To protect and serve (whites)

Every post about an ugly subject needs an ugly picture; the one below is my pick. It’s one of dozens we’ve seen in the news of cops doing despicable things. Who knows why they detained this poor bastard? Maybe he was just pedaling by, and they needed to verify that their canisters of pepper spray were correctly primed.

Never again will I tolerate the apologist who says, “You know the media. They just pick out a few bad apples among hundreds of good cops.” Stomach acid and rage will ensue. Do apologists know about the surge in police resignations since George Floyd’s murderer was charged? Have they heard about the 57 Buffalo cops who quit their force’s emergency response team? They were upset because two of their buddies were disciplined for knocking down an elderly man in their path.

The common public perception of the police — Baltimore’s, Minneapolis’s, Houston’s, Albuquerque’s, LA’s, you name it — is diametrical to reality. The police today are indeed a “force.” They are a paramilitary force, a cultural force, a labor force, a political force, and ironically, an extralegal force.

Not too many decades ago, the police had no tasers. They had tear gas but no pepper spray. They had fire hoses but no stun grenades. They had batons but no rubber bullets. They had megaphones but no LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices), commonly known as “sound cannons.” At a distance of 15 meters, anyone in its audio path will suffer great pain and possibly permanent hearing loss; at 300 meters, severe headaches.

It used to be rare to see a police force backed up by the National Guard, and never by regular military personnel in tanks and helicopters. Now the police are virtually an arm of the U.S. military. How did they ever maintain the peace before they became imitation soldiers?

The police are a culture unto themselves. In one respect, they’re like the Mafia: snitching on a “family” member is absolutely forbidden by their fraternal code. And if an officer is pounding on some innocent schmuck, his colleagues are obliged to stand aside or, better, join in the mayhem. It’s what buddies do.

Their culture often includes guest members, like the DA’s office and the mayor’s office. Bringing criminal charges against a cop does not go down well in a predominantly white community that relies on cops to protect and serve. It’s not lost on mayors and most DAs that they serve at the pleasure of the voters.

Like all unions, police unions are concerned with improving the safety and prosperity of their members, though they needn’t be overly diligent. White communities are grateful for police work, and all the cop shows on TV tell them they should be. Unlike other unions, police unions craft employment contracts that let cops escape accountability for egregious conduct. A Washington Post study in 2006 found that fully a quarter of cops fired for misconduct were reinstated after they were accorded the forgiving review procedure in their union contracts.

Police associations make political endorsements, even though the police belong to the executive arm of government. Imagine the FBI, CIA, or our armed forces endorsing a candidate for federal office! It would be a catastrophe, the end of our republic. Should the executive arm of a state or locality be any different? Nevertheless, the police do it, and pity the politician who gets the “soft on crime” label or some other resonant curse. It pays them to be on the kindly side of the police by blessing contracts that require leniency for police misconduct.

If cops do something provably criminal, say something corroborated by videos and tattle-tale buddies, they still have a lovely ace in the hole. It’s a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, introduced by the Supreme Court in 1967. It grants public officials immunity in civil suits if they’ve done something abhorrent but the law about their behavior is a bit fuzzy. For example, take the case of a pregnant Seattle woman who was repeatedly tasered when she refused to sign a speeding ticket. The police officer in question was given qualified immunity because the law on stun gun use wasn’t entirely clear. Never mind the use of excessive force, which was clearly demonstrable.

Naturally, recent police outrages have renewed calls for an end to qualified immunity. Last week, the Supreme Court acted preemptively by declaring it will not hear cases that request a reexamination of the doctrine. Just like SCOTUS to slink away from a crying need for judicial review.

It’s plain that policing has to be reformed in a uniform way across the country, not just in this city or that city. The headline “Minneapolis Bans Chokeholds” sounds like progress, but it means very little. What about Dubuque? They might allow chokeholds, but perhaps they take a dim view of stomping.

Reforms, therefore, must devolve from the federal government. Otherwise, we’ll get more of what we’ve always had, an unequal application of justice across the land. The situation is much like allowing each state to establish its own voting laws — civil liberty is respected in some places and disrespected in others.

Sorry, but we need a new federal bureaucracy. Call it the Bureau of Police Affairs (BPA) or something similar. It probably belongs within the Justice Department. (I know — Barr has a talent for fucking up both what we have and what we need.)

Here’s what I see as the BPA’s charter:

• • Create a police training course and keep it current. Write a Policing Bible to go with it. The Bible will contain dozens of scenarios that give examples of good and bad policing.

