by Rosa Brooks
And she didn’t like cops.
In some ways, my mother’s negative experiences with police formed a core part of her identity, and by extension, my own. Late in 1969 or early in 1970, for instance, my mother marched at an anti-war protest where she was tear-gassed by police trying to break up the crowd. At the time, she was pregnant with me, her first child. I’ve heard her tell this story many times, and usually she offers, as a coda, the reminder that I was tear-gassed while still in utero (“Which explains a lot,” she always quips, and I always chuckle dutifully).
Political activism was a routine part of my childhood. In one of our photo albums, there’s a picture from International Women’s Day, 1975: there’s my mother, in bell-bottoms, with a Gloria Steinem hairstyle, looking beautiful, passionate, and brave. She’s on a raised platform, giving a speech. I’m up on the stage too, just four years old, zipped into a hooded parka, holding her hand. Was I happy to be up there in front of all those people? The photo is too blurry to make out my expression, but judging from my body language—I’m not just holding my mother’s hand, but clutching it with both of my own and leaning my head into her forearm—maybe not.
There’s another picture in the family album from early 1979. My mother, my stepfather, my little brother, and I were engaged in what passed for recreation in our family: attending a protest. There was a nuclear power plant near where we lived, and we thought it should be decommissioned, or torn down, or not built in the first place—I don’t recall. A photo of my eight-year-old self shows me with long braids and a Yankees cap, a button pinned to my jacket depicting a nuclear power plant and the legend “Shut them down!” By then I had apparently decided that center stage was an okay place to be: in the photo, I’m grinning, gap-toothed and reckless, even though it’s raining and my clothes look soaked. The grown-ups were planning to get themselves arrested by trespassing on the nuclear plant’s property, or chaining themselves to its fence, or doing one of those things people do when they think getting arrested is a useful way to make a political point, and I wanted to get arrested too. My mother refused: in our family, getting arrested by the Man was a privilege reserved for the grown-ups.
As I got older, it sometimes became harder to reconcile my family’s political commitments with my own needs. Here’s another snapshot, this one just a memory, not an actual photograph. It was 1980, and my family was marching on yet another picket line, trying, largely without success, to persuade members of the public to boycott the Nestlé food company. Nestlé, my mother explained, was killing babies in the third world. Well, not killing, precisely, but selling powdered baby formula to women who lacked access to safe drinking water, leading ultimately to the deaths of their babies.
This was troubling. I was a loyal, obedient child, and I wanted to save the third world babies, but Nestlé made every candy bar that I loved, including my favorite, the $100,000 bar. My mother acknowledged this dilemma, but explained that we must all be willing to make personal sacrifices to live by our principles. So I abstained from $100,000 bars, and all other Nestlé products—no Nestlé Crunch, no Baby Ruth, no Nestlé Quik chocolate or strawberry milk powder with the picture of a rabbit drinking through a straw.
But the longer I abstained, the more I dreamed of that gooey caramel, crispy rice, and rich, sweet chocolate. Scott’s Five and Dime sold Nestlé $100,000 bars for twenty-five cents each, and I had a quarter burning a hole in my pocket. My mouth watered whenever I thought about it.
Finally, the temptation became too much. I was in Scott’s with my mother and one of her feminist friends from New York City, and they were momentarily distracted by the copies of Playboy and Hustler peeking discreetly out from the forbidden top shelves of the magazine racks. My mother’s friend decided to shock the small-minded, small-town customers by picking up one of these magazines and leafing through it ostentatiously, offering a high-decibel commentary on the female orgasm and its inexplicable absence from mainstream pornography. I was mortified, and I imagine my mother was as well (despite the activism and the public speeches, she has always been a deeply private person), but it worked briefly to my advantage, as the eyes of everyone in the small shop were drawn to the two crazy feminists by the magazine rack.
I seized my chance. I slipped over to the counter, grabbed a $100,000 bar from the shelf, thrust a quarter at the clerk, and ran.
I ran. I ran as if I had stolen the chocolate bar instead of spending a quarter from my own allowance on it. I raced out the door, around the corner, and into the alley behind the row of shops, where, huddling behind a dumpster, I ripped off the bright red wrapper and stuffed the candy into my mouth, gorging, almost choking on chocolate, caramel, crispy rice, defiance, and shame.
After an eternity, but much too soon, there was nothing left. I hid the telltale scarlet wrapper under some other trash and skulked back into Scott’s, guilt seeping from every pore.
No one had noticed my absence.
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• • •
I tell these stories so it will be clear: when I say that I feared my mother wouldn’t approve of my decision to become a reserve police officer, I don’t just mean that I expected her to be skeptical or concerned. I mean: I knew she would loathe the idea.
