The Problem With Good Cops

by Fox

Every day people in this town who are unhoused and spend their nights along the city streets of Aberdeen are moved along each day by the police in this town. Even those in camps allowed by the City are routinely swept out of their spot to “clean”. This process of cleaning involves moving people out of the structures they’ve built and demolishing them, along with any belongings they aren’t able to remove in time. This causes untold instability as compared to the old River Camp, where people were able to build structures and have a stable place to camp. The police helped to evict this old long term camp by the Chehalis River in 2019, and continue to keep people from entering the unused City portion of the property today.

As organizers in this community we are frequently told of the harassment by the City and the police, including this constant shuffling, the throwing away of personal belongings, and the arrests of people for crimes of poverty such as petty theft, driving on a suspended license, or illegal camping. The police commit these acts under the guise of helping, but they clearly serve the City government, not the community. Police in this town are complicit and, in fact active, in the eliminationist plans of the City. Their position above us in the systems of state hierarchy results in looking down at people in need and feeling superior rather than contemptuous of the poor, whether they feel any guilt for their position of privilege or not. Yet they still enforce policies that amount to genocide, they will never feel the bond of solidarity with those struggling under the oppressive system police uphold. Can we really be proud of police who attempt to use their position to undo a tiny fraction of the pain caused by the system they enforce in the first place?

Rotten Apples

We’ve all heard the phrase “the rotten apple spoils the bunch” in regards to police abuse. The so-called “Rotten Apple” theory of police abuse is held by both police commanders and their allies. It states that it is the exception to the rule when police officers commit abuses, that it is a tiny minority of officers who do so. It is, in other words, a means of protecting the organization from scrutiny and of avoiding change. The problem with this mentality is that it is not the individual who is to blame for the level of violence we see in police departments across the country. Police sympathizers will say that it is unfair to blame the whole police department for the actions of a few, and yet this is an obfuscation of the issue at hand. We claim that the root of police violence is the institution itself and The State that gives them their monopoly on legitimate violence. These are institutional critiques and you cannot remove them from the discussions of individual police officers. By being a part of the institution of policing, all officers are complicit in the worst of its abuses.

When police everywhere, including here in Aberdeen, show up to a unhoused encampment eviction it’s not to provide assistance – it is to ensure compliance. The City would not be able to enforce these harmful policies if the police didn’t show up with their guns and the ability to arrest anyone who stood up to oppose the eviction and threaten lethal force for resisting said arrest.

The “Rotten Apple” theory first appeared in the 1973 Knapp Commission Report, a judicial commission formed to investigate corruption of the NYPD. This theory holds that any police misconduct is the result of individual officers deviating from the standard policy, organizational and institutional factors, such as police warrior training and lack of supervision, are downplayed or ignored. This model perceives police corruption as a rotten apple in a clean barrel. In other words, it is an individualistic model of deviance. In contrast to the “Rotten Apple” theory, the “Rotten Barrel” theory emphasizes organizational influences and factors. It is the barrel making the apple rotten.

The “Rotten Apple” theory has argued that deviant police officers bring their undesirable traits into the policing profession when they are hired. In this view, the solution becomes perhaps increased psychological screening for officers, keeping potential “bad apples” out of the barrel. Studies have found that many police officers display sociopathic and antisocial personalities. They have found that since the environment in which police work provides unlimited opportunities for corruption and abuse, many officers tend to have sociopathic traits. But these reforms and safeguards do not address the root of the problem – the institution of policing itself.

Rotten Barrels

Over the last three decades the Structural Theory, or “Rotten Barrel” theory, of corruption has gained more attention. As more and more scholars have looked deeper into the history and subculture of policing, they have come to realize that corruption is a inherent feature of policing, that is ingrained into the structure itself.

In his book Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing Edwin J. Delattre explains that as a young, naïve individual enters a profession where the worst of people is exposed to them, they are socialized to this environment by senior officers who have become cynical and lost faith in police work. Under pressure to form bonds of mutual trust and reliance while witnessing corrupt practices, it’s realized that superiors don’t support efforts to behave honorably, that sanctions for corruption are negligible, and the young officer will probably accept the status quo and join in the corrupt practices.

There is now a huge body of work that supports this theory, as seen in the numerous reports of corruption within units in departments and entire departments themselves. Officers tend to only associate and socialize with each other because of all the social isolation brought on by the job. When the public at large complains about police work, they claim that the public is being mislead and that they have “misconceptions” about police, this serve to reinforce the bonds of the profession. This need to bond together forms what is called a “siege mentality” – where it is Us vs Them. Trust between officers up and down the chain of command is important, and since supervisors are already socialized in this way, they are more likely to have already accepted certain levels of corruption and brutality as minor things. These behaviors are minimized by the organization, to stabilize the overall system.