• • Hire a cadre of police instructors to run the courses. How to train police officers will no longer be a local decision.

• • Create procedures for hiring, disciplining, firing, and reinstating police officers. Specify that no police or municipal official may sit on a disciplinary board if an officer is accused of misusing deadly force.

• • Create an attachment to police union contracts that enumerates the rights of officers accused of misconduct. It will supersede any other contractual reference to that subject.

• • Maintain a database of citations of police misconduct and check it whenever a police department sends a “request to hire” notification (a new requirement). Grant or deny the request.

That’s a boatload of authority to bestow on any government agency. The BPA could survive a court challenge only if were created by an act of Congress that was signed by the president. Even then, its legitimacy might be struck down by the Supreme Court, but more about that latter.

While Congress is creating the BPA, it must pass this complementary legislation:

• • A law that spells out the meaning of “excessive force” and rejects the use of qualified immunity whenever its standard of excessive force is met.

• • A law that prohibits any group that does police work from endorsing a political candidate.

• • A law that creates the legal machinery for staffing police review boards on which no police or municipal official sits.

I’ve proposed a BPA, a charter for it, and a Congress that makes sweeping police reforms because street protests alone will never, of themselves, reshape our country’s malformed police establishment. That can only be done with ballots — ballots that put in place a progressive Senate, a new president and, by extension, a new Attorney General and sensible additions to the Supreme Court. (A radicalized Congress would, I hope, impeach and convict at least two of our justices.)

Democracies must continually save themselves in cycles of outrage and reform. If they fail at this task, they degrade and die. If we fail in November, we will have shown a lethal disregard for our lives, our liberties, and our happiness.

The sad case of Brown and Wilson

Bob McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis county, delivered the decision of his grand jury last night. Incredibly, they brought no charges against police officer Darren Wilson for his fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a young unarmed black man. I’m trying to grapple with this news, and I’m not succeeding. The reality of it just becomes more upsetting.

Let’s assume the very worst about Brown and see where it takes us. To begin, let’s paint him as an antisocial, arrogant thug who pushed people around and took what he wanted—a handful of cigars, for example. We’ll say he was self-assured, even swaggering, and had no respect for authority. He saw all cops as scum, and he was not about to be intimidated by their likes.

Let’s go even further and agree to a scenario that casts Brown in the worst possible light…. He was so cocky and hostile that when Wilson apprehended him, he had no qualm about trapping Wilson in his car, punching him through the window, and going for his gun. Wilson got off a couple of shots in the struggle, one of which grazed Brown’s right hand. Brown fled; Wilson got out of the car and pursued. Brown decided to turn and charge. At no time did he raise his hands in surrender. Wilson fired a volley of shots, stopping Brown for a few seconds. Even though he was seriously wounded, Brown charged again, and Wilson fired another volley. The last shot entered the top of Brown’s head and killed him.

There. No imagining of events could be more favorable to Wilson’s case than this. Let’s now assume it was exactly this scenario that the grand jury believed to be true. Even so, to bring no charges against Wilson a very big hurdle had to be cleared. They had to find that in using deadly force Wilson reasonably believed that Brown was a mortal threat to either him or a bystander. And there lies the problem: how could they have concluded that either was the case? In turning to charge at Wilson, Brown’s focus was on no one else. In the face-off, Brown was armed only with his fury. Wilson was armed with a gun. No police officer—at least none that should be allowed on the street—can reasonably believe his life is in danger when we has a gun and a charging assailant has none. Perhaps if Brown were Andre The Giant at a menacing distance of six feet, but barring that, no. A few shots at most should have been sufficient to make Brown manageable. Wilson, however, didn’t have “manageable” in mind. At the very least, he should have been faulted for the negligent use of deadly force and charged with voluntary manslaughter. A trial would have told us a great deal about white policemen, black neighborhoods, and the perception of danger.

That brings me to Bob McCulloch. As prosecutor, it was his responsibility to bring a charge before the grand jury and sell it to them. In other words, he was supposed to make a case. He made none. In effect, his message to the grand jury was, “I don’t know whether this police officer deserves to be tried for anything. I’ll just put a ton of evidence in front of you and let you figure it out.” Well, they didn’t.

What’s most depressing is that nothing constructive will come of this sad episode. Black communities that are struggling with poverty, high unemployment, fatherless homes, and gang violence will continue to be plagued by crime and resentment. The cops in those communities will continue to threaten and be threatened. In confrontations, they will continue to act unreasonably, to take lives without sufficient provocation. The dysfunction goes on.

