The Police are Not Impartial Law Enforcement
American police are not neutral arbiters of the law who are "just following orders," though even this rationalization would not absolve them of their part in daily injustices.
American police would be considered a force for regression if they were only innocent, unthinking automatons holding up the law, because that law is regressive and fascist in nature. The law as it exists in 2022 tasks the police with brutalizing mostly impoverished communities and sets its sights on arresting nonviolent and innocent individuals in order to enrich the privately-owned and operated corporations who administer prisons. The police are aware of this and yet voluntarily continue to do their (well-paying) jobs anyway. But their participation in the capitalist system goes beyond the passive use of their bodies for the enforcement of an evil agenda—they are more than just thugs for the capitalist system that is currently destroying our world. They go beyond following orders, embracing and amplifying the cruelty and racism of the law and punish any who dare to speak out about the injustices they’ve witnessed. The police have been called the largest street gang in America; this is unfair to street gangs.
A recent Reuters special report details the rise of far-right conspiratorial ideology in police training courses:
On social media, Richard Whitehead is a warrior for the American right. He has praised extremist groups. He has called for public executions of government officials he sees as disloyal to former President Donald Trump. In a post in 2020, he urged law enforcement officers to disobey COVID-19 public-health orders from “tyrannical governors,” adding: “We are on the brink of civil war.”
Whitehead also has a day job. He trains police officers around the United States.
The Idaho-based law enforcement consultant has taught at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 85 sessions in 12 states over the past four years, according to a Reuters analysis of public records from the departments that hired him. A Washington state training commission in 2015 temporarily banned Whitehead from advertising courses on its website because of instructional materials that referred to a turban-wearing police officer as a “towel head” and contained cartoons of women in bikinis, according to emails from the commission to Whitehead that were reviewed by Reuters. Other marketing literature touted Whitehead’s “deception detection” technique that, among other things, teaches officers not to trust sexual-assault claimants if they use the word “we” in referring to themselves and their assailant.
The commission was responding to a student complaint citing “offensive slurs” and “blatant misogyny.” Whitehead said in an interview that the commission had given too much credence to one student’s opinion and caused him to lose business. Since then, he said, he has expanded the section of his course that caused that controversy, adding more “pot-stirring” material, including a slide that ridicules transgender people: “Suspect is a gender-fluid assigned-male-at-birth wearing non-gender-specific clothing born Caucasian but identifies as a mountain panda.” Whitehead said such barbs are intended to push back against pressures on law enforcement to espouse left-wing views on gender or race.
Racist imagery and tropes in a Kentucky police training program were the subject of a lawsuit in 2021 (whistleblowers were also retaliated against and demoted, as police departments often do):
A lawsuit has claimed that Kentucky's Department of Criminal Justice Training, the government agency responsible for training police officers statewide, used racist materials in their online training courses.
Department employees who complained about the materials were retaliated against for whistleblowing, the lawsuit alleges. Though the lawsuit was filed in August, details of the training materials have only recently come to light.
The online course to train recruits allegedly used slides that contained images from the Black hip-hop cultural website Nappyafro.com. One slide on human trafficking allegedly used the term "Gorilla Pimp" next to a picture of a shirtless Black man. The slide allegedly described the "Gorilla Pimp" as violent, unsophisticated, limited in social skills and focused on "survival needs." …
Former employees of the state's Department of Criminal Justice Training who filed the suit considered the images "derogatory and racist," WDRB reported. One woman who reported the images to the department's equal employment opportunity office said that she was demoted soon after, court documents stated.
One of the slides from the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training program
These are few examples of law enforcement’s overarching program to dehumanize and declare war on the citizens they are meant to protect. In another, a popular police trainer (Dave Grossman, retired military) exhorts police to see themselves as warring with their community rather serving and protecting it:
The retired Army ranger and former West Point instructor, teaches a course called "The Bulletproof Mind," where he teaches officers the logic behind killing. He offers online classes through Grossman Academy for $79.
His overly aggressive style prepares law enforcement officers for a job under siege, where they're front line troops who are "at war" with the streets. Officers need to be prepared to battle the communities they're told to protect, Grossman has said. And ideally in Grossman's eyes, officers need to learn to kill less hesitantly.