Individual police officers can have their own values subverted and corrupted through the social norms of the group. The “brotherhood” demanded by the job can detract from their moral belief system and cause them to do things “on the job” that they would not do to a person in their normal life. This process of degradation of individual morals goes for correctional officers as well.

The structure of policing provides officers with the incentive of a unique kind of social authority. It also gives them a high degree of discretion, and a low degree of supervision in situations of life and death. Most bureaucratic institutions like police departments contain hierarchical qualities that facilitate abuse and deviance. The division of labor into specialized units, limited career mobility, and the distinct sub-culture that values maintenance of the status quo above all. These are structural and systemic issues, not individual ones, we cannot reform or modify this structure to achieve anything else, it does what it does incredibly well. This is not a broken system, it is one designed to impose the will of the ruling class on the poor and marginalized. What is needed is something that prioritizes people’s safety and addresses the root causes of harm in society, not brutal gangs with unlimited power.

Bad apples do exist, but that is not the issue either. The fact that some people are abusers is precisely why we shouldn’t have positions of authority and domination, such as police. It invites too much abuse and corruption. We can find terrible sociopaths in many occupations, but only the police are given such inordinate amounts of power and lethal control over the population. When the profession in question is policing, it should be clear that the threat is too great to allow anyone to have that much power and discretion. We need to have systems of justice and safety that are responsive and accountable to us.

Monopoly on Violence

An anarchist theory of The State holds that The State is a tool by which a small group of people rule a large group of people, against their interest. Police enforce this rule through displaying overwhelming force against criminalized populations. This force is the only socially acceptable form of violence within the envisioned society. People are not to commit acts of aggression against one another or The State, but The State grants itself the ability to meter out violence against those deemed “criminals”. The society accepts this, and thus the power of The State is wielded at the hands of militarized forces like the police. Every utterance from the mouth of a politician is a police order. Without the police to enforce their will over ours, they would be nothing.

Despite many believing that police have been around since the beginning of this country, the invention of modern policing is relatively new one. The police has its origins in the power of a man over his family. In the American Revolution this power shifted from being in the hands of the King, to being in the hands of the people. In Colonial America policing was generally an informal for-profit venture, or community watch volunteers called “night watches”. Constable often supervised these watches, but it was even then not a highly desired job. Early policemen “didn’t want to wear badges because these guys had bad reputations to begin with, and they didn’t want to be identified as people that other people didn’t like,” says Gary Potter, a crime historian at Eastern Kentucky University.

As the nation grew different regions used different police tactics. Being such a large shipping hub, Boston merchants who were paying money to ensure safe travels of their goods at the time, found in the 1800s that they would be able to pass along the cost to the taxpayer if they claimed it was for the “public good”. So in 1838 Boston became the first city with an official publicly funded police force with full-time officers.

In the South however the police rose out of the need to maintain the system of slavery that underlie the economics of the region. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.

In the late 19th century they were employed in strike breaking activities, as fears of labor union organizing and large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants began arriving in the country. This sparked xenophobic calls for preservation of “law and order”, as conceived of by those in power. During this time police captains were often hand picked by local political machines, so as to harass oppositional parties and intimidate voters.

As the 20th century came there were calls to “professionalize” the police. But crime historian Samuel Walker’s The Police in America: An Introduction argues that the move toward professionalism wasn’t all good: that movement, he argues, promoted the creation of police departments that were “inward-looking” and “isolated from the public,” and crime-control tactics that ended up exacerbating tensions between police and the communities they watch over. And so, more than a half-century after Kennedy’s 1963 proclamation, the improvement and modernization of America’s surprisingly young police force continues to this day.

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a term used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry which use surveillance, policing, and incarceration as solutions to economic, social, and political problems. Individuals in the ruling class use this apparatus to extract profits from the brutal enslavement of a portion of the population, with people made to work in prison labor camps for little to no money. These profits come at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, who are preyed upon by The State to fill their prisons and jails.

This is the function of the police, to enforce the decisions and to protect the interests of the ruling class and impose their will on the people, through violence.

Police organizations hold a large share of the blame for police violence, not simply individual officers. With the complexity of modern police departments brutality may be encouraged from below or above, and can adapt to many conditions. Both formally and informally these organizations and their hierarchical nature tend to push people towards a climate of tolerating and even promoting unnecessary violence. The more formal aspects of policing that lead to violence is the training given to officers, the priorities in the field, what money and time is spent on, and the system of promotions it offers.