The big D

I first learned about psychological defense mechanisms in college, in an Intro to Psych class. The prof told us about acting out, compartmentalization, projection, dissociation, regression, and reaction formation—all profound insights into the psyche. But the granddaddy of them all, to me, was denial. For my money, love doesn’t make the world go round—denial does.

Denial permeates every level at which people interact. It’s rife internationally and within nations. It’s the hallmark of religions and political parties. It dominates our financial world, the way we educate, law, and race relations. Need convincing? Let’s take a trip around the globe, across the American landscape, and into our institutions…

The world population is a tick under 7.2 billion at this writing. Every year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by 75 million; with medical advances we can expect this number to steadily rise. As the population juggernaut rolls on, our oceans grow steadily more polluted. Ten percent of all the plastic manufactured ends up in the sea and causes more than a million sea birds and mammals to die yearly. The runoff of pesticides and fertilizers from farms produces toxins that deplete water of oxygen and kill marine life. Chemical pollution is responsible for an estimated 400 “dead zones” around the world. Every day, cruise ships dump 250,000 gallons of wastewater and sewage into our oceans with impunity. The sea life that survives poisoning and disease has been overfished for decades. It may be gone altogether in just a few more decades—a catastrophe for the ten percent of humanity that relies on a seafood diet. At the same time, there is good reason to believe that climate change is reducing crop yields. This means starvation around the world, fewer grains in our diets, and less food for livestock, which we also eat. Clearly, the problem of an exploding population and a challenged food supply is a worldwide crisis, but where is the alarm? Many are concerned, certainly, but look at the agendas of the UN and governments around the world. The problems at the top of their lists are all geopolitical. The #1 problem facing humanity gets little more than a shrug. This is denial on a grand scale.

Tens of millions of Russians, with Vladimir Putin foremost among them, believe there is a special glory in being a Russian. They can’t conceive that this isn’t so. Similarly, tens of millions of Americans believe there is a special glory in being an American. We even have a name for it: Exceptionalism. Americans just like anyone else? Absurd, and possibly treasonous. The British, French, Japanese, and Germans have all had delusions of “exceptionalism,” but their eventual disillusionment hasn’t made the slightest impression on us.

People have a genius for inventing ways in which they are superior beings. Nationalism is just a special case of tribalism, which is still thriving today. Of course, there’s religious superiority as well, down to the sectarian level. Nowhere is there a better showcase for the varieties of I’m-better-than-you than the Middle East. The entire region is a murderous cauldron of denial. The common denominator of Middle East relationships is denial of humanity. It goes this way: “I’m virtuous, you’re not; you’re some kind of disgusting devil-dog.” Many of the combatants in the region take this to the ultimate level: “Therefore you don’t deserve to live. In fact, your death would be a kind of cleansing.” Holocaust logic. ISIS isn’t the sole example of it, but they purvey it over the largest area. They teach us what early Islam must have been like, when the religion was spread by the sword from Spain to India in just 125 years.

The Israelis and Palestinians also deny each other’s humanity, which means, in effect, they prefer brutality to empathy. Their unanimity on this point locks them in a “denial bind.” Neither can accept the idea of living harmoniously with the inhuman other, and so both offer impossible peace conditions. Hamas wants freedom of movement, including the freedom to cross the border and cut Israeli throats. Israel offers a two-state solution so long as the division is entirely on its terms, meaning, among other things, complete control of Jerusalem. Deadlock. (You have to cut Israel a little slack. After all, do chosen people trade away pieces of the safe haven that God has promised?)

In America, we like our denial more refined. Republicans and Democrats see their opposites as subhuman only in certain respects. Republicans, as seen by Democrats, are unaccountably dim-witted. They suffer from diminished capacity and have the reasoning power of fleas. Democrats, on the other hand have cultivated naiveté to the point of a mental disorder; they can’t see that their political agenda will wreck everything our forebears have built. The majority of Americans happily pin a party affiliation on themselves and learn the slogans and knee-jerk perceptions that make thinking superfluous. Party affiliations confer the gratifying conviction of “I’m always right; he’s always wrong.” It won’t get you into heaven, but it makes life on earth more pleasant.

