In the wake of the horrific killing of two NYPD officers, police union officials and their political allies have worked to isolate and vilify police accountability and racial justice activists. By claiming that the shooter was motivated by the protests they argue both that the protests should be suppressed and that there is no space for public criticism of the police. Both of these are profoundly troubling claims. Pat Lynch, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and former governor George Pataki have all intimated that to criticize the police is to be anti-police. But what does this even mean? If I complain that my garbage hasn’t been picked up am I anti-sanitation? If I call and point out that the swings in the playground are broken, am I anti-parks? Policing as it is currently organized has very little to do with violent crime. Day in and day out the police are primarily tasked with low-level enforcement actions that target the poor. That is because many of them and many of their leaders believe that the only thing preventing the complete collapse of civilization is them. This is a profoundly conservative and narcissistic understanding of the world, and it is false. Too many police officers believe that left to their own devices, poor people of color will descend into barbarism. This is probably driven by two structural factors. One is that their job involves seeing people at the worst. The second is that they are enmeshed in a system based on the use of punitive sanction to control behavior and a kind of behaviorist obsession with the effectiveness of deterrence, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. thenation/article/193737/what-does-it-mean-be-anti-police#
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 21:35:00 +0000
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