On the other hand, when police culture itself, as well as informal occupational norms, are the support base for violent tendencies, then this brutality can arise from below. The thin blue line mentality, the code of silence, indifference to the problems of police brutality, generalized suspicion of the population, and the intense demand for personal respect can be counted in this regard. The average officer regards the public as the enemy, and feels that their occupation is in conflict with the community. These collective experiences and feelings give rise to the shared belief that police need to be secret and insular in their dealings. The persistent refusal to deal with violent abuses with proper legal consequences is also another check in the column of systemic police abuses. Even when individual officers disapprove of an act of violence, it is necessarily condoned by the organization that seeks to protect and defend each officer involved in allegations of abuse, applying as few consequences as possible.

Even in the case of Derek Chauvin, who tortured and murdered George Floyd publicly and on camera for nine minutes and 29 seconds, prosecutor Jerry Blackwell opened by telling the jurors that they would be hearing about how it was not policy to use the force that Derek Chauvin applied, and that the individual officer, not the police as a whole is what is on trial. This obscures the racist violence inherent in the US policing system.

“Black people who are unarmed or not attacking police are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people,” the Brookings Institution found. “More than 75 percent of the time, chokeholds are applied on men of color.”

Every time we see this happen it is only a fraction of the cases that we don’t hear about because they weren’t filmed. Initially, when an act of violence occurs, officers face little punishment of any kind, and only when people protest and riot in the streets over it are charges ever brought. Originally, The MPD [Minnesota Police Department] fired Chauvin, then prosecutors charged him with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Only later, after much protest, did they add a charge of second-degree murder.

But what would have happened if eyewitnesses had not recorded Floyd’s death? Would Chauvin have been fired and charged with murder?

For 9 minutes and 29 seconds, Chauvin continued to choke Floyd as several bystanders watched, many visibly recording the killing. Chauvin didn’t try to hide what he was doing. As eyewitness Genevieve Hansen testified, Chauvin looked “comfortable” with his weight on Floyd’s neck.

Clearly we cannot rely on the court system to bring justice to those brutalized and murdered by the police, as they are a part of the same system that is responsible for the many violent acts committed against poor people of color. We must build capacity outside of their systems of retribution and incarceration, as these are not what we want to base our justice in. We must organized the affected communities to challenge State power and the monopoly they hold on legitimate violence. By establishing ourselves as parallel sources of legitimate power, we can control our own communities free from police.

Who Will Protect And Serve Us?

We must establish community defense initiatives, building the capacity of these grassroots organizations to be able to defend the working class against police violence and reactionary forces, as well as providing mediation and conflict resolution within the community. A three-pronged approach is recommended in Rebellion Against Police Violence by The First of May Anarchist Alliance:

First we should be able to mobilize and respond quickly in our neighborhoods in order to prevent, defend, or retaliate against police terrorism. Second, we should be able to hold regular meetings in the community in order to address conflicts between neighbors so as to eliminate our dependence on police to resolve our disagreements. Finally, should one someone in our communities become a victim of police violence, we should have the ability to create enough of a disruption in the lives of the ruling class in order to force them to give us justice by meeting the demands of the victim and/or their family.

It is vital that these defense organizations be non-hierarchical and not just another gang wielding power over the people. It is to be made up of the people. Our capacity for self-defense needs to be generalized to the whole population. The power we have is collective, and The State uses rifts between sectors of society to divide and conquer us. These divisions must be healed in order to empower us to defend everyone with care, respect, and justice.

Responses to harm must be handled within the community and at the local level, with transformative and restorative approaches to justice. We do not need to replace the police, what we need is something entirely different that actually addresses the social inequities that lead to so-called crime and the actual sources of abuse and harm in our communities. These are communal and social methods of dealing with people who cause harm, it is not about punishment but about stopping the behavior and healing the community as a whole. In this light it can be seen that those most in need of being held to justice are the police themselves.

Opposing Opposition

As Crimethinc notes in their piece Why Fuck The Police, criticism of opposition to police usually falls into one of five categories. First being the argument that police are fellow workers, and should be our allies. But the police exist to enforce the will of the ruling class, they are managers, not workers, they manage the population for the ruling class. They routinely help to squash dissent and attempts at revolution and striking. They cannot be our allies until they leave their positions. By publicly deriding the police as an institution, we can insist that police get real jobs, and then join us on the barricades. But as long as they follow the orders of the day, they can never be our allies.

Today’s police officers, at least in North America, know exactly what they’re getting into when they join the force; people in uniform don’t just get cats out of trees in this country. Yes, most take the job because of what they feel to be economic necessity, but needing a paycheck is no excuse for obeying orders to evict families, harass young men of color, or pepper spray demonstrators; those whose consciences can be bought are everyone else’s enemies, not potential allies.

