Hate-Love the Police, American Style

Americans entertain a hate-love relationship with the police. We invented them. And with the invention comes juxtaposition.

We call the police a pig. A devil. An unclean spirit susceptible to vanities of tribalism. One popular stereotype is that if you scratch a cop he or she bleeds racism. White police especially. But non-white police are not immune from the scratch test because of the one-drop rule. According to community folklore, one drop of “blue” in the blood of a black, Hispanic, Native American, or Asian police officer taints his or her loyalty to race. Meaning an allegiance to the profession rather than to his or her people reigns as the principle code of ethic. For female police officers, already wearing gender-normed professional aspirations we tattooed to their bodies at birth, the one-drop rule paints them manly.

We also call the police a hero. A public servant. A salvific character in dangerous times. One popular stereotype is that if you scratch this type of cop you find a spouse, a mom or dad, a captain of an athletic league for youth. Accolades of this nature can transcend a police officer’s race or gender. When they do not, we celebrate policewomen and officers of color as role models worthy of emulation in their respective communities. This also is true for white policemen with proud Irish, Italian, German, Polish, or Scottish ties to a family tradition of policing.

At a deeper level, our hate-love relationship with the police reveals an inventor’s dilemma — and this has played out across space and time.

Consider Victor Frankenstein, a protagonist in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. He entertained a hate-love relationship with his invention. When Victor’s soul became disenchanted with the creature he sewed together with paraphernalia from battles won and lost between God and man, death was the prescribed cure for the riots his invention caused.

In cities across America, 202 years later, a demand to abolish or defund a department of police — a conspicuous tentacle of the Leviathan we call local government — is not dissimilar in spirit to Victor’s desire to rid society of his monster.

City residents today are within their rights to demand locally elected officials abolish or defund the police. Any justifiable appeal to do so is more arduous than we would like to think. Not for lack of imagination. Not for lack of political will. Not for lack of money. It is because “We the People” are inextricably intertwined to the police by a social contract whose moral fidelity is tested by such a time as this. The following questions accentuate the dilemma:

· Is our call to abolish or defund the police a confession of our loss of faith in their role as public guardians?

· Is our call to abolish or defund the police an inquiry into what kind of democracy we have with police?

· Is our call to abolish or defund the police an existential audit of what kind of people we need to be to sustain democracy without them?

· Is our call to abolish or defund the police a solicitation for more accountability in local government?

Answers to each question will tell us a lot about the tenaciousness of our character, our commitment to constitutional republicanism, and adults’ hopes and fears for the future our children will inherit.

For what it is worth, the concept of hate-love the police is not unique to American society. Ancient civilizations in Africa, China, and Greece provide examples of people responding well when administration of justice was fair, and angrily when injustice was in full bloom. In Europe, prisoners, thinkers, and travelers wrote stories about ecclesiastical and military enforcement of laws on the policed, be it before or after the Age of Enlightenment.

Undoubtedly, transnational stories and lived experiences about hate-love the police traveled with immigrants across the Atlantic Ocean. Once they settled into the colonies, growth of towns and cities, new scientific thinking about human behavior, and the maturation of the English language from Samuel Johnson to Noah Webster refined conceptual definitions of police. No longer did “police” simply mean a function of governmental management — police became a function for governmental administration with the intention to deter crime, promote public safety, and to protect property.

Among the tectonic shifts in American society that occurred from the Revolution through Reconstruction emerged two appeals that influenced our ideas about crime, punishment, and the role of the police in them. One was a demand for law and order that was endorsed by landowners, industrialists, as well as progressive and conservative social reformers. The other was a demand for surveillance of peculiar people — runaway slaves in the South, eastern and southern European immigrants in northern cities, unruly labor, poor white women, religious minorities and crime syndicates, to name a few. Consequences from call-and-response policy making of this nature live with us to this day.

In modern times, how hate-love the police unfolds in American life it not confined to public policy alone — it does so in our entertainment choices, too. Take movies as an example.

On one hand, police-themed comedies such as Smokey and the Bandit, Police Academy, Charlie’s Angels, Bad Boys, and Beverly Hills Cop — the highest grossing film of 1984 and winner of the People’s Choice Award for favorite motion picture — have been audience favorites throughout the decades. This is where we smile and laugh at the police. We tend to love them in this role.