Grossman, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Insider, is part of a larger industry of controversial militarized and fear-based police training educators, that also includes psychologist William Lewinski at the Force Science Institute in Minnesota, whose work has been called "pseudoscience" by the American Journal of Psychology. …
Craig Atkinson, the filmmaker behind "Do Not Resist," told Insider that he attended one of Grossman's Bulletproof courses upon an invitation from the Ohio State Patrol's SWAT team in 2015.
He said Grossman's military background seemingly makes it difficult to distinguish at-war soldiers from police trying to protect a community.
"He doesn't see the separation between Fallujah and Ferguson," Atkinson told Insider. "And so he thinks of the police as the first line of defense to Al Qaeda, and there's no difference."…
Grossman's seminars, of course, aren't the only thing leading cops to kill, and police brutality has been an issue long before militarization techniques became popular. And use-of-force is still an issue among police departments that have banned courses like Grossman's.
Inconsistent policies and trainings among law enforcement agencies, lack of accountability, and centuries of racial inequality and injustice in the US all contribute to a proportionally larger number of people in the black community to die at the hands of cops.
The immediate issue with encouraging police to kill more indiscriminately should be obvious (this is a common authoritarian argument which laments the fact that the police and military have to abide by rules which hamper their ability to do their job): it justifies reactive violence against those very same cops. Imagine a scenario in which a significantly more violent police force is attempting to break down the door to an armed individual’s house. Surely the homeowner is aware that now more than ever, the police are disposed to using preemptive violence in the course of making arrests. From the homeowner’s perspective, here is an armed and dangerous intruder whose announcement that they are law enforcement is no longer a comfort. Where before they might have chosen de-escalation, they are now all but forced to “defend themselves” from an imminent threat. Is the homeowner justified in shooting at the police if they are reasonably sure they will be killed in the encounter anyway? The police are already known for being trigger-happy when dealing with people of color.
Violence begets violence, and one’s badge does not protect them from reprisals, neither in a moral nor physical sense.
This militarization of the police serves the ends of capital, whose enforcers are surely aware of the imminent social breakdown and attendant unrest that will be brought about by climate change and environmental destruction and are training the police as they do private security: in the art of oppression. Gone are the days of community policing, if they ever did exist. The police now align themselves politically with the far right agents of free market capitalism (protecting the ill-gotten private property of the rich), prejudice against minorities, and self-serving abuse of the office:
Sims is not the only new sheriff who accused his predecessor of taking advantage of the power of his office as his term wound down. In fact, his predicament is just one example of a dubious but little-known tradition of Alabama sheriffs hobbling those who defeat them at the polls.
AL.com and ProPublica interviewed nine of the 10 new sheriffs who won elections against incumbents last year. All nine said that last-minute actions by their predecessors had negative impacts on their offices and, by extension, the public. A captain in the office of the tenth, Jefferson County Sheriff Mark Pettway, said there were no problems during his transition.
Many of the sheriffs alleged that their predecessors acted in ways that could be described as vindictive hazing: One failed to have a badge made for the new sheriff; another threw all the sheriff’s office’s unmarked keys in a pile, leaving his replacement to figure out which went to which door or vehicle.
But seven of the sheriffs made more serious accusations against their predecessors, many of which were corroborated by internal office records. Among their claims: Outgoing sheriffs pocketed public money, fudged financial reports, wasted sheriff’s office funds and destroyed or stole public property.
(See also the police abuse of asset forfeiture.)
Much like the mafia, the police devote a significant amount of resources to protect themselves and preserve their image as a social benefit while actively creating and amplifying the problem they claim to redress. A large part of police budgets go into the creation of pro-police propaganda designed to keep the population frightened and pliable:
This wealth of evidence would be insufficient to convince most Americans that the police are an anachronistic, biased, counter-productive force, because we have been raised from birth to assume that policing is a just and necessary vocation, the only thing keeping us safe domestically in the same way the military is the only reason the US hasn’t been invaded. These are both lies, maintained quite fastidiously by the cops and troops themselves as well their wealthier and less accountable private contractor counterparts. Any valid criticism is dismissed as the actions of a few crooked bad actors, whose transgressions don’t detract from the importance of the overall mission, which must be seen as crucial to keep us safe. All one needs to do to understand how pervasive and potent this propaganda is: publicly declare your opposition to the police or military and very quickly face the unbridled wrath of the incensed Ugly American, who will hurl insults and slurs at the temerity on display—of course we need both of these armed forces to protect us, do you want to give criminals and foreign powers carte blanche to create chaos and destruction? They will readily cite any instance of police behaving heroically which springs to mind, asking if you’d rather the criminal have prevailed that day.
