by Geo Maher
The point here is not to debate the intricacies of legal precedent but to note the vast gulf that exists between what the police are required to do and what the public believes they are supposed to do, a gap concealed by the myth of “serve and protect.” This example is especially relevant given that the question “What about the rapists?” is almost always followed with “What about mass shooters?” The answer is Parkland, and “no duty to protect.” Indeed, there’s zero evidence that school police have ever stopped a mass shooting. What happened in Parkland was, in fact, a replay of the massacres in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado, and in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, among others. Writing exasperatedly about the “cowardly cops” who failed to stop Pulse shooter Omar Mateen, Michael Parenti observed at the time that “while they are shy about confronting killers in nightclubs or schools … the police continue to perform fearlessly against unarmed individuals.”
And just as police are not legally required to protect and serve, they are not trained to do so, either. On the contrary, they are trained to protect themselves first and foremost, even if it means harming others, and they are taught that their safety exists in a zero-sum relationship to a presumed aggressor. According to Seth Stoughton, a law professor who spent years working as a police officer in Tallahassee, the problem isn’t a lack of training but what the police are actually trained to do. Starting at the police academy, “the concept of officer safety is so heavily emphasized that it takes on almost religious significance.” Rookies are taught that their prime directive is survival, and that “every encounter, every individual is a potential threat”—a strangely Hobbesian vision for those claiming to be “public servants.”
Stoughton goes on to describe “hands-on exercises” in which
one common scenario teaches officers that a suspect leaning into a car can pull out a gun and shoot at officers before they can react. Another teaches that even when an officer is pointing a gun at a suspect whose back is turned, the suspect can spin around and fire first. Yet another teaches that a knife-carrying suspect standing 20 feet away can run up to an officer and start stabbing before the officer can get their gun out of the holster. There are countless variations, but the lessons are the same: Hesitation can be fatal. So officers are trained to shoot before a threat is fully realized, to not wait until the last minute because the last minute may be too late.
While occasionally encouraged to avoid mistakes fatal to the public, “officers are taught that the risks of mistake are less—far less—than the risks of hesitation. A common phrase among cops pretty much sums it up: ‘Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.’”56
But the reality is that it isn’t really dangerous to be a cop, hyperbolic ranting about a “war on police” notwithstanding. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, being a police officer is less dangerous than being a logger, fisherman, roofer, pilot, garbage collector, truck driver, farmer, steelworker, construction worker, landscaper—the list goes on. My own father was nearly killed in a logging accident, not because he was a hero, but because he was a poor, disposable worker. But loggers don’t declare war on the trees. Fishermen don’t believe the seas are out to get them. And I have yet to see a “Garbage Collectors’ Lives Matter” T-shirt.
Poor people go to work and risk their lives every day without exaggerating their heroism, even when that heroism is exceptional: nurses, doctors, and other frontline health care workers; the USPS workers and garbage collectors who are only beginning to get their fair due; and the migrants picking fruit in the fields of California as wildfires bear down on them. It is only the police who are forever describing themselves as the bravest of public servants but are trained to see everyone they encounter as a mortal threat. It is no surprise that this topsy-turvy view, in which armed aggressors paint themselves as victims, bears the same logical structure as the victim complex of settler colonialism in the past and white nationalism today. Cops today are increasingly, and by design, cowards who never stop talking about how brave they are.
Why do we have public employees trained in the use of violence if they aren’t even required to use that violence to protect and to serve, and if even when they do, it has no positive impact whatsoever on community safety? Why would the public pay billions of dollars in salaries just to then pay hundreds of millions more—$100 million in Chicago in 2018, and $880 million in Los Angeles between 2005 and 2018—to settle cases of police brutality?57 There is no Hippocratic Oath for police, and if they were actually held to the standards of primum non nocere (first, do no harm), policing would be nothing like what exists today. Instead, the only oath binding police today is to avoid any possible danger to themselves; to shoot first and ask questions later, killing those armed with cars, knives, sticks, wallets, cell phones, or nothing at all. What happens when the public realizes that the police don’t protect us, and that they aren’t even required to do so?
Trying to understand the police can sometimes feel like staring into a fun house mirror. The right-side-up reality of a policing apparatus that systematically fails to protect the vast majority instead appears flipped upside down, in an expansive pig majority that underwrites, supports, and votes for ever more police as the sole solution to all of society’s ills. What explains this optical illusion whereby an American public that jealously guards its tax dollars nevertheless throws billions at a violent and useless system of policing? To be sure, false promises can be tempting, especially when there seems to be no alternative to the world of police. But the mirror is cracking, and the idealized image of the police is splintering. Even the tiniest fractures offer glimpses of a new world.
The only people police protect and serve are themselves.58 And just like any other corrupt and self-serving bureaucracy living parasitically off the public dime, they should be abolished.