The second argument goes that because the police have such overwhelming force, and resources at their disposal, they can certainly win in any fight. So we shouldn’t fight them, since it is a loosing battle, not worth our time. This is a strategic calculation made by those who have never dealt with the police in a confrontation and discovered just how stupid they really are. The police are heavily limited and constrained in what they can get away with, needing to balance public perception  with the need to deploy overwhelming force. This is why a small crowd of protesters can hold off a larger, well organized force of police. These contests are not decided on the lines of a military engagement. There are complex social pressures at play that allow the clever anarchist to outsmart and outmaneuver the police. These displays of victory are important, not matter how small, as they demonstrate the willingness of people to rebel against the system, and that is always inspiring to others.  They let anarchists show that reality is negotiable, and that their grip on society is not as stable as it may appear.

The third category of argument is that the police are a mere distraction from the real enemy – The State. But as we discussed already, without the police to carry out their orders politicians would be little more than whiny brats debating alone in a room somewhere about how other people should live their lives. The police are not the end of the fight, but to ignore them is to risk loosing entirely as they are the fundamental repressive arm of The State, the one most likely to be used against us in our struggle for liberation.

The fourth line of argument is that we actually need police. Yikes! According this logic, even if we can think about a future scenario in which we have no need for police, we still need them today, because people aren’t ready to live peacefully together without armed mediators. But the social imbalances maintained by the police is far from peace. Is it not important that the abolition of police be carried out in a snap of a finger tomorrow, the point is that we need to make strides towards a concrete goal and not be abstract in what we are fighting for. If you think some police officers are good individuals, then fine. But they are still police officers, upholding the violence of The ENTIRE State apparatus, and everything that entails. Naïvety is only so much of an excuse for perpetuating this sort of cruelty on people. The idea is not that conflict and harm will disappear with police, but that we need better methods of dealing with conflict and harm than police.

The final argument is from the pacifist camp, who’s opposition to all forms of violence leads them to counter that it is inherently wrong to use violence in service of liberation. To use it would make us just as bad as them, for example. But if the point is to make the world a better place, then it will necessitate violence in certain situations, such as opposition to Nazi Germany.

Conclusion

It can be hard to talk about the need for police abolition in a small rural town like Aberdeen, WA. We seem far removed from the scenes of militarized riot police beating protestors in the large cities nearby. But we separate ourselves to our own detriment, as their struggle is the same as ours. In the event of a localized uprising police come from surrounding areas to assist the smaller local departments in their riot control efforts. This means we are not disconnected from the possibility of seeing riot police here in Aberdeen, if the need arose.

From Crimethinc:

To make this clear: yes, cops are people too, and deserve the same respect due all living things. The point is not that they deserve to suffer, or that we have to bring them to justice—that’s Christian morality again, dealing in currencies of superstition and resentment. The point is that, in purely pragmatic terms, in order that others not have to suffer, it may be necessary to interrupt, by militant and confrontational means, the injustices perpetrated by police officers.

We must not be trying to put the police up against the wall, or exact our revenge upon them, that is not the goal. Our goal is to better all life, including theirs, as we hold that it would be far better for the officers in question to not be police officers anymore. The term “police” can refer to an individual officer, but it can also refer to the entire occupation as a overall structure.

Therefore, while it may even sometimes be necessary to set police on fire, this should not be done out of a spirit of vengeful self-righteousness, but from a place of careful thought and compassion—if not for the police themselves, then for all those who would otherwise suffer at their hands.

We must continue to call the police out and oppose them ferociously, the rhetoric employed here will do little to provoke assault, but it will publicize the concept of disapproving of the police in Aberdeen. This may do more for the lives of these officers and their families than anything else —for not only do police officers have a disproportionately high rate of domestic violence and child abuse, they also get killed, commit suicide, and become addicts with disproportionate frequency. So by this measure, anything that de-legitimizes the police and their absolute authority, demoralizes them, and encourages them to quit, is in their best interest, as well as the interest of their loved ones, and society at large.

So, the problem with good cops is that there aren’t any. That’s missing the point entirely, the problem isn’t individual, it’s structural, it’s systemic. Who is on the force hardly matters, when the overall structure of policing is what it is. Until we abolish the structure of policing, the occupation of police, nothing we do to the system will ever make it less oppressive or brutal.

Fuck. The. Police.

Addendum:

In contradiction to this entire article, the only good cop was Chris Dorner

Sources:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-why-fuck-the-police

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/first-of-may-anarchist-alliance-rebellion-against-police-violence

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kristian-williams-our-enemies-in-blue

https://criminaljusticeaccess.com/tag/rotten-barrel-theory/https://www.studymode.com/essays/Police-Deviance-Rotten-Apple-Or-652279.html

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

Delattre, Edwin J.. Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing. United States: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Incorporated, 2011.

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