At the same time, police-themed dramas such as Dirty Harry, Rampart, Gangs of New York, The Untouchables, and The Departed — winner of four Oscars including best picture in 2007, earned millions of dollars and received critical acclaim. In fact, the very first R-rated movie to win an Academy Award was The French Connection, a movie about a corrupt, womanizing, and bigoted New York City cop. This is where we publically jeer the police. Privately, however, some of us celebrate the bravado of this type of cop who works outside the lines of authority to get the job done — even if it means hurting innocent people along the way. We rarely voice our love for this type of cop to avoid offending anyone, or worse, being called a fascist.

Our complex relationship with hate-love the police also unfolds in movies where the race of a lead character is on display. In 2002, Denzel Washington became the second black man to win an Academy Award for best actor in his portrayal of a rogue cop in Training Day. He did not win one for his previous roles as a minister, a lawyer representing a Philadelphia man with AIDS, a football or debate coach in the segregated South, or an activist in apartheid South Africa. Also in 2002, Halle Berry became the first black woman to win an Academy Award for best actress for her nuanced romantic relationship with a correctional officer working at a prison where her ex-husband is on death row in a movie titled Monster’s Ball. She did not win one for her previous role as Dorothy Dandridge, the first black woman nominated for an Academy Award for best actress in 1954, and who, ironically, fought hard not to be stereotyped into roles for black women or negative roles about black people.

In addition to movies, childhood and adult play rituals tell us a lot about what we think of the police.

Some parents forbid their children to wear a police costume for Halloween. Why? Because of negative connotations associated with the police in general, or fear associated with wearing that uniform in particular communities. Other parents, however, allow their children to wear a police costume for Halloween because it is analogous to uniforms worn by other crime-fighting superheroes like Batman or Spiderman.

Halloween is not dress-up time just for children and teens. Look at the online variety of adult police uniforms for sale. A badge, gun, and cap are standard accessories. Even if Halloween is a once-a-year occasion for adults to dress up like a police officer for fun, adult nightclubs provide a weekly stage for police-themed striptease performances complete with handcuffs, a baton, and dark glasses — for fun. Now, love-hate the police morphs into another dimension of American entertainment choices.

Christmas and birthdays also provide parents an opportunity to purchase police playthings. For instance, a toy police station complete with a helicopter, roadblocks, and handcuffs ranked 24th among the 25 best toys for 4-year-old-boys according to a Good Home Institute survey in 2019. “It’s great for role play,” is written in the summary section.[1]

Although many children and adults play cop every year, approximately 800,000 sworn uniformed police officers in 15,000 general-purpose law enforcement agencies in the United States call it a way of life. Police play multiple roles in our lives, and all of it is not nefarious. One role includes maintaining our standard of living by protecting our property and our bodies.[2]

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Victimization report published in 2018, at least 4,636,730 people were victims of a serious crime that falls into two categories for which offenders can be charged with a felony.

The first category is labeled serious property crimes. It is defined as a completed burglary, or unlawful or forcible entry into a person’s home, garage, or vacation residence, as well as completed motor-vehicle theft. In 2018, 1.2 million burglaries resulted in $3.4 billion in losses according to FBI statistics. Two-thirds of burglaries occurred in residential properties, and 56.7 percent of them were forcible entries — sometimes with people present inside the home. Incredibly, victims of property crimes accounted for more than 70 percent of all serious crimes committed in the United States between 2014–2018.

The second category is labeled serious violent crimes. It is defined as rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggregated assault. Between 2015 and 2018, victims of violent crimes increased from 2.7 million to 3.3 million for people age 12 and older because of increases in rape, sexual, aggravated, and simple assaults. Not all rapes and sexual assaults are reported to law enforcement, which means these numbers are likely higher.

How does all of this relate to our standard of living?

The police play an integral role in apprehension and arrest of people who break into our homes, destroy our property, and sexually assault our bodies. Some people convicted of these crimes end up in prison or jail. According to 2020 figures of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, the number of people convicted of property crimes like burglary, theft, etc. accounts for a larger number of the 1.2 million people locked up in state prison than all the people convicted of drug-related crimes. When the 713,000 people convicted of violent crimes such as rape/sexual assaults, murder, etc. is added to the number of people convicted for property crimes, 7 of 10 incarcerated people in state prisons are there for crimes against our property, our bodies, or the bodies of our family and friends.

