"No good cops in racist system"
— chant heard during the recent marches
I am far away from these days by now; it's been at least twenty years since the incident I want to discuss. I teach college now and live far away. I don't have the police reports in front of me, nor do I even remember the names of most of the people involved. I want to emphasize I present this as a sketch primarily, as close as possible to memory as I have retained it. This is not about me or my guilt or white guilt in general — it's about the systematic forces of marginalization on a vulnerable person in our society, and how our obsession with control and security forces our own hand to perpetuate them. I don't write this to ask for absolution from this person or to justify myself as a person committed to justice now. What it concerns has haunted me for a long time and I guess it's time to tell the story.
What I want to accomplish here is to present in clear terms the primary ethical quandary of being a "good apple" in a law enforcement agency, to suggest in a clear anecdote why current law enforcement philosophies are wholly inadequate to address the terrifying and traumatic legacy of police violence against marginalized peoples of every sort. One way I can see this essay helping in some minor way is to dispel the pernicious and unhelpful myth of a "few bad apples" that mainstream America clings to in order to assuage its many complexes and psychological blindspots about power, force, race, and citizenship. What we have witnessed unfold these past days is way beyond a few bad cops: it's far bigger than that.
After I graduated from college in the early 1990s, I went to police academy in a fit of idealism. I have cops in my family, and it seemed reasonable to try it out. I wasn't ready for graduate school yet, and I thought of myself as a sort of becoming a sort of Joseph Wambaugh, using my experiences to write about humanity. I thought a career in community service would help me grow as a person and allow me to do some good in the world. I knew that I didn't want to work in a municipal or county department, so I set my sights on the university police department where I went to school (I'm going to leave the names of these places out, since it invites a reader to claim it was just that particular city or that particular department, when actually this occurs everywhere). The profile of the department appealed to me: the officers I knew there were articulate, clever, and college educated. The university in question was a big state school with lots of residential students. It's located in a fair-sized Western city that most people would say was a nice place to be, very white, very affluent mostly. Most of the city's police business was concerned with controlling underage drinking and its social effects, and our department was cross-commissioned to give us police authority in municipal jurisdiction.
I was just an average officer, I guess. Nothing special or heroic. I was good at listening, good at defusing conflict. These sorts of things are not usually measurable or mentioned much when it comes to deciding if someone is an effective cop within, for purposes of promotion and such in a department (but my lieutenant didn't have to field many complaints about me). I never saw any horrifying abuses of force (I just mean nothing sadistic or fatal), but I did see how certain officers conducted their business in ways that were officious and degrading, especially to marginalized people. I saw how certain populations were systemically excluded and demeaned. I saw how our social systems leave too many vulnerable to harm and abuse, which therefore expose them as "problems" for law enforcement to handle. There were officers (mostly on the city force) who I thought were dangerous and malicious, and I made it a point to drive the other direction whenever they were doing anything.
Let me turn to my account of the incident in question:
I had been about three or four years on the force, and finally had obtained enough seniority to get a day shift during the summer. As classes are mostly out, this was a quiet time for our department, so we'd run traffic or rove campus. There was a lot of time to dig for things in the city, if one was so inclined. This particular morning I heard two city bicycle officers responding to the municipal library parking lot on a complaint of an indecent exposure with the suspect present. The description matched that of a houseless person who we had all seen around town: a tall black man with shaggy hair who usually went around barefoot in just a sarong and a straw hat. Kind of a local icon in a town full of unusual folks. I had never heard of him being a problem before. So this was a surprise.
My sergeant got a hold of me on the radio and asked me to accompany him to the scene of the incident to help out. He was a person I respected immensely, our arrest control trainer, and he made a point of conducting himself with absolute calm and control. He spoke softly and let a contact yell until they calmed themselves down (it really does work). I felt more confident in his presence because I knew he was in control of himself, and I yearned to manifest that same degree of control over myself in moments of conflict. He treated people with dignity and was often very creative in finding a solution to a problematic situation. What I didn't realize at the time was that he was not confident that these two officers were not going to escalate the situation and hurt this guy.
When we arrived, that escalation had already occurred, and the two officers were having a tough time managing the situation. We're all trained to get a situation under control first if it's already messed up. You can't usually stop and say, "Is this contact justified?" So we were compelled to put hands on this human being, and it took all four of us to get things stopped. My sergeant decided to apply a neck restraint on this person while I tried to control his left arm.
