The individual tells you nothing about the system. The system tells you nothing about the individual.

The issue isn’t whether we respect Black Lives Matter. It isn’t whether we respect the Police. It isn’t whether we know police officers who are good people.

It’s whether the Police believe all are equal under the law. Recent weeks and months (and years) have set before our eyes a wealth of evidence answering that question.

By “Police” – upper case – I don’t mean Officer Joe, the good cop you know. We all know good cops. Instead, I mean the institution of local law enforcement in the US. Not a police officer – lower case. The Police.

The argument isn’t that an individual officer is bad or that all officers are bad. It’s that our society structures law enforcement in a way that reproduces our worst characteristics, our inequalities and prejudices and oppressions.

As a result, Police departments have become fertile environments for a certain kind of person. Ignorant. Hateful. Insecure. Weak