Modified London police brag-sheets

boing
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First, the rhetoric you’re employing exists because of the civil rights movement. Using it to defend the cops isn’t just mistaken, it’s perverse.

Second, cops are not a “group” the way you’re using it. They are an institution. Or rather, they are a bunch of individuals who deliberately cooperate to form an institution, to advance the interests of that institution, and to benefit from it. That’s what makes them cops. If they stopped doing that, they wouldn’t be cops anymore.

They understand themselves as a coherent group with common interests, goals, and adversaries, so why shouldn’t we? Some cops may claim to object to the way that the institution operates, but as long as they continue to advance its interests and benefit from it, their objections are just lip-service. They are still, in practice, the same as all other cops in that they’re aligned with the police institution.

Being a cop is a role, not an intrinsic characteristic. So it’s not unreasonable to ask people to stop being cops as long as the institution is oppressive. Anyone who refuses - who maintains their loyalty to an oppressive institution - deserves to be called far worse than a bastard.

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Canadian police are, by all accounts, rather good.

I would suspect that a significant percentage of Canada’s Indigenous population would strongly disagree with that. (Hint: search “highway of tears”+RCMP for more of the horrific details)

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So you’re saying that there is no difference in that institution? From coast to coast? That some small town department in Kansas who can count on one hand the number of shots fired in a decade and whose biggest busts are DUIs and an occasional car packed with drugs driving through, is the same as say the notoriously corrupt New Orleans’s department? They have the same goals? (Which are?) The same corruption and abuse of power?

See I can see the points made about large departments acting as one entity and system. But for every large metro there are dozens of smaller departments that don’t seem to have the same problems. (Though they aren’t immune, as I pointed about some small town who make big profits on the drug money seizure scam.) I just have a hard time seeing them all as one.

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You’re describing differences in scale and flavor, which definitely do exist. But the structural role and incentives of police are the same throughout the US (and in much - though not all - of the world). Police all over have the power to be at least partially above the law. They must have that power in order to perform their function. That function is not the creation of justice or even lawfulness but the preservation of social peace - and of course the protection of the institution of policing itself, which is the source of their power.

The power to be above the law causes corruption: Police stop acting in the best interest of society and start acting in the interest of themselves personally and/or the institution which supports them. This corruption expresses in many different ways, so that’s why it seems like “not all cops are the same”. You’re right.

Some cops rape sex workers. Some cops work for drug cartels on the side. Some cops perform illegal searches to increase their arrest stats. Some cops cut certain people a break and haul others to jail for the same offenses. Some cops look the other way when other officers do these things. Some cops perform their job completely by the book, even though the book is written by their superiors to oppress certain demographics. Some cops even act extra-friendly in an effort to deflect attention from the wrongs that their institution commits, allowing it to continue without meaningful change. So they’re not all corrupt in the same way, but they are all corrupt, and the corruption has a common source.

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I don’t necessarily advocate doing it; but your analogy is notably deficient. The state of being a cop is one that you choose and achieve through a sustained regimen of job performance. The state of being black is something you achieve by inheriting and expressing certain genetic properties governing pigmentation.

Things that you choose to be can reasonably be expected to tell others more about you than things that you merely are, involuntarily.

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OK, guys, I just don’t understand the hypocrisy here. Ok, Race is a bad example. You can’t pick your race. So then it’s ok to make assumptions about groups and look down on them because of their careers or interests or religion?

Examples:
Girl dyes her hair blond - she must be dumb and easy.
Lots of tattoos and/or piercings - freak, easy, criminals
Star Trek fan - lonely virgin in their basement. The worst kind of people.
Star War fan - awesome person who gets tons of women/men
someone who smokes weed - stoner who will amount to nothing.
atheist - smug asshole who thinks they are better than everyone
christian - smug asshole who thinks they are better than everyone

Let’s generalize just occupations:
pro football player - must be a dumb jock and probably hits women
rapper - does drugs, probably armed, was/is in a gang
stripper - daddy issues and a slut, probably does drugs.
someone over the age of 30 still working fast food (non management) - must be dumb and/or lazy
male hair dresser - probably gay
republican politician - closet gay who dresses in My Little Pony skirts.

