What To Do About the Cops

Will they always be with us?

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis has not yet triggered a wave of civil unrest like that of the murder of George Floyd or the beating of Rodney King. There are several reasons for this, three of which I think are central. The first of all and most importantly, the police had already been charged prior to the release of the video. Whatever other social issues that protests against police brutality represent, they are fundamentally about justice and the perception that the police are above the law and some people, black people, are beneath the law. The formal administration of justice might seem like an insufficient bandaid on a gaping wound for socially-minded people, but what it means for people is “you have rights” and “you are a citizen.” It’s easy for people (mostly white people) who walk around with the assumption that they have rights all the time to forget that how this is not only reassuring, but also deeply constitutive of how they act and think, of how they move about in the world and what sort of things they can expect from it. The fact that these officers were swiftly charged with murder is an important mark of progress, even if it’s after the fact.

Second, big conflagrations over police brutality usually coincide with another major social crisis: the Rodney King riots took place during Depression era-level unemployment in Los Angeles and years of grinding poverty for South Central’s residents; the George Floyd protests happened as the entire nation was in the midst of COVID and the severe social dislocation that wreaked. In those cases, an episode of police violence is the spark of a broader revolt. This instance is a bit more like the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man who was shot 41 times by the NYPD in the Bronx. Compared to Rodney King before it and George Floyd after it, the public response was more muted, but it did result in reforms like the Street Crimes Unit being disbanded. In the case of the Tyre Nichols murder, another one of these hyper-macho, militarized elite units is also being done away with. One might say that was progress, except its the same type of reform as two decades ago.

I also believe the third reason that there hasn’t been a mass uprising this time is the fact that the cops in this killing were all black. This, along with the fact that police killings have actually increased since 2020, is creating a palpable sense of despair. We thought once we integrated police forces they would serve communities better, now that hope looks dashed. Like mass shootings, are we just going to give up now? What is actually going on with the cops?

It’s seems difficult to give the old answer of “racism.” And indeed, it’s leading to the fatuous suggestion by some on the right and center that race is not an issue at all here. That’s just about as willfully-blinkered as pointing at colonial troops to say that imperialist states were not racist and had all kinds of multi-racial opportunities. America is not exactly the same as that, but it’s a lost closer than a lot of people would like to suppose. Some formulations that are offered, like “multi-racial white supremacy” or “multi-racial whiteness,” tend to offend people’s common sense and sound like so much jargon. But, when unpacked, they are correct in essential ways. The fact of the matter is that our society’s racism runs so deep that we just don’t think of black people’s lives as being as important as white people’s. In many ways, they remain second class citizens. This was the point of the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” And no one is really immune from this: it’s a structural feature of our country and black people can and do participate in it all the time. Police brutality is one flashpoint in a long struggle for recognition that’s still ongoing and faces us with harder problems than we’ve supposed, problems that may remain with us even if anti-black racism somehow manages to be overcome. The recent mass shootings in California point to this as well. What is going on in America that we so regularly and habitually disregard each other’s basic humanity? In these moments it can sometimes feel like racism is just one manifestation of a deeper spiritual illness: a kind of cruel solipsism that can be expressed either on the individual or group level.

But again, I don’t think if we simply talk about healing the spiritual wounds of the country we’re gonna get very far. I mean, it’s pretty clear that we won’t. Like everything else, police brutality is a political and economic problem. The sullen and often murderous group solipsism of cops is not the result of ethereal causes, but because they have become an alienated and alienating force in our society. The cops are a group apart from the rest of the country, with their own neighborhoods, own towns, own bars, and even their own flag now. The mafia calls itself la cosa nostra, this thing of ours, and the cops, too, have a thing of theirs. The dark triad of brutality, racism, and corruption, which so often appear together, stems from this essential apartness: they all reflect a self-conscious apprehension of superiority, difference, and conspiracy against the outside world. This is all exacerbated by the post-industrial ruin of our cities: being a cop is one of the only rackets going, a way into the middle class, but the job is essentially keeping in line the left-behind and racialized poor of globalization.

I think it’s very revealing that here in New York an old nickname for the police, used not least by cops themselves, is “Hessians,” after the German mercenaries who the British brought during the Revolutionary War and earned the hatred of the colonials for their cruelty. Police are something of a caste. Most Americans view themselves as individuals first, but the police have a corporate identity and interest. They view themselves as the put upon guardians of law and order, misunderstood and maltreated by the surrounding society. They stand on the boundary between respectable society and the world of crime and so they share some features of both: the bureaucratic, rational corporation and a criminal gang. And I think that may be permanent.