To my mother, police officers weren’t heroes, crimes solvers, or protectors of the vulnerable and lost. They were the German paramilitary officers who murdered Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, smashing in her head with a rifle butt, then shooting her and dumping her body in Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. They were the Alabama cops who arrested Rosa Parks in 1955 when she refused to sit in the back of the Montgomery bus. (That’s right—who else would I be named for? I got a twofer.) They were Bull Connor in 1963, ordering his men to use fire hoses and dogs against African American civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. They were Chicago cops in 1968, using their clubs on protesters at the Democratic National Convention. They were the sadists who used cattle prods to coerce confessions from suspects in Chicago, sodomized Abner Louima with a broomstick at Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct station house, and beat Rodney King until he lay bloody and unconscious by the side of a Los Angeles road.
* * *
• • •
Because I’m my mother’s daughter, her stories fill my head as well. I knew all about the cops who used tear gas, clubs, and fire hoses against people like my mother and my two namesakes. But these were not the only stories I knew. Back in the mists of time, there was a great-great-great-grandfather, James McLaughlin, who worked as a police officer in Dillon, Montana, in the late nineteenth century. He died of syphilitic paralysis, which is not to his credit, but he must have done something right, because his daughter, Mamie McLaughlin Howes, features prominently in many of my mother’s family stories. (Mamie is usually invoked to explain the family’s break from organized religion: enraged by the local Catholic priest’s refusal to administer last rites to her dying father without payment of an exorbitant fee, Mamie, attended by a priest on her own deathbed just a few years later, summoned up her last strength and, in a final act of defiance, flung the crucifix across the room.)
There was also my mother’s uncle Dave, an officer in the California Highway Patrol who, when she was a young teen, sometimes let her drive his patrol car. (This was probably not sanctioned by California Highway Patrol regulations.) When I was a girl, we visited Uncle Dave, by then long-retired and running a gift shop in Barstow, California, and it was obvious that my mother adored him. She made no effort to take him to task for his years policing California’s highways, and whenever she saw me watching CHiPs, a hit television show throughout my childhood, she reminded me that Uncle Dave had been a highway patrolman just like Ponch and Jon.
And there were cops everywhere in our blue-collar town. In the early 1970s, a short-term college teaching job, followed by divorce from my father, left my Montana-born mother temporarily marooned in the small Long Island town of Syosset. When their marriage broke up,
my father sensibly retreated to Manhattan, but something—maybe inertia, maybe a budding romance with the young steelworker who later became my stepfather, maybe sheer stubborn perversity—kept my mother in Syosset, where she carved out a defiantly bohemian niche for herself on the wrong side of the tracks.
In Syosset, you can still find Gatsbyesque mansions in the part of town stretching toward Oyster Bay and the old Gold Coast of Long Island’s North Shore. On our side of the tracks, ramshackle Victorians quickly gave way to the cookie-cutter Levittown houses of the respectable white working class. Our house, a modest white ranch, was just a few hundred yards from the railroad line, and most nights I fell asleep to the sound of train whistles and the clickety-clack of wheels on the metal tracks.
While my brother and I attended protests and circulated petitions, our classmates went to Sunday school and played in Little League games. Our parents were socialists, while theirs were Archie Bunker–style Republicans. Our parents had PhDs, while most of our friends’ parents hadn’t gone to college, and most held blue-collar jobs. My best friend Laura’s father was a fireman; Caroline’s dad ran a construction company; Audrey’s dad co-owned the local Irish bar. Gwen, Billy, and Pat’s fathers were all cops, as was Pete’s big brother Jimmy.
We didn’t belong. But I liked those fathers and big brothers—so solid, so respectable. These were fathers and brothers who took you fishing, set off fireworks at Fourth of July picnics, took you to the ball game—so different from my own family of radicals and bookish oddballs, where picket lines and boycotts counted as family fun, and displays of patriotism were met with immediate denunciations of militarism, imperialism, and patriarchy. Whenever I could, I attached myself to these large, comforting men, insinuating myself into their family gatherings. Laura’s family took me along to the local Catholic church on Sundays (I kept mum about great-great-grandmother Mamie). Caroline’s dad took us out on his boat. Pete’s brother Jimmy persuaded the other local cops to look the other way when, in our early teens, we were all caught drinking beer and smoking weed on the beach. The weed had been spirited away from my mother and stepfather’s stash, but I kept mum about this, too.
And I liked detective novels and cop shows—CHiPs and Columbo and Barney Miller. I liked the suspense, the adrenaline, and the clarity. No matter how complex the plot or how devious the perpetrator, these stories mostly boiled down to the same basic formula: there were bad guys, there were flawed but dedicated police, the police investigated, and—generally after a car chase or two—the bad guys were brought to justice. Simple, stirring, and satisfying. There was violence, yes, but it was always in the service of justice and the greater good.
The Abyss
Officers Injured/Use of Force: Officers attempted to affect a stop on a fleeing suspect. The suspect brandished a handgun and fired at the officers multiple times striking the officers. In response to the aggression from the suspect, Officer [redacted] fired his service pistol and the suspect was struck. Both officers were transported to an area hospital for treatment of gunshot wounds to the body. The suspect was transported to an area hospital where he succumbed to his wounds.