You can point out that there is a problem with the system, that there needs to be more internal policing and that some departments have some serious problems. I agree that there should be more oversight and reform. But I can’t abide by a blanket statement that “all cops are bastards”.

I still contend that when you do that you are condemning a whole group based on a minorities actions. And I would argue that logic just doesn’t jive because when racist, anti-Semites and anti-Islamics use those same arguments that there are “too many bad ones and the good ones aren’t doing enough to control them” that doesn’t excuse their messed up views.

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None of these are directly in charge of making sure that other members of the group represented don’t fit the stereotype.

Fact of the matter is that police are supposed to be above reproach. That’s why they are given powers outside of those that ordinary citizens have. In return for those powers they have a duty to use those powers responsibly and also to ensure that their colleagues also use that power responsibly. The are failing in that respect, most egregiously.

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48

My point was not to encourage extremely broad generalizations(very few of them are accurate enough to be worth much except as extremely tenuous initial hypotheses when no better data are available and some data are needed); but to point out that your example wasn’t ‘bad’ but a category error. Drawing inferences from people’s choices is hardly an exact science; you can be wrong about the reason for somebody’s choice, or wrong about what is actually associated with a choice; but it represents an inferential extension of judging somebody’s choices, which is about the only flavor of ethical judgement available to us.

There is also the important case to consider(not one I personally endorse; but quite possibly one endorsed by the heavier users of the acronym) where you make a broad generalization about people who have made a given choice because you make that judgement of the very act of making that choice. Say, for instance, you are of the anarchist persuasion, and consider state power coercive and illegitimate and so on. Judging all cops badly would be a reasonable conclusion under those premises because to be ‘cop’ is to choose to be an instrument of upholding state power.

Choice-judgements that do not directly relate to essential features of the choice are necessarily weaker(since they are not true by definition; but, at best, empirically accurate), and may or may not even rise to the level of useful or adequate; but choices have good odds of being more informative than non-choices and include a class of judgements that are definitional and not statistical. It’s a fairly salient detail.

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Wrong.
It definitely existed before WWII in Austria and Germany among those (too few) people who opposed the Nazis. It became part of the popular consensus after 45.
And I’m sure the idea that you shouldn’t condemn whole groups (an act generally called “prejudice”) is older than that, and I’d be surprised if it originated in Austria.

Also, two wrongs don’t make a right, so I don’t see how using that to defend cops can be perverse.

Now let’s agree to disagree for now on whether calling them all bastards is morally right or not. Either way, it is unreasonable to ask people to stop being cops. In fact, it’s dangerous.

Who do you think will honor your request? The bastards? Or the non-bastards who are still part of the police force? Maybe the half-bastards? They won’t all quit, because some of them are bastards. (I guess we don’t want to just abolish the police and then ask all criminals to choose some other line of work…)

The police force won’t get any better when decent people refuse to become cops.

If there are two or more organisations that fill the same niche, you can just ask decent people to go the one that’s not rotten. If there is no alternative to an organisation, boycott by decent people doesn’t work, because it makes the organization more rotten.

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The end goal is not to improve the police institution, it is to abolish it. Of course we must have ways to keep our communities peaceful and just, but the police are a failed solution to this problem. Throughout history there have been many different methods of maintaining social peace, and they’ve changed over time. So there’s no reason to believe that we cannot change now. In fact, we must, because the situation is rapidly getting out of hand.

The main reason people are resistant to abolishing the police is unshakable faith in the respectability of the institution. No matter how many wrongs are displayed before them, people continue to see the police as a noble and trustworthy institution - the kind you could rely on in a crisis. Shaming the police and pressuring people to abandon the institution does several important things:

  • It lets the human beings in uniform know they are wrong, so that they have a chance to make a principled decision.
  • It weakens the institution in a material sense by reducing the hiring pool.
  • Most importantly, it counteracts that veneer of respectability, which makes it much easier for society to move forward with abandoning the institution and developing new models for community safety.

