A.C.A.B. — An Upgraded Understanding
Unintentionally, I am putting down the first words of this essay on May 31st, which I only learned this morning to be the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre; an attack so abominable in scope and intent, that when it was dramatized on HBO’s Watchmen late last year I was shocked to learn it was not an extension of the alternate American history which guides that fictional world — but a very real, very tragic, and, it seems, effectively obfuscated historical event. But this essay isn’t about that. Though the Tulsa Police Department was notorious for allegations of corruption, fraud, and misconduct at the time. And it is indeed the police as a concept, as a seeming national necessity, as a social modem, and as an increasingly brutal, domineering, desperate physical force, that I aim to interrogate here.
Evidently the phrase “All Cops Are Bastards” causes intense and immediate social derision. By the time Ice Cube and N.W.A rapped “f*ck tha police” in 1988, they were merely putting on vinyl a sentiment that, to many Black Americans, felt as universal a precept as 2+2. Depending which one of the members you ask, it was either a direct response to an encounter with the police, or a rallying cry against the heavily coded “war on gangs”. The truth is that police brutality predates hip hop, predates the Civil Rights Movement, and even the Jim Crow era. The earliest examples of American policing — truly, the very inception of police forces— relate directly to slavery. And before I elaborate on the historical context to support this, I think it’s important I state here what you all clicked to read. Because what may be causing your visceral, gut-deep distaste for the “ACAB” slogan now made resurgent by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is the very understandable human tendency to judge situations from a personal perspective. My dad /brother/uncle/mom/sister/aunt/cousin/partner/neighbor is a cop, the retort typically goes. And they don’t agree with what’s happening.
This may largely be true. But the crux, I think, of understanding this idea (which is not always explained beyond the four words that constitute it) lies in the distinction between identity and assignment. No, not every human being who chooses a career in law enforcement is an evil person; certainly not every one of them is racially bigoted (beyond those inherent prejudices and stereotypes we all have to unlearn); and no, not all of them are murderers. But it is an unfortunate and undeniable truth that once the transition is made, so, too, is a pact: that you will value the collective interest of the corps — no matter how deficit in integrity; no matter what you see, hear, or feel — over anything else. Over those who govern you. And, yes, again and again, over the lives of the people you took oath to protect.
I won’t pretend to know, or have the ability to know, the intention behind every young man and woman who joins the police academy, but in my heart I’d like to believe that some notable fraction do want to help people. It would be cruel to assume that the 700-900,000 sworn police officers in America are all chomping at the bit to get their hands on a firearm and roll around neighborhoods they don’t know, looking for people they’ve never met, just to inflict their state-sponsored will. But an idea like “Blue Lives Matter” wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t an expected trade: your blood for the badge. So, understanding (and, even more radically, any attempt at repairing) the fundamental issue with police departments as they operate currently requires an examination of their original design, as well as an objective comprehension of their systemic racism and their systematic methods of carrying out that racism.
Building Blue
Before police forces, there were slave patrols: armed posses who traveled around their counties hunting runaway slaves. Their presence was also meant to serve as a deterrent for even the hint of slave rebellion — which was of course the White Man’s brightest terror. In their breakdown, The National Law Enforcement Museum quotes Sally Hadden’s book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas:
The history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascination, by white patrollers, with what African American slaves were doing.
Which meant that violent encounters between law enforcement and black people were inevitable. The formation of these patrols was not at all dissimilar to the gathering of a militia. It essentially required a census be taken of all able-bodied white men in a given region, with no separation between wealthy landowners and poor farmers. Their mutual goal of bringing terror to Black life muted any consideration of the wealth disparity which kept the latter locked in their place — just as Venus knows never to move an inch closer to Earth, sisters though they be.
The first patrols were formed in 1704; it would take 150 years and a Civil War to dissolve the last of them. But by then their practices were custom, their philosophy endemic, and the general white public couldn’t imagine a society without them. Especially not that of the paranoid white South: wherein suddenly the self-deceiving narrative of the docile slave was torched, going up easy as thin parchment, and now every shadow held an invisible Black face with strong, wrathful, and equally invisible hands ready to wring vengeance out of white necks and raze white castles.