Where alternatives to policing have been attempted in the US, though, they’ve been wildly successful:
SACHS: Richardson is a clinical social worker and addiction specialist with the Mental Health Center of Denver. He's part of a team that got $200,000 to treat behavioral health episodes without a gun and a badge.
RICHARDSON: On some of these calls, like this most recent one, this gentleman was, you know - he was a bit intoxicated. So he ran the risk of having a public intoxication thing.
SACHS: Like an arrest or a court summons.
LESLIE HEROD: It'll help us to begin to break the cycle of incarceration because this is a cycle.
SACHS: Leslie Herod represents Denver in the Colorado Legislature. She helped bring STAR to the city after seeing similar work in Eugene, Ore.
HEROD: Because people don't just go in for one time and then they're forgotten about forever. No. It's about a cycle of substance use, of mental health crisis, of inappropriate law enforcement response and an inappropriate criminal justice response.
SACHS: Six months in, the team responded to almost 750 calls. Not one interaction led to an arrest.
Further reading from Harvard Magazine:
Last fall, Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program volunteered to help city administrators think through concrete possibilities for how to change public-safety procedures. Two law students, William Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, spent several months as part of the program’s Dispute Systems Design Clinic, researching other cities’ approaches and interviewing Boston-area city officials. The pair also studied the multiple ways Boston’s public-safety system intersects with other local factors: racial bias, income inequality, access to medical and mental-health care, pipelines to prison from school or foster care, and substance-abuse rates—to name only a few. The inquiry yielded a report, released late last week.
“We found a number of cities that were doing neat things,” says Roberts. In Texas, Houston and surrounding Harris County law enforcement officials have worked closely since the 1990s with a mental-health organization, the Harris Center, whose clinicians assist officers in responding to crises; clinicians themselves respond to mental-health emergency calls, and the organization serves as a crisis drop-off center for police officers bringing in people who need such support.
In Eugene, Oregon, the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets Program (CAHOOTS) has been operating for 30 years. Police dispatchers send unarmed medical and mental-health workers (without law-enforcement officers) in response to reports of mental-health crises, substance abuse, or homelessness. The CAHOOTS workers arrive wearing casual clothes in a van with a dove painted on the side, and are trained to handle a range of problems, from conflict resolution and suicide prevention to offering first aid or a ride to better-equipped services. In 2019, CAHOOTS responded to roughly 24,000 calls and requested police backup only 150 times. …
“Very little of the time that police officers spend at work involves actual crime fighting,” Smith said, “and this is the case even in the most dangerous neighborhoods or communities. In Baltimore in 1999, the most violent and most addicted and most abandoned city in America, regular patrol officers spent 11 percent of their time on crime.” In other places, she added, it’s below 1 percent. Especially in communities that suffer from both overpolicing (excessive stops and arrests, unconstitutional searches, routine confrontations) and underpolicing (which leaves many crimes unsolved and residents without help when they need it), Smith said, “It makes sense to start to consider other options for achieving safety. And we have an abundance of research that shows directions that we can go.”
Insofar as police departments were recently “defunded,” the impact on crime across the board was minimal:
But according to Interrupting Criminalization researcher Andrea J. Ritchie, these attempts to discredit the movement have obscured its very real victories, particularly when it comes to challenging the deeply embedded cultural narrative that police power is the key to public safety. “When I talk to people on the ground, they are very invested in increasing community safety and very invested in not being killed anymore, or raped or beaten,” Ritchie told VICE. “They're like, ‘I don't care what the slogan is, as long as we're clear about what we're doing, which is divesting from institutions that criminalize, police, punish, surveil, and kill people and investing in the things people need to recover from this unprecedented pandemic and economic crisis, and the climate crisis that's ongoing, and the ongoing crisis of anti-Black police violence.”