Let me pause here to describe the theory behind to the neck restraint technique. First of all, and this is super-emphasized in training, it's dangerous. You can easily seriously injure or kill someone if it's done wrong. You never even attempt it unless there are no other options. The way it was supposed to be done in our system is that you approach from behind and reach over one shoulder and then bend the elbow, reaching up and around to apply pressure to the carotid artery in the neck on the opposite side of the body. One's elbow is bent a good distance from the windpipe if done properly, so there should be no danger of choking. The pressure is intended to get the person to comply, but if you press there long enough you can cause a human to lose consciousness temporarily from constricted blood flow to the brain. We were trained to never use any control tactic without giving clear directions of what it takes to comply, so there's often no need to go all the way to unconsciousness. So both my sergeant and I are speaking in clear, calm voices to settle him down, to stop resisting, to relax. But this person is super-panicked by this point and resisting us actively but not aggressively, but we do get his arms behind his back to handcuff him and control the situation. It is my memory that this person did not lose consciousness in the struggle.
After things have settled down, we asked what happened. The officers told us that a white woman had been walking through the parking lot and saw this black person getting out of the car where he slept, and he was getting dressed for the day. She saw his penis. He may have gestured at her to wonder why she was staring, but she called the police in a situation that should be very familiar to us these days. The officers arrived, got her story, and then escalated the situation by trying to immediately arrest him. He fought back to a degree, not particularly aggressively, just shaking their hands off him, and refusing orders, and they couldn't control him and it got more chaotic. That's where we came in.
The officers placed this person under arrest (I believe for resisting arrest and indecent exposure) and were going to transport him to the city jail. However, my sergeant intervened and insisted that the person be medically cleared before jail. It is a part of our training also that when a neck restraint is ever used that it is that officer's personal responsibility to ensure that there has been no permanent injury. So we called an ambulance and my sergeant sat in the back with the guy and accompanied him to the emergency room. He was not injured physically, so that was a relief. I reckon he went to jail after that.
I have a very vivid memory of the state of conflict at the moment because a news photographer got a picture of the whole thing, which was on the front page of the paper the next day. In the middle of the picture you can see this person we were trying to arrest, this human being, with us surrounding him, a look of anguish and terror on his face. He's seated, his arms behind him, seemingly not particularly struggling at this point. The two city officers are on his right, scattered in multiple directions, one's been knocked onto their rear end, the other is coming from behind to re-engage. They look agitated, grimacing, tense, in blurry motion. My sergeant has his arm in place for the neck restraint, his ear to this person's shoulder, holding, but no real look of tension on his face, nor does it look like he's squeezing much at all. I'm holding this person's left arm, squatting down, pulling his wrist behind his back. It's obvious I'm talking, but my face and body are relaxed, de-escalating. We are obviously doing what our training has asked us and no more.
So this situation, bad as it was, could have been much worse, and this human could have been hurt seriously or killed, and might have been if two different officers had responded, or if another officer had tried the neck restraint. A photographer had evidence of what we did that morning, but we wrote our reports documenting our use of force (a vital requirement for any department, no matter where) knowing we had adhered to policy and statute in every way, so we never heard anything else about it. The other officers in my department thought the picture was funny, so I got ribbed about it.
Still the situation haunts me, and I've kind of buried it all these years until recent events shook it loose. That moment, those fifteen seconds, illustrate perfectly the peril of relying on "good apples" to redeem police departments. Let me explain how:
The whole scenario is thoroughly and utterly contextualized by racial and social injustice and white, propertied privilege. A white woman accidentally saw a black homeless person's penis and he didn't act ashamed or deferential about it. There did not appear to be any intention to alarm or harm her, just to assert his right to occupy that particular space for a human need. Instead of being moved to sympathy by his vulnerability, her response was to demand the police enforce her comfort and privilege. The situation clearly expresses the bizarre contradictions of black bodies as commodified, as objects of desire and disgust, and as subjects of state discipline — and how white people are conditioned to keep these bodies under surveillance at all times (and all white people are conditioned this way). The law and our cultures of privilege combined to criminalize ordinary life for this person. He was houseless in a wealthy city. The city ordinance says that exposure of one's private parts wherever it is reasonable to expect another person to see you is indecent exposure, but that does not force an outcome in arrest.
So the complainant was alarmed, sure I get that. But a low-key investigation (by talking to this person) would have revealed there was no intent to harm, and then a solution could be determined. Social referrals, advice to park somewhere less public, there are lots of possible outcomes that ends the public disruption and keeps everyone safe. Yet it was a bad call, demanding a use of police power with the only purpose of informing this person that he did not have a legitimate place in that community, a community he had existed in for years. The complainant and some of the other officers would probably strenuously deny all of those things as conscious intentions (in the early 90's I know I didn't have the language yet to articulate the situation in its true social implications either). The officers of course had a responsibility to hear the woman's concerns and find a solution that resolves them to everyone's satisfaction and safety. But it was also clear the officers had approached this person in an officious, confrontational manner, went "hands-on" much too quickly, and he stood his ground. He did not want to have his freedom constrained for this, a situation his homeless status forced him to occupy, and even then I couldn't find fault with that.