An interesting case study is Egypt under Mubarak. The police in Egypt were shamed by the public so thoroughly that very many of them abandoned their positions. Those who stayed often wore masks, because they knew that even their own families would probably disown them if they were exposed as cops. As you allude to, the government responded by deputizing any asshole who wanted to knock some heads, making the police worse. But that meant the egyptian people came to understand the police as literally a gang of thugs. And because their legitimacy was so thoroughly undermined, people had no problem staging a mass rebellion against the police - and ultimately against the government which they defended.

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Just pressing the heart icon does not adequately communicate how much I think this comment is right-on.

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Ah, now I see where you’re coming from.

Let’s assume we do want to abolish the police force.
Convince 51% of the people that the police should be abolished, and you’re done. (Or a bit more in case you need to change some constitutions - depending on local traditions of jurisprudence).
You won’t be weakening the institution significantly as long as 50% of the people are still convinced that police forces are necessary. Once you’ve got 51% convinced, no further weakening is necessary.
As for “counteracting the veneer of respectability”, are you proposing to actively “break” a half-failed (varies by country, I guess) institution that the other half of the electorate is still trying to get fixed, just to convince people that it can’t be fixed? I’d consider that wrong, or at least “against the spirit of democracy”. If 51% of the people think the police forces can be fixed, let them try, don’t sabotage it to convince them.

But what do you mean by “abolishing the police force”? What kind of solution do you propose?

Do you want to abolish US municipal police and send in the FBI? Or scrap both and build a new police force from scratch, with a new name, a new organisation and new people? I’d just call that radical reform.
(This is also why I do not consider the Egypt example valid. It was a mass rebellion against a specific government and the police force that kept it in power. That particular government ended up being replaced. The new government also has a police force, and I seriously doubt there was ever any serious talk about not having one in the future. Regime change, not abolition of the police forces).

If you think there is some method to make a civilized country work without any kind of police force, then I’m listening.

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Those adverts have always been heavy handed

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That understanding of how society changes is a bit “Schoolhouse Rock”, but in general I agree that we must convince many people.

So I should refrain from expressing my opinion because it might undermine faith in an institution that others are trying to save? I’m not convinced. Because the institution is already bankrupt, and the people trying to save it are naive at best and self-serving at worst. Why would I want to let well-meaning people labor at that project and conceal the fact that it’s hopeless and even counterproductive?

Correct, I’m not calling for any of those things.

This is very true. But during the uprising itself (which let’s remember, lasted quite a while), there was no police force. Even in the early days when the military took over, they hardly acted as a civilian police force. The public saw to public safety themselves. There were some rough edges, to be sure. But overall, it’s a proof of concept: no crime wave broke out in the absence of the Egyptian police. In fact, crime went down, as communities took the responsibility for public safety directly into their hands. (It’s probably no coincidence that at the same time, they also spent a lot more effort caring for each other’s economic and social needs.)

I don’t have a simple program for you, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does because each community is different. But I think situations like that show the direction we need to be moving.

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The problem can be neatly summed up by the absurdity of a hashtag like #NotAllKlansmen.

When we were kids, we white folks of a certain age were encouraged to believe that the police were The Good Guys. We played Cops-n-Robbers, we sometimes pretended to be Ponch and Jon on our bikes, and we were told to approach beat cops with problems we felt ill-equipped to handle, whether it be some lunkhead neighborhood bully giving us grief, or our kitten being stuck up a tree. And many cops probably took that righteous Public Servant image to heart. To this day you can still read “To Protect and Serve” on the sides of many a police cruiser.

I used to think those cops were not only on my side (as a self-identified Good Guy), but on the side of all us law-abiding Good Guys and Gals. There was a time when if a cop needed my help identifying or apprehending a suspect, I’d have gladly helped, no questions asked, because my default assumption would have been that the cop was acting in his capacity as duly-sworn Peace Officer, Public Servant, Defender of the Downtrodden, and Champion of the Common Schlub. Now I’ll be damned if I’ll help out. FFS, I’m even conflicted when I see an Amber Alert go up on a freeway sign. If I spot the vehicle in question, should I call it in and potentially help save a life? Or will my hand be stayed by the doubt planted years ago in the back of my mind that maybe, juuuust maybe the fugitive in question is no child abductor, but simply someone who’s gotten himself in dutch with the Powers That Be, and maybe those Powers aren’t above misusing or abusing all the crowdsource fugitive-nabbing resources they can bring to bear just to catch this guy (Whistleblower? Kidnapper? Roddy Piper in They Live? How the hell am I supposed to know?!).