Still, in spite of all the crimes we commit against each other on an annual basis, the call to abolish and defund the police continues.

To be clear, police brutality against black people, and lack of accountability against police that do so, are fueling a major portion of abolish or defund the police movements. And understandably so. Police brutality against black people is not new. Black intellectuals and grassroots leaders from diverse political ideologies noted these travesties decades ago. In 1951, Paul Robeson and Claudia Jones were two signers of the We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the U.S. Government Against the Negro People petition submitted to the United Nations in New York City and at the United Nations meeting held in Paris. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality” in his I Have A Dream speech delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

Police brutality against black people is worthy of our attention. Yet, to narrowly tailor our response to brutality to abolishing or defunding an entire police department does three things: (1) undervalues black people’s reliance on a public policing force to protect their standard of living; (2) overlooks black people’s investment of millions of dollars annually into technologies to protect their property and bodies from brutality perpetrated against them by the civilian population; and (3) leaves state laws for police management unaddressed.

Nevertheless, as calls to abolish or defund the police continue, a review of a few experiments that occurred in other cities before the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020 may offer insight into what reform looks like in practice.

Between 2010–2011, local government officials disbanded their police department for financial reasons in Camden, N.J. and three California cities — Half Moon Bay, Millbrae City, and San Carlos. Did this vote leave city residents without a policing force? Of course not. The Camden County Police Department was created in 2013 by a partnership with a surrounding jurisdiction. The three California cities partnered with a Sheriff’s Department to assume administration of justice duties left behind by abolishment of their local police.

But, what if, theoretically speaking, a local government’s vote to abolish or defund the police actually resulted in no police at all for its residents? What will happen next? Many local residents will endorse a replacement. And if we must have a police force, then “policing ourselves” is an option. Its supporters will tell us this model is more humane than the science of policing currently employed by local government.

So we begin to police ourselves in the name of love. Wearing amulets as proof. Then the experiment matures. And when the brutality of us is unleashed, against our civil liberties and the idols in our hearts, without a blue uniform or weapon of war, but by words and actions that are homicidal, nonetheless, the policed grow to hate their new master — as they did their former one. Hate-love the police reignites, and the people demand reform, again. This time, analogous to a biblical Pharaoh, we will chase the police we sent away into the wilderness of America with the ambition to bring them back into our private lives and public spaces, with all their glory and pain, one way or another.

What does all this mean?

Speaking frankly: We will never abolish the police. We will never defund the police into a position of infecundity. Nor should we do either.

Like it or not, our hate-love relationship with the police makes them our imperfect inevitability.

Personally, I do not support the demand to abolish or defund the police. At the same time, I respect the right of others to hold a different position.

Instead, I support the following:

· Creating a local coalition of concerned stakeholders — including victims and perpetrators of crime, employers, faith leaders, criminal justice and public health professionals, progressives and conservatives — in each city to work strategically to abolish protocols that neglect accountability, promote fear, or erode confidence in the police profession.

· Addressing local and state arbitration laws that allow terminated police to be reinstated.

· Investing in research, best practices, and entrepreneurs to improve policing as a practice and a business.

· Utilizing laws already on the books to address police misconduct.

· Incentivizing police chiefs and police unions to tell us how to improve the profession.

· Listening to what residents living closest to the problem have to say about reforming the police, and the judicial system, too.

· Encouraging city and county residents to examine how their elected officials spend their taxes on law enforcement to identify what works, what is wasteful, and where there is room for innovation.

In closing, as we consider police reform nationwide, be it driven by brutality or budgetary reasons, let’s try to avoid a mistake so many of us make when assigning good and evil to main characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For example, the creature we call Frankenstein is a misnomer. It is only an invention. The monster is the one who gave it life.

So, who are we?

[1] In June 2020 when I was researching materials for this article, I located “best toys for 4-year-old-boys” at the following website: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/childrens-products/toy-reviews/g29355921/best-toys-gifts-for-4-year-old-boys/. On August 4, 2020, I clinked on this link only to find the webpage no longer lists the toy police station as the 24th best toy for 4-year-old boys — right ahead of an Espresso Bar at 25th place. As of September 4, 2020, the 25th best toy is “Wonder Crew Superhero Buddy” — a black superhero. Where did he come from — all of a sudden? And what happened to the police station?

[2] Naturally, we have plenty of examples where the police have confiscated our property or broken our car windows and our bones.