Okay, so this is where the "good apples" come in: we were able to keep this person from ending up charged with more serious offenses (assault on a police officer, say) or end up in the hospital or morgue. And because there was no lasting harm to his body, our departments never thought twice about it. But none of it needed to happen at all, and that's the key. And because it did happen and because officer decisions had sent it off in a bad direction, we surely had violated this human being's fundamental right to live and thrive in that community. All of it within department policy and state law, all of it within the terms of the Fourth — there would be no public outcry. You see, even though all four of the officers involved would have considered themselves “good cops” we were also conditioned by these systems of oppression and control, these mechanisms of surveillance and exclusion. It was far too easy for us to assume the black houseless man was of course criminally culpable, because our jobs depended on satisfying the comfort of wealthy white citizens. Me as a well-intentioned officer couldn't help this human being in any sort of existential way. Even wanting only the best, to reduce harm as much as possible, I was acting in complicity in this racist, dehumanizing system at that moment.
I remember his face vividly in that newspaper photo and I know I helped cause his terror and bewilderment. But this is not about my shame. It is about his pain and terror and shame, the force of the state emphasizing to him over and over again that he is only marginally human, only half a citizen. The story wounds me today especially because I know his story has millions of reiterations, most of them lost to bureaucratic obfuscation and the sneaky technicalities of power. Even at their best, a good cop could not be just in this situation. There is no way to be under the circumstances that unfolded. Training and skill and good intentions meant nothing in the bigger scheme, in the grinding wheels of society's bad faith and racial nightmares.
I'm not saying there are not police officers who genuinely try to do right by their communities, who sincerely value the dignity and human rights of the humans they encounter. Of course there are, and I honor their commitment to service, skill, and compassion — just as there are departments that have started the work of retooling their approaches to their communities. But I shouldn't have to say that just to salve wounded feelings. What I am saying is those good cops —no matter how many— cannot possibly be enough to achieve justice and equality on their own. I was a good cop, in a fairly decent and service-oriented department, and still I harmed this man in a fundamental way.
The "good apples" themselves cannot possibly serve as an ethical restraint on police abuse on their own, and it's obvious they never have. The system is far too deadly, dehumanizing, and hostile towards the marginalized for those good cops to be much more than ultimately complicit. The system itself was created for the benefit of white propertied men to hold these human beings down, and all white people benefit to some degree by it remaining in place. We must have change obviously — but police reform will never be enough. We need to replace the entire way we understand authority and power and force and citizenship. How see ourselves as agents of state control. How we repair and restore injury and harm as a real community. Reforms and accountability are a start and may start to stabilize things for the short term. Police abolition must be the ultimate goal. Cities are bankrupting themselves to pay for war against their own citizens. We all suffer from the austerity that creates, and vulnerable communities are deprived of the services and support they need to protect their welfare.
True justice is far cheaper than never-ending war. The answer is not to raise budgets and hire more officers — these are typical liberal canards which only increase our addiction to force and occupation. We must slash their budgets instead and redistribute those resources to community welfare, providing a comprehensive strategy to address social harm, thus redefining the mission of peace and safety. We need to detoxify ourselves from our tragic dependence on control and surveillance and think about mobilizing community resources as a strategy to reduce crime, treat substance abuse, protect the disabled and mentally ill, and provide resources to alleviate poverty and homelessness. We need a redefinition of what we pay for in city services.
Let me clear: abolition is not lawlessness. It will not be a quick transition, nor is anyone arguing that there will be no response to harm to others, only that belligerent engagement and perpetual occupation is not the answer. This is not a new idea, though you may have just heard of it, and in fact police forces are only a recent innovation in European history. There is an extensive reading list about the subject and many organizations already working towards this goal. We must honor and respect the work of the black and brown activists who have been leading this fight in our cities. We must take our cues from the communities who deserve peace and justice, and commit our every effort provide support to them in this mission going forward. We need to listen to what these communities say they need right now, if we have any interest in moving forward. Not everybody does...
We have plenty of reasons during the past days to understand how perilous our rights and our lives are in the face of unchecked law enforcement if we fail to act and amend this crisis. This is what marginalized communities have been saying to us for generations. The danger is now, and so the response cannot wait.