So patrol policies found new skin in police departments. Now minted men of the law, racist white men were given a very specific set of laws to enforce: those of that morbid minstrel caricature Jim Crow. These were descended from Reconstruction-era Black Codes, which were written with the explicit purpose of making freedom something between a dream and a joke for Black people and limiting their lack of socio-economic options so that they would remain available as a source of cheap labor. When Black people broke these labor laws, they were arrested, beaten, and then forced to do the work anyway. Jim Crow laws coincided with the expansion of cities, which, in tandem, saw the foundation of more police departments. However, their establishing premise was less to do with responding to crime, and more to do with maintaining order. And the constitution of such a principle is subject entirely to the ruling class at any given time. In this case, the ruling class were what Dr. Gary Potter called “mercantile interests” and “commercial elites” who, tired of absorbing the cost of private policing, opted to divert their funding through taxation and leave charge of social control to the state. This meant that from the beginning, police officers were given uncontested jurisdiction over the Black body. As even further evidence of the intrinsically false crime-fighter ideology (and connecting to the example provided at this essay’s outset), police departments were infamous for taking bribes from crime organizations even in their inchoate form. Dr. Potter continues,
Early American police departments shared two primary characteristics: they were notoriously corrupt and flagrantly brutal. This should come as no surprise in that police were under the control of local politicians…Police systematically took payoffs to allow illegal drinking, gambling and prostitution. Police organized professional criminals, like thieves and pickpockets, trading immunity for bribes or information.
So we have centuries’ worth of empirical study that shows us how policing, like every other facet of American society, was born out of racism. And yet that facet remains, for some, staunchly defended and indelible. Why? Any number of reasons, not the least of which being legacy. The grossly exaggerated, almost mythical archetype of the Lawman is impermeable from Western culture, and the idea of a family within which every firstborn son is a sheriff or police chief remains a point of pride for thousands. But legacies require examination; and in the account of American history, police have far more red in their ledger than black.
But what about Black officers?
Black police officers are in a peculiar position. Just like any other race, they may come to the constabulary for a number of reasons; some seek to protect, both their neighborhoods and the community at large; some seek to understand, having existed as the opposition for so long; and some, as James Baldwin once wrote, find themselves “standing, futureless, on the corner,” with nowhere to go and nothing to feel except a dark and demanding need for fraternity. A police force offers that, at the very least. What it does not offer is an easy way out.
But here’s the real kicker: counted as of 2018, 77.1% of American police officers are white. Richard Dyer wrote in 1997 about how whiteness (the construction, not the people) has spent centuries being situated and preserved as the neutral model of humanity; an identity blank and buildable, untethered to any preconceptions because it was the first. Blueness, this new demographic, strives for a similar neutrality; a naming based on occupation, on a willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty — which would be heroic, if duty wasn’t calling for civic suppression. What am I saying? That blueness is whiteness. The two are inextricable, because one bore the other. So when any non-white individual joins with a police force, they are annexing themselves to a system that de-individualizes them, devalues them, and then bids they do the same for the civilian population that they (ah, look) patrol.
Because of this, there is no indication that “more [non-white] officers” will assuage the infected internal hemorrhage caused by police brutality and criminality. It is an impossible proposition to make while any who enlist are forced to forget the fact that they have an identity beyond the badge in the first place.
I have been to one protest in my life. It happened in Manhattan, on July 7th, 2016, after the twin executions of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile (whose name, it should be noted, still triggers red underlines when typed). I left LaGuardia High School with a group of friends and we marched downtown to Times Square, filling the streets with sound and fury. I even led a few chants. I didn’t know I could be so loud. Or so angry.
Part of me is ashamed to say it took that long to realize how unbearable my Black existence is to the country that’s used it for so long. Another part of me mourns for the Black people who lost their youth to an early reminder of their place in the status quo, and were left no choice but to become revolutionaries before they could buy tickets to R-rated films.
The rapid maturation of the Black conscience is unparalleled within this nation. We are the ones forced to grow up underneath a system that flattens us, and punished for swelling against the pressure. It should not surprise anyone paying attention that police officers can kill, with impunity, any Black man, woman, or child they want to. They have been doing it since we were in chains. The differences now are the power of recorded image, and a decreasingly patient Black spirit that burns for restitution.
Is this essay meant to inveigh you, police officer? Or your relative that is? Not on a personal level. But the institution under which you/they have served? Yes, unequivocally. Cops are not born, they are the product of a choice. And that same choice can be regretted, or even reneged. We have seen demonstrations of individual sympathy from men and women who begin to doubt the virtue of the uniform they wear. But their voices are few and so vastly far in between. Easily identified, eliminated, and replaced. So if you are indeed “a good cop”, then you should not only be appalled in words by the action of these supposed bad apples, but undergird those words with deeds. Lay down your over-militarized gear. Step out of the armored squad car. Remove your helmet, and yes, your badge, and walk/run/stand/sit/shout/sing/sob/be among the people. Not because we’re telling you to, but because you know something is horrendously wrong with the way things are.
And I know there will be people, both in my circle and without, that still seek a career in law enforcement. I don’t condemn you — that would be too easy. Rather, I charge you to it. I challenge you to change it. Be unyielding. We demand and deserve an amendment as relentless, as scorching, as complete as the terminations of our Black brothers and sisters and children.
Your oath is to protect and serve.
You can see that is not what you’re doing.
Shouldn’t that make you mad?