Denial in America is by no means confined to the political arena. It pervades our entire society:

• The leaders of business and finance, with few exceptions, believe that regulations are anathema, even though history repeatedly demonstrates that a lack of regulation lets greed run amok, which in turn collapses the economy. When we get a dead economy, these same titans believe that government must severely curtail spending to curtail debt, which will in turn inspire confidence and stimulate consumer demand. It happens that the last six years have served as a real-life laboratory for testing this thinking. After approving a modest stimulus in 2009, Congress thwarted every proposal to stimulate demand that the White House put forward. The result has been a slow, puny recovery that has left a trail of impoverishment and wrecked lives. In fact, if it weren’t for the stimulative policies of the Federal Reserve Board, we would have millions more unemployed than we do now. And what has the 1% learned from years of irrefutable data? That the government spent too much on unemployment benefits, food stamps, and medical insurance! The House even threatened not to pay the nation’s bills unless more counterproductive cuts were made!
• Speaking of the need to regulate, what about gun ownership? And how long will Americans deny that unregulated ownership leads to a high homicide rate? Those who oppose regulation will give you two reasons why nothing should stand between them and all the guns they want. First, safety. They feel more secure with guns around. But they have no explanation for data that shows the vast majority of shooting homicides occurs between intimates, not between a householder and a stranger. Second, freedom. When our tyrannical government eventually sends its agents to arrest them, they will stand tall in defense of their freedom. This notion is too ridiculous for comment. What gun owners are ultimately denying is the ego rush conferred by a tool that makes explosions and fires deadly projectiles. To command such power is a thrilling thing. You can see this clearly by recalling news clips showing the primal joy of Muslim fighters as they fire their weapons into the air. Power is bliss.
• Our educators have put grim data before us for decades. Our children compare poorly with the children of other countries in math ability, reading comprehension, verbal skills, and knowledge of science. In a world where educational outcomes and prosperity go hand in hand, this data is a frightening signal. So how has the education establishment responded? Basically, by denying that the other countries are doing something that we ought to adopt. Are they paying their teachers more to attract better prospects to the profession? Are they training their teachers more rigorously? Do the teachers relate to their students differently? Do they match curriculum to age groups differently? How do they confirm that learning has occurred? How are foreign teachers evaluated? None of our educators seem to care about the answers. They deny that they can be taught anything. I’m inclined to give them a no-confidence vote until I see a lot more humility about what they don’t understand.
• Our law enforcement establishment must do its job with fairness, firmness, compassion, and a regard for life. Its members would no doubt howl at any suggestion that they do less. Yet we repeatedly see evidence that they perform their jobs otherwise. In Los Angeles we see a highway patrolman pummel the face of a helpless woman as she lies on the ground. Obviously confused, she hadn’t obeyed his commands not to walk beside the freeway. On Staten Island we see four policemen grab a man who loudly insists he’s done nothing wrong. One of the officers applies a choke hold and doesn’t relax his grip, even when the beleaguered man calls out that he can’t breathe. He dies of a heart attack. In Ferguson, Missouri, we hear about a policeman who shoots an unarmed man for unclear reasons. We know, though, that the officer fired a volley of six shots, paused, and fired a volley of four more shots. Killed and rekilled. In nearby St. Louis, some days later, we see several policemen fire a volley of eight bullets, killing a man brandishing a knife but not attacking any of them. What do all these incidents have in common? Unquestionably, excessive force was used in all cases—killing force in three and life-threatening force in one. In all cases, the officers were not facing life-threatening danger, although there was a small chance of harm in two of the cases. It’s not a reach to conclude that in all cases the officers were prepared to kill rather than receive any harm. Is it an acceptable policy for a police officer—a professional keeper of the peace—to take a life rather than risk injury? That’s far from my law enforcement ideal. One point more. All four of the victims in these cases were black. Who among us has seen a comparable video where the victim was white? I can’t recall any. Yet I expect that every last law enforcement agency in the country would vehemently deny that they were poisoned by racial prejudice.

I’ve amused myself by imagining how transformed the world would be if I could snap my fingers and thereby banish denial from the repertoire of human defenses. What a shock would run through the world! The idea reminds me of an old, entertaining movie, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. In it, the protagonist, a mere draper’s assistant, is given supernatural powers by a demigod. He becomes so enamored of his power that he tries to stop time by commanding the Earth to stop rotating. Of course, buildings crumble and anything not anchored to the ground is thrown into space. Something equally horrendous would no doubt happen if denial could be banished everywhere at once. Instead, we can only hope that it will disappear in stages. Perhaps the definition of progress is the peeling away of denial very gradually, layer by layer, while taking care to spare the human psyche as much as possible.