I don’t know how to write about policing in the U.S. I could take the historical route, marking all the ways that law enforcement has been designed specifically to destroy and suppress communities of color. How modern policing can trace its development to anti-worker groups like the Pinkertons as well as Jim Crow era enforcement. How rich, white people mistake militarized police, increased surveillance efforts, and invasions of privacy for safety. How the media uses words like “rioters” and “looters” to ridicule and turn public opinion against those fighting for a better world. But this has all been done before. Many, many, times. By people who know more, do more, and write better than me.
I could turn this into a personal essay. But I’m a white guy who has never had to worry about being murdered in cold blood in the middle of the street by a cop. I’ve never had to fear for my life while interacting with a police, ever. Any personal story I could tell would ring hollow and pale in comparison to the constant daily reality of millions of Americans.
I could take the policy angle. Outline the ways in which increasing police budgets and sizes hasn’t made the populace safer or better. Offer up solutions for this like police abolition and defunding, or community oversight programs. Or talk about how community led groups, funding for social workers, trained crisis psychologists, and case workers have seen far more success than police forces. But other people have done this.
I could go to social media and post the link to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund. But then what. Not even a billion dollars in donations would fix this. Heck, I haven’t even convinced myself about the point of writing this. Around one hundred people will read it, most likely less.
I am not alone in this. Other people have also had to think through this conundrum. Activists since the beginning have argued over tactics and strategy, both on individual and organizational levels.
This does not mean that I feel any conflict over what I believe about policing and police. Living in the United States for the last thirty years will do that to a person. Living in Chicago, even more so. The Chicago cop union recently elected as their President a notorious racist who at the time of the election had no police powers. The CPD had a black site where they tortured people. The city mandates that Chicago Public School teachers teach about this incident in classes as part of the settlement. Cities like Chicago spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on settling cases over wrongful death and police mistreatment. The Supreme Court has defended something called “qualified immunity,” which exempts cops from facing pretty much any sort of punishment for their actions. Civil asset forfeiture has stolen more and more from people every year. None of these things need to exist.
So what am I going to write about? I want to write about a number of things. Anger, the valuing of private property above life, the role of social media in today’s political economy, the life and money that has been stolen from minority communities throughout the history of the U.S.. These topics all deserve the light of day. For this though, I am going to write a little about the difference between the law and justice.
Justice and law are two different concepts. They each have perfectly long historical backgrounds, that reach back hundreds of years. Their meanings and applications have changed as well. And, in a vacuum, neither are inherently offensive. Laws have their place, as does the concept of justice. However, we do not live in a vacuum, as much as we might like to think that we do. The prevailing culture far too often conflates justice with the law. Many believe that to serve justice means following the law. So too that if someone does not follow the law, then penalties need to occur. The law describes these penalties, and their full application means just has occurred. On a facile level, this makes sense. As every American schoolchild learns, we live in a democracy. This means we all have a say in the government, how the government runs, and what laws it writes. Surely justice runs through everything a democracy does. However, thinking about this for even one second reveals it to be completely bunk.
Justice does not come inherent in democracies. It took a war to end slavery in the United States of America, the self-proclaimed “beacon on a hill” for liberal democracies worldwide. Women didn’t win the right to vote until the 20th Century. The Civil War didn’t end de jure segregation, and neither did the Civil Rights movement. In fact, in the U.S., laws hardly have anything to do with justice at all. Sure, every once in a while, something slips through. More often than not however, people find whatever small portion of justice they can outside of the legal system.
This largely has to do with what justice looks like. Justice is not a one-way street. No one can “do” justice to someone else. Justice requires a satisfactory ending for every party involved. It is a process, one that has no universal guidelines. Groups construct justice from the ground up. It is often incomplete, and usually quite painful. Sometimes there cannot be justice. Law on the other hand, is handed down. It is often written behind closed doors, at the behest of some power or another. It often has no bearing on reality. The classic example of this is the question of if a starving man should be found guilty for stealing a loaf of bread. A pretty basic test of one’s idea of justice. Thousands of starving, mostly black, men sit in U.S. jails right now because of the way the U.S. criminal system approaches this question. A mass failure.
The conflation of law with justice has led to people adorning their cars with “Blue Lives Matters” bumper stickers, and supporting cops on TikTok who do dances when they have children cuffed in the back of their squad cars. It has led to the deaths of millions of innocent people in the United States. It has led to police facing absolutely no recriminations for murdering the people they supposedly protect. It has led to people getting more mad about some stuff being taken from a Target – a company worth billions of dollars – than a man being suffocated to death by a cop.
I still don’t know what to write about. I hope this helps more than it hurts.
Donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund here.
And as always, The Onion did it better first.