3
The Mirage of Reform
Scarcely a week before Baltimore police killed Freddie Gray in April 2015, officer Michael Slager gunned down Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, shooting the fleeing man in the back five times from a distance of more than twenty feet. After footage of the killing sparked widespread outrage, and Slager was quickly arrested and indicted for murder, a deafening chorus emerged, insisting that “the system worked.” And they were right. The system did work, just not in the way that most mean.
The system lurched into motion immediately, as Slager cuffed the dying man and then ran (ran!) back to grab his alibi, the Taser that he would then plant near Scott’s failing body. As rapper and activist Boots Riley noticed at the time, Slager did so in an eminently practiced way: “This was done so readily and so smoothly that it can’t be the first time he’s done it, and the nonchalance shows that it’s commonplace.”1 The machinery continued to whir smoothly as the second officer on the scene—Clarence Habersham, who is Black—ignored the planted evidence, raised no questions, and did not administer CPR to Scott. Habersham later insisted that he had immediately applied pressure to Scott’s wounds, but audio recordings from the scene suggested that he was instead counting bullet holes in the still-dying man. After all, multiracial policing is still just policing. The North Charleston Police Department parroted Slager’s account in a preemptive attempt to exonerate the officer, calling the killing a “traffic stop gone wrong” that had been “unfortunate and difficult for everyone.”2
The media—an essential component of the system if ever there was one—immediately ate up a story so thoroughly predigested as to not raise any eyebrows. The police are to be believed, so we are told. Among those who also believed that the system worked, because they are an essential part of that system, were groups like Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, whose local representative was clear about his priorities: “I don’t want to see another Ferguson.” The system purred along smoothly when a superior officer briefly interviewed Slager, only to make it clear that he had nothing at all to worry about: “They’re not gonna ask you any kind of questions right now.”3
The system worked because it performed the function it was designed to perform: to kill Black people and either justify it, cover it up, or both. This is the system, this has always been the system, and yes: the system worked.
Michael Slager wasn’t arrested because the system worked—if this were the case, killer cops would be arrested all the time. He was arrested due to a glitch in the system, and that glitch’s name is Feidin Santana. Not only did Santana courageously capture the murder of Walter Scott on video, but crucially, he released the video not to the police, but to Scott’s family instead. Santana knew better than to trust the police with evidence, and he feared for his own personal safety. On both counts, he was justified. When Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant dead in Oakland, other officers immediately attempted to confiscate the phones of bystanders like nineteen-year-old Karina Vargas. She released her footage, which went viral. Ramsey Orta, who filmed Eric Garner’s killing, was harassed by police, imprisoned at Rikers Island, and—he believes—poisoned as retribution.4 Slager was arrested not due to the normal functioning of the system, but because Santana operated outside it.5
Policing isn’t a few bad apples: it’s a violent system that generates corruption, brutality, and inhumanity, recruiting self-selected bullies and teaching them how to bully more effectively. It is famously shielded by the so-called blue wall of silence, behind which, with a tiny handful of exceptions, even the “good cops” cower, protecting their own in the knowledge that they might be next. And it’s a system in which the very worst of those apples float to the top, promoted internally or elected to leadership positions in the Fraternal Order of Police. Policing is not a fundamentally sound system that has simply become too heavily armed or militarized. On the contrary, policing—especially of poor communities of color at home and abroad—has always been a militarized affair. Likewise, policing isn’t suffering an unfortunate crisis of community relations; the “community” is the explicit target of its control and repression. No number of town hall meetings and soothing words, barbecues and softball leagues, can obscure this fundamental reality.
Policing isn’t broken, and police reform hasn’t failed. Just as policing is doing what it was designed to do, so too has police reform been largely successful in its own task: to legitimize the police. And just as every “failure” of policing is turned into the need for more funding and more police, the same goes for police reform—every failed reform means we just need to try again. Police reform is always a “failure,” but the answer is always more reform. This is why the various quick-fix, silver-bullet solutions to police violence and misconduct have done nothing more than strengthen policing as a system. Ironically, it is by claiming to be broken—repeatedly, loudly, and publicly—that policing has historically distracted attention from its own rotten foundations. Reform doesn’t seek to change and correct the problem of policing from the outside: it is itself an essential part of that problem.6
To borrow a phrase from Critical Resistance co-founder Rachel Herzing, we can understand police reform as a sort of magic, an incantation that—no matter how absurd—is believed to cure all ills through mere repetition. This magic takes the form of a historical disappearing trick, concealing the failure of all previous reforms behind the magician’s cape of the present. Were this trick not already obvious enough, consider the fact that one central target of police reform in the present—“broken windows,” or proactive policing—was itself once offered as a magical fix by a previous generation of violent magicians.7 What could be more magical than solving crime proactively, before it even happens? Or, consider that police once held up the kind of “neck restraint” that killed George Floyd as an alternative to beating suspects with their nightsticks. The magic of reform is its power to hypnotize, to dazzle, especially those who want to believe (or at least want an excuse to ignore). We should be wary of similar incantations in the present: body cameras, racial sensitivity training, diversification, procedural justice, community policing, “less lethal” weapons.
