Police “reform” is a failure because The Police think they are The State: Part 1

An anecdote from post-dictatorship Chile: a guy I knew slightly in Santiago had a job working for the first civilian president after 17 years of dictatorship and secret police terror. Patricio Aylwin was a Christian Democrat who had supported Pinochet’s coup like many “moderates” (equivalent to the mainstream Democrats of our day) and was elected in 1989 after a negotiated transition process that left Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

My friend compiled the news reports of the day and sent a digest in to the president-elect along with the newspapers and magazines. (Aylwin hadn’t yet taken office.) He related to me that the police guards assigned to Aylwin’s home, carabineros (members of the national police who had military rank and whose commander previously sat on the four-man junta along with Pinochet), routinely intercepted the day’s newspapers, casually read whatever they fancied, and thought nothing of leaving the marks of their coffee cups on the president’s personal copies.

It was a minor but telling detail: these low-level police foot soldiers had so little fear of the ire of their ostensible civilian superior that they metaphorically put their feet up on his desk and spat on his carpet. Aylwin didn’t notice (or pretended not to), but the message was clear: our real boss is the guy in uniform, not some wanker politician in a suit.

This made me recall an interview I had with a long-retired military guy who lived around the corner from me in Ñuñoa, Gen. Roberto Viaux, a key figure in two attempted coups before Pinochet’s successful one. Although one of the attempts led to the murder of the Army chief, Viaux’s superior, he was allowed to decamp for exile in Paraguay and later to come back to Chile to live out his retirement.

Viaux was delusional and thought someone was going to come knocking on his door to play a new and heroic role when in fact he had long become a footnote to history. But he explained to me something absolutely central to military thinking: the armed forces and the nation, in the generals’ view, are one and the same. The nation exists if and only if the armed forces exist. In fact, let’s capitalize both: once the Armed Forces are gone, The Nation disappears. The two entities’ essences intermingle in a form of consubstantiality like that of the Three-Person Deity, with citizens relegated to a sort of misty Holy Ghost-ish role.)

Something similar operates in the miasmatic airs of One Police Plaza and not just in New York City. Law enforcement has long abandoned the view that its ranks exist to serve the city—they think they are the city. This was obvious a few years ago during the last “I Can’t Breathe” crisis when Mayor de Blasio made some conciliatory statements about how his own mixed-race son might be viewed by a trigger-happy cop. The police union had a cow over that, and shortly afterward two auxiliary officers were gunned down by a suicidal assailant who may have been angry about police abuses. Hundreds of officers then turned their backs on De Blasio when he spoke at the funeral.

This open act of insubordination made it clear that the ranks of the NYPD respond to their own hierarchy, not to the city that pays their hefty bills (and their overtime and their generous pensions after 20 years of service). It happened again this week when De Blasio’s daughter was arrested at a demonstration and had her bust sheet immediately leaked and circulated on social media by the cops who technically work for her father.

It’s even more obvious when police departments around the country respond to citizen demands for an end to state-sponsored murder by criminalizing their assembly and their speech. (Yeah, yeah, I know, arson and looting—we’re not talking about that.) The idea that someone should attempt to determine the parameters of public life or dare to assert limits on their deployment of the use of force is deeply offensive to their institutional self-concept.

Does this apply to every line officer or beat cop? It doesn’t have to. The belief system flows downward from the top, and the ideological true believers hold sway. I suspect that’s why so few cops of color dare to intervene to stop the white officers who overwhelmingly account for the excessive force abuses. They know who will get back-up from the system and who won’t.

And this is why “reform” of police practices is just a shiny object held out to distract children. Cops don’t need sensitivity training. They need a political revolution that restores them to their true role as public servants with a heavy burden of trust, i.e., the right to use deadly force, and the sanctions that come with misusing it. This change can only come from a restored civilian authority empowered by mass repudiation of the police as army of occupation.

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