to mark a lane closure (by standing in it) or road construction (by standing in front of it) or a town fair (by standing at its entrance). They announce eventfulness, and in some way their mere presence stands against danger.

  Of course we feel differently if we think the danger they might think they see is us. Or if we resemble their idea of obstruction, or of notable event. When police eye African-Americans, harass African-Americans, obstruct the movements of African-Americans, and wind up drawing their guns and murdering African-Americans—which even in the twenty-first century they do with regularity and impunity, no matter the police department or region of the United States—it’s first because America still sees racially. Kidnapping an African labor force to build the country is still the country’s unrepented sin. The mad but ingenious mechanism of coding the difference between free and slave by “color,” not by an actual spectrum of tans but “white” and “black,” as metaphysical as day and night, bright and dark, sight and obstruction, nobility and stain, lingers. Police, as devotees of sight and seeing, sustain this way of looking at every citizen of recognizable African ancestry.

  What differentiates a place that seems clean, orderly, and peaceful from the same location with items out of place, mixed up, confusing, noisy, and conflictual isn’t just aesthetic norms in the neighborhoods police come from, but what they think that “we” want, by how we see. But who are we? The police sociologist Peter K. Manning, one of the best ethnographers of police departments, has strongly made the point that one thing police tacitly depend on most is how they think their client citizens view them as they undertake patrols and arrests—yet many of the formalizations they use to imagine such “law-abiding citizens,” “good people,” “the public,” rigidly enacting an absent standard of order, alienate them from their actual citizenry. The place they possess least guidance and clarity is on what “good people” want and how we want to be treated:

  The police were designed to respond to citizen demands and requirements for service as much because this represented prevention or deterrence of the sources of crime as because the police were intended to act symbolically as one citizen would to another in time of need. The symbolic centrality of police action as standing for the collective concern of people, one for another, cannot and should not be underestimated. Law has grown up as a means of formalizing the conditions under which the police must act and cannot act but does not provide the basis on which they do or should act.

  Violence, too, is given to police as a technique they alone can use, in the service of the overall nonviolence or pacification of society, such that citizens need never use violence legitimately upon one another—they route it through police, so to speak. But this formal device, too, winds up defining police by their application of violence. They wind up originating violence as a means of resolving any social deadlock. Police add violence to situations. If we can see, and see through, police, we may see that this becomes a way of injecting testing violence or domination into the heart of society in a public way. Small comfort, perhaps, since there is no guarantee that we will oppose the wicked things that police may show us. Our neighbors may support that wickedness. We may have no idea how to fix it. Still, police violence differs from forms of violence and domination which have no visible presence, or public check. The police measure out in public what the society will tolerate, even to our shame.

  Is it ever possible to love police? Certainly at the personal level, momentarily, it’s possible, when they save us from direct violence, or return a lost child home. I mean beyond that. Perhaps the other scenario really is when we know they have order or law on their side, and they don’t apply it—because, they hint, their adherence is to community, not to the State. “I see you, and I let you go, for the sake
of an order you and I share which is yet not the law.”

  This reaches to a completely different part of theories of democracy—to fraternity, solidarity, sympathy, sociability, trust—the least formalizable part, the part most betrayed in recent years (or maybe always) by moneyed politics and corrupted government. The least articulable part, and a place to start.

  [2015]

  VIII

  THOREAU TRAILER PARK

  THE MEANING OF LIFE, PART IV

  In Concord, Massachusetts, opposite Walden Pond, during the decades when I was growing up nearby, the maples and oaks that fringed Walden also shaded two lots of concrete, where there rested a congregation of flat-roofed oblong trailer homes, like caskets of ivory. Cinder-block front steps tied the screen doors to the earth. Fabricated to move, these homes had lost their mobility. The state had purchased the land underneath them. Divided from these lots by a state highway not much widened from the old cart road it had paved, the dark woods, the deep pond, the wan beaches, and vast tracts of forest past the railroad tracks constituted Walden Pond State Park, a nature preserve, and also a historical memorial, controlled by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Thus there was the state park, and then there was the trailer park. The two must be at odds forever. For if the low, undistinguished dwellings across the road made a “trailer park” in the American parlance, this name marked them off profoundly from the logs and grasses and falling leaves, paths and overlooks, fenced in so that anonymous citizens could enjoy them (for a modest entrance fee) as long as they left no trace. “Trailer park” bespeaks a corral for retirees and the working class, poor enough not to own houses not on wheels, but not deprived enough to be picturesque or pitiable; not poor enough to lack garish collections of cars which nosed up to vinyl siding, and oversized televisions that twinkled in daytime through windows of automotive glass, cutting out silhouettes of plastic flowers on the sills, or glinting through the mazes of chintz curtains. “Trailer trash,” referring to human beings, is the rare American phrase of contempt that lacks an organized group to resent it. Throughout my childhood, the state park service prosecuted a war of attrition against the trailers: forbidding transfer of their sites to heirs or newcomers, prohibiting return to anyone who planned to use his wheels and then come back, finally disposing of each carcass as its owners died.