By the same token, police reform is also a mirage: it tantalizes from a distance, promising relief that never arrives. The closer you get, the further it recedes into the distance, but not without enticing you to continue walking in vain. We know that police reform doesn’t work, because we’ve seen it all before; because in the densely packed years from Ferguson to today, all we have had is reform proposals and blue-ribbon commissions. None of this was enough to save George Floyd’s life.
—
Police reform is as old as policing itself. The earliest sheriffs, the shire-reeves of Norman England, were empowered both to collect local taxes and to enforce the law—a perfect recipe for corruption and brutality (Robin Hood’s antagonist, the Sheriff of Nottingham, was hardly a caricature in this respect). Later constables and night watchmen, established around the thirteenth century, were scarcely better—“unarmed, untrained, under-supervised, often unwilling, and frequently drunk,” not to mention “wandering about with lewd Women.”8 In fact, the very founding of the modern police was an attempt to rein in the corrupt bands roving the countryside and brutalizing the poor in the name of the Crown. Ever since, the response has been the same on either side of the Atlantic: to professionalize the police along military lines and on the model of colonial domination.
Within a few short decades of the NYPD’s founding, the 1894 Lexow Committee discovered a level of corruption so widespread that officers were guilty of “almost every conceivable crime.”9 Police affiliated with the Tammany Hall political machine would buy promotions before recouping their money through extortion and by running prostitution rings—all while cracking down on independent sex workers—and they were fully embedded in the widespread political corruption and electoral tampering that defined the era. These early reforms had little effect, and the Prohibition era saw the explosive growth of both corruption and police abuse, including the use of torture to extract confessions. A 1931 report by the Wickersham Commission was penned in large part by diehard police reformer August Vollmer himself, who often boasted about his own colonial experience, advocated the use of “military tactics” to fight crime, and described policing as “a war against the enemies of society.”
Vollmer argued that police should be professionalized even further along military lines by incorporating a vertical structure and adapting colonial methods. As LAPD chief, he had previously modeled an elite crime-fighting unit on counterinsurgent forces in the Philippines.10 This was a strange response indeed if torture was a concern: US counterinsurgency training has seen the most brutal forms of torture exported globally, with those chickens later coming home to roost in cases like Jon Burge in Chicago. If Vollmer’s counterinsurgent policing initially involved a campaign for hearts and minds through community engagement, however, he and other police reformers soon abandoned this vision in favor of inward-oriented process of professionalization. Early police forces in the United States had been “catchall health, welfare, and law-enforcement agencies” that “cleaned streets and inspected boilers in New York, distributed supplies to the poor in Baltimore, accommodated the homeless in Philadelphia, investigated vegetable markets in St. Louis, [and] operated emergency ambulances in Boston.”11 Before long, the professionalization drive of the 1930s stripped police of what little role they had played in social welfare to focus more narrowly on crime, setting the stage for the crisis of today.
Fast-forward to the late 1960s, when three separate federal commissions—Katzenbach, Kerner, and the National Violence Commission—all struggled with the questions raised by mass rebellions against police violence. All three commissions pointed squarely toward underlying social issues: police brutality may have provided the spark, but structural racism, poverty, unemployment, and housing were the kindling. The Kerner report, in particular, famously diagnosed the existence of “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” concluding that “white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it
, and white society condones it.” The vast social divide that produced the riots was not the product of policing as such, and would not be resolved without job programs, investment in public housing, and the broader desegregation of American society.
Lyndon Johnson would largely ignore these recommendations in favor of an emphasis on security that saw the dramatic expansion of policing. While for many this is an indication of the unfulfilled promise of the Kerner Commission, it also paradoxically shows how Kerner, by pairing far-reaching statements about social welfare that political leaders would inevitably ignore with a by-now standard menu of minor reforms, became a model for almost every subsequent police reform proposal. And while recognizing that “recruitment of more Negro officers alone will not solve the problems of lack of communication and hostility towards police,” Kerner nevertheless concluded that such diversification efforts should be “intensified” anyway.
The New York Knapp Commission, empaneled in 1970 following corruption revelations by detective Frank Serpico, showed just how little the NYPD had changed over the course of a century. While not focused on use of force against civilians, Knapp was a window into how corruption stitches police together like a gang or a mafia. Low-level corruption, so-called “grass eating,” was the disciplinary glue binding together the blue wall of silence and protecting more aggressively corrupt “meat eaters.” After all, you can’t snitch if you’re a little guilty too. Serpico himself learned the hard way what happened to those who betrayed the brotherhood: he was shot in the face under suspicious circumstances while his fellow officers refused to provide backup, later denouncing “an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer.” A 1994 report from the Mollen Commission later found that attempts to reform the NYPD had actually made things worse: the department had cracked down on the low-hanging fruit of everyday graft while commanders, in part worried about public embarrassment, had discouraged investigations of more serious corruption. Whereas cops had previously accommodated criminals, the report argued, now they were the criminals—more meat eaters than grass eaters.