A lot of liberals, often from professional backgrounds themselves, believe that “professionalization” is the answer. This is both naive and historically illiterate. Progressive reformers tried all that in the 20th century to separate cops from the corrupt spoils system and make them professional civil servants. That made them even more of an unaccountable clique, because now you couldn’t even fire them. For years, the LAPD stood essentially outside of constitutional government, they were a kind of state within a state, with the mayor and city council essentially unable to dismiss police officials. Imposing “rational bureaucracy” actually created a medieval fiefdom. The LAPD became much less corrupt, but the corruption had actually mitigated the brutality: you could at one time pay-off someone to not get roughed up, now you just got roughed up. Under Chief Parker, the cops transformed into a “professional” army of occupation. Only after Rodney King did some semblance of democratic control return when Chief Gates badly overplayed his hand. (I honestly believe Gates let the riots spiral out of control to “show” that the LAPD, then under a brutality probe, should be left alone, but more on that for another time.)

In New York, the Knapp Commission of the 1970s uncovered endemic graft in the police department. Just twenty years later, there was another commission to investigate corruption, the Mollen Commission. What it found was disturbing: the widespread petty graft had been basically ended, the free corn beef sandwiches to cops and so forth, “paying” your parking ticket on the spot, and so forth, but in its place smaller, intense criminal gangs had established themselves within precincts, dealing drugs, providing protection to organized crimes, assassinating rivals. Not even so small: the so-called Dirty Thirty after the 30th precinct in Harlem comprised some 33 officers. These were protected by “clean” cops who either felt the pull of omertà or feared the professional consequences of making waves. Michael Dowd, sometimes called “New York’s dirtiest cop,” did his business for years under the nose of Internal Affairs who claimed to be frustrated by higher-ups. It took Suffolk County to finally charge him. (The LA County Sheriff’s Department apparently has an even worse internal gang problem.)

Surely, the clean cops welcomed the opportunity to get rid of corruption? Well, not quite. After the Dowd scandal emerge, Mayor Dinkins, New York’s first black Mayor announced the Mollen Commission and plans for an all-civilian review board. The cops quite literally rioted and almost stormed City Hall. And not just a few, either: This was two-thirds of the force. The proximate cause of the police riot was that they were rallying to the defense of a cop cleared by the DA for the shooting of a “low-level drug dealer” named Kiko Garcia in Washington Heights. But the cop was a member of the same precinct where Michael Dowd once helped drug dealers dispose of their rivals and was himself suspected of shaking down dealers. Overnight, the Police Benevolent Association turned him into a hero cop. And you know who protested these City Hall protesters? Eric Adams, then head of a group of black police, but not exactly Mr. Reform these days. I think that just tells you how intractable these problems are.

All of this is why I’ve been broadly sympathetic to “defund the police” even if the rhetoric has arguably backfired: it has the right idea, the cops are a power-center that needs to be brought to heel and checked. It will not be possible to do this in one fell swoop. Police power extends farther than the nightstick: they have an enormous ideological sway on our society and are the beneficiaries of huge amounts of propaganda. Getting rid of the police altogether is just too much a break with common sense for most people. That doesn’t make them “bootlickers” or whatever the fashionable online left-wing insult is these days, either. The idea is genuinely scary, both because of the huge amounts of copaganda pumped into the world, but also because our society is actually quite violent. Borrowing from the terminology of foreign policy, I think perhaps we need to adopt a realist stance of containment in regards to the police that admits that both reform and revolution have failed. The realist attitude says, “This is a powerful political entity with its own interests, its interests are not really aligned with the broader society, but are to get for itself as much power and resource as possible. And we, the general public, should curb the expansion of its power as much as possible.”

The other tricky thing is that they do offer some socially beneficially services. And unlike what many leftists would like to tell themselves and others, it’s not just “the ruling class” that calls for more cops; as conservatives love to point out, it’s also residents of poor and minority areas. And not just because of they are dupes of “false consciousness,” it’s materially in their interest as well: the social causes of crime are deep and complex, city governments are not well-equipped to deal with them, the quickest route to feeling more secure is more cops. Of course, the police are also hogging (no pun intended) resources that might go elsewhere. And the cops benefit no matter what: crime goes up, “you need more of us,” then crime goes down, “see what a good job we’re doing.” Sure, it’s a machine and a racket, but machines and rackets do provide real benefits, even if they are paltry and insulting. An elderly person doesn’t believe they will live to see society change for the better, they just don’t wanna get mugged tomorrow. And who can blame them?

There is a long, difficult road ahead in the political struggle against police power, maybe, as we’ve seen, an even longer one than against racism. Both will require big changes in the way our society and economy work. Fortunately, the police’s biggest enemy is often themselves: they constantly demonstrate their abuses very publicly and make it clear they need to be controlled. Will we one day have a society without police altogether? Maybe. But I’m not holding my breath.