I know I’ve read too much dystopic sci-fi and seen too many movies (Enemy of the State, anyone?), so Occam’s Razor is gonna make me call in that Amber Alert sighting, so y’all can let go of yer pearls… but that doubt is brought on by the actions of actual nonfictional law enforcement officers, not mustache-twirling Buford T. Justice clones. Cops generally leave me alone since I’m white and I haven’t yet caused them much inconvenience, but I’m not blind to what they routinely do to my friends and neighbors, ostensibly (though falsely) in the name of Keeping The Peace. There was a time when I felt that most bad cops were isolated “bad apples” that would quickly be drummed out of the force when their misdeeds became known, but Christ on a pogo stick, when was the last time any of us heard of a cop being fired or prosecuted for any egregious misdeed up to and including murder? There simply is no recourse, there exists no actual process by which bad cops can be removed from duty or prosecuted for their crimes. They have become lawless gangs of thugs, answerable to precisely no-one, and even a hypothetical good cop apparently has no actual limitation placed upon his behavior should he one day decide to do something other than protecting and serving.

So the burden of proof now lies upon them to demonstrate that they exist for the common good. They have disproven that idea so very often, and tarnished that badge to a shitty black patina that no known solvent can clean off, to a degree that now I distrust those fuckers completely. I hope to god nobody assaults my wife or kidnaps one of my kids, because if I have to ask the LAPD, the Pasadena Police, or the L.A. County Sheriffs for their help, Jesus wept, God help me. I believe I could hope for a better result if I shone a bat-shaped spotlight onto a passing cloud. Or turned myself into Charles Bronson.

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56

Naturally, I was oversimplifying.

Nope. In my opinion, you should just refrain from “shaming the police force” as a means to an end, the end being bypassing the democratic process when abolishing the police force. As an opinion in itself, I don’t agree, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t express it. By contrast, I want the patently wrong opinion that “police are held to a higher standard than the rest of us” to be expressed as often as possible - because I want the police to believe it.

Well, fewer crimes got reported to the police. Do you know anything more accurate? The National Museum got looted, while the Christian minority hid in their houses. Of course, in a time of crisis, most people will try to help each other (The Walking Dead, like every post-apocalyptic story written in America, has this absolutely wrong). However, this wears off. People will organize, for better and for worse. If they are lucky, a democratically legitimized police force is reestablished. If they are unlucky, the mafia or some tribal warlords are first to organize (Somalia, here we come!).

So, let me get this straight. You are advocating the transition of the US to a state of anarchy (thankfully, I live in a European country with a mostly-working police force), or to some utopian state that you don’t know anything about. The reasons being, that US police forces are corrupt, and that Egypt was such a nice place to live during the revolution.
Because, as we all know, the places where no police exists are the best places to live, and the places where a democratically legitimized police force actually still has some remaining respect from the population are the worst. Or was it the other way around?

Coming from a place where the police forces aren’t perfect, but the problems seem entirely manageable, this sounds insane.

Maybe, if people only cared about their neighbors… I’ve heard this actually works in small-scale argrarian societies. So maybe, if we want to live peacefully and happily, maybe the we should return to an argrarian society.

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Depends. IME, when a crisis is obviously temporary (blackout, natural disaster, 9/11 attacks) people’s altruistic and community-minded impulses do tend to come to the fore. But when there’s little or no hope of things getting better any time soon I suspect it breaks down into tribalism/factionalism/anarchy. You don’t see middle-class people looting dollar stores in the aftermath of a hurricane, but impoverished people are still going to be impoverished (if not even more so) after things get cleaned up, so “get it while you can” becomes the operative ethos. In a scenario like The Walking Dead or The Road or The Road Warrior, everybody is totally fucked for the foreseeable future regardless of their situation beforehand, so the same dynamic would apply. (I’m sure there are real-world examples of this but I don’t know enough about specific ones to name names.)

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That’s my line!

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