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
I have always been fascinated by violence: why people are drawn to it, and how they make sense of it—justifying it, glorifying it, condemning it, or trying to constrain and control it. At various points in my career, I have studied and written about South African police culture during the transition from apartheid, concentration camps in Bosnia, blood feuds in Kosovo, capital punishment and immigration detention in the United States, Ugandan and Sierra Leonean rebels, corporal punishment in Kenyan schools, Taliban and Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, and US wars and counterterrorism drone strikes—trying, in each case, to understand how it is that people come to believe the things they believe about violence. My more recent book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, looked at the ways in which post-9/11 America came to view so many problems through the lens of war, and how that has transformed and distorted our laws and institutions.
By any measure, policing in the United States is a breathtakingly violent enterprise. American police kill more people each month than police in most developed countries kill in several decades. For instance, during the first twenty-four days of 2015—the year I applied to the MPD Reserve Corps—police in the United States killed more people than police in England and Wales killed in the previous twenty-four years. Adjusting for population size, American cops kill people sixty-four times as often as police in the UK.
Ask how the United States became a country where police kill more than a thousand citizens each year, so many of them young black men, and you’ll get two standard but quite different answers. The first, offered most frequently on the political left, is that American policing is fundamentally violent and racist—American police officers kill so many young black men because police are the agents of a brutal state that does not value black lives. For America’s first two centuries, black people were enslaved by white Americans; for a century after slavery ended, black citizens were denied access to wealth and political power by overtly discriminatory laws; in the decades since Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racially biased policing practices and mass incarceration have replaced older forms of discrimination and brutality to become “the new Jim Crow,” as legal scholar Michelle Alexander puts it. American policing is violent because violence has always been a key means through which the country’s white majority defends its unearned privileges against the encroachment of minorities.
The second answer, offered most frequently on the political right and understandably preferred by many police officers, casts police in the roles of heroes and victims, not villains or racist thugs. In this version of the story, the problem is not the violence of police, but the violence of American society more broadly. America charges its police officers with the difficult, dangerous task of preventing and responding to violent crime—of which the gun-saturated United States has far more than its share—and in the United States, young black males commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes. The reasons for this are complex, but certainly not the fault of the police, and the relatively high rate of criminality among young black men brings them into more frequent contact with police officers than other demographic groups. The disproportionate number of young black men killed during encounters with police reflects this unfortunate statistical reality and nothing more, and although there are always a few bad apples who make other cops look bad, it is not fair to blame police officers for simply doing their dangerous, poorly paid, underappreciated jobs.
These two competing stories about policing don’t exhaust the possibilities, of course, and well before I decided to become a police officer, my instinct was that the true causes of US police violence are far more complicated than either of these narratives acknowledges.
Violence is a puzzle. We all say we oppose violence and want to reduce it, but no human society gets by without it. Violence, or the credible threat of violence, lies behind the laws and institutions of even the most seemingly placid society. In some societies, the state’s violence is right out there in the open; in others, it’s well hidden. But as the legal scholar Robert Cover argued in a now-classic 1986 article, “Violence and the Word,” we should not be fooled by surface decorum. In criminal trials, for instance, the defendant “sits, usually quietly, as if engaged in a civil discourse. If convicted, the defendant customarily walks—escorted—to prolonged confinement, usually without significant disturbance to the civil appearance of the event.” Yet, wrote Cover, “It is, of course, grotesque to assume that the civil facade is ‘voluntary’ except in the sense that it represents the defendant’s autonomous recognition of the overwhelming array of violence ranged against him, and of the hopelessness of resistance or outcry.” If most prisoners walk into prison, it is because “they
know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk.”
We tell ourselves that a central project of law and political institutions is the reduction of violence, but this is mostly a fairly tale. Law and politics play a role in structuring violence, but rarely “reduce” it. In every human society, soldiers, police officers, “criminals,” and ordinary people all create their own stories about violence, stories that explain—to their own satisfaction, at least—why some violence is acceptable and some is not. It would not be too extreme to say that much of human “civilization” revolves around the problem of violence: not how to reduce it, but how to channel and control it, how to make sense of it and assign it moral meaning.
It’s always easy to condemn the violence of others; we label the violence we don’t like as savage, unthinking, immoral. To Murphy and Auguste, struggling to make sense of the crime and dysfunction they see as they patrol in DC’s Seventh District, the residents of Southeast DC become “these fucking people” and “fucking animals.” To those protesting police shootings, the police themselves are brutes and animals: robo-cops, killers, crackers, pigs.
It’s the same the world over. Virtually no one conceives of their own behavior in such derogatory, dehumanizing terms. Instead, we construct stories—whole systems of meaning, often accompanied by elaborate legal and institutional structures—to explain and justify our own biases and behavior.