There are really only two kinds of societies: the ones based in consensus, and the ones based in slavery. Every other difference is pretty much window-dressing. Do I need to say which of these needs a heavily-armed and wildly-overstaffed police force, the kind that we have in America, the kind that, if we saw it in a movie, would tell us right away that we were watching dystopian sci-fi? But nobody would invent a police force like that for no reason. We have those police because somebody has to defend a wildly-unequal distribution of wealth that is, from a moral or rational point of view, indefensible. You obviously couldn’t convince anyone with a sense of how big a number 125 billion dollars really is that Jeff Bezos “deserves” that kind of money. I’m not just talking on a national scale, though: if you live in a city, there’s probably more dramatic inequality of means within a mile of you than there was within the entirety of the Roman Empire. In American, wealth and poverty rub shoulders: they have to, because wealth in America comes from paying your neighbors starvation wages or gouging them for rent and medical care. Odds are, you can stand on your roof and see someone whose net worth is a thousand times higher than yours. Do they deserve it? If you think they do, you’re a sucker, and if you think they don’t, then the logical next step is to redistribute the wealth. Thus, cops: they exist to make us submit to a distribution of wealth that we’d never agree to if there weren’t a policeman with a gun on every streetcorner.
A little historical awareness is all you need to see how weird this situation is. Did Athens have police? Did Republican Rome? No, they did not. The various institutions that some historians have misrecognized as police forces – Scythian Archers at Athens, various adjuncts of the Praetorship at Rome – just kept order in the public square and protected the constitution. The property-protecting, protective and punitive functions of a modern police force were accomplished by the community at large, defending norms that had the support of consensus behind them. The same has historically been true of every approximately egalitarian society (and “approximately” has to embrace an awful lot, since Republican Rome was almost as unequal a society as the modern USA).
No, the police are a modern invention – created in England and France in the 18th century to replace the shriveling private justice of the great lords, metastatizing to govern by force the urban masses who could see for themselves how unequally distributed were the benefits of industrialization, and finally so embedded in the fabric of the modern state that most people find it hard to imagine their absence. Their existence, on the other hand, is an admission on the part of the wealthy that their wealth is indefensible on any other grounds that at gunpoint.
The really difficult question, given this, is why so many people not only accept the inevitability of policing, but identify with and actively support the police officers who serve as our slavedrivers and work at our expense. It isn’t enough to answer this question by pointing to the heroization of cops in films and other mass media, though this tendency is doubtless poisonous in its own way and doesn’t exactly produce great entertainment. Despite that steady diet of indoctrination, people know from experience that most cops are highway bureaucrats, that most police spend their working hours handing out parking or traffic tickets, and certainly nobody thinks that the policemen who get caught on body cams planting evidence or cursing people out before shooting them are heroes.
The “blue lives matter” crowd doesn’t genuinely believe that police are heroes. They say it, not because they mean it,** but because they feel like the designation “hero” is a token of submission they can give to an authority figure to whom they believe that all obeisance is due. The imaginary policemen to whom they offer this tribute is not the policeman who does his job scrupulously, who enforces the law, who protects and serves. For these people, the true policeman is the one who pillages and destroys the community that’s been entrusted to his protection. They embrace that kind of cruelty, that savage exercise of power, because it’s what they want for themselves but lack the strength, courage or uniform to take. What’s more, they assume that the rest of us are just like them, and they imagine that the police are the only thing preventing a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Where do people like that come from? America, I guess – in particular, the America of Reagan and after, where everyone’s a cowboy and no one works together, and additionally, for sure, the America where racism lets crackers with “blue lives matter” bumper stickers feel sure that the people cops taze or kill will always be someone else’s father, mother, son. That flag – you know the one I mean, the one that drains all the color out of the American flag except for one blue stripe – is the emblem of a probably incurable mental disorder, a fantasy of cruelty that’s just waiting for permission from the proper authorities to play itself out.
Are these people curable? I think so, but there’s only one way to do it: we have to abolish the police.
*All Cop Fans Are Bastards. Maybe ACAB too, but that’s a rap for another day.
**or else, without being aware of it, they mean “hero” in something like its original Greek sense: “an asshole who does whatever he wants and kills anyone who gets in his way.”