As Ritchie outlined in a January 2021 report titled “The Demand Is Still #DefundthePolice,” police budgets were cut; superfluous units were cut; enforcement areas, like parking and homeless “outreach,” were delegated to other city agencies; and campaigns a literal decade in the making—like the Black Organizing Project’s push to abolish the Oakland School Police Department and reinvest its $6 million budget—clinched their wins.
The political backlash to Defund doesn’t engage very much with the fact that the police violence the movement aims to address is still happening. According to data from Mapping Police Violence, 223 Black people have been killed by cops since George Floyd’s murder. In April, Minneapolis Police Department officers killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright just 10 miles away from the then-ongoing trial of MPD officer Derek Chauvin, the cop found guilty of murdering Floyd. The inability of the police to meet the Defund movement’s fundamental demand—stop killing Black people— without more intervention is evident.
And while Defund has made huge strides, the actual dent made in fiscal-year 2021 police budgets in most major cities is significant, but it’s still relatively small in most places. Cuts that look big on paper also haven’t translated to capacity changes—New York City officials claim that defunding the police is to blame for a rise in violent crime, but the so-called “shift” of $1 billion out of the NYPD budget didn’t remove a single cop from the streets.
There is no evidence that arrests correlate to less violent crime, and studies have found that increasing local police presence does not have a significant impact on criminality, especially in poorer areas (it does have a measured impact on the arrests of people of color).
If we were truly interested in fighting crime, there is the variable we would be working to address: inequality. Instead, we are content to create conditions of profound poverty and force our victims into stealing and robbing to survive, then profit off of the punishment for those acts:
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) inspector general initiated a review to examine conditions at a number of for-profit prisons that the federal government contracted with from fiscal year 2011 through fiscal year 2014. A report on the findings indicated that private prisons had a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults compared with federally run or operated prisons. Furthermore, the report found that for-profit prisons in the United States were more likely to endanger inmates’ security and rights. These problems were so significant that in August 2016, the Obama administration announced that it would begin to phase out private prisons.
As the number of incarcerated individuals in for-profit prisons grew, so did the number of immigrants detained in such facilities. According to a report by the Sentencing Project, about 4,841 immigrants were detained in for-profit facilities in 2000. By 2016, that number had soared to 26,249 immigrants—a 442 percent increase. In the wake of the DOJ’s decision to phase out the use of for-profit prisons, the Homeland Security Advisory Council reviewed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) use of private immigration detention facilities. Immediately after this review was announced, the stock prices of private prison company giants CoreCivic—formerly the Corrections Corporation of America—and the GEO Group Inc. dropped by 9.4 percent and 6 percent, respectively. A majority of the council agreed with the view that DHS should begin to move away from using private prison facilities but recommended that while they were still in use, they “should come with improved and expanded [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] oversight.”
Following the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2017, however, the administration immediately shifted course to robustly support private prisons. In February of that year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked the Obama administration’s initiative, and by April 2017, the DOJ began requesting bids for contracts to house federal inmates in private prison facilities once again. That same month, the GEO Group won a $110 million contract to build the first detention center under the new administration.
(The Biden administration has attempted to end contracting with private prison companies, but they have found an easy loophole to exploit in the form of holding immigrant detainees rather than US citizens.)
Whereas Dave Grossman wants police to see the community as inhabited by sinister, uncontrollable monsters, the capitalist leadership responsible for the existence of the police see their subjects as something much worse: sacrificial lambs with dollar signs painted on their coats. In choosing to remain police despite knowing the evils they signed up for, the average cop abdicates their moral responsibility and forsakes their very humanity, but they go beyond even this amorality: in embracing the politicization of their roles, they reveal their ultimate allegiance to the oppressive and destructive forces currently in the process of ensuring civilization will not last many more generations, all because those forces have held their livelihoods hostage and ensured that no alternatives for policing can exist. The police are no longer unprincipled mercenaries if they ever were, they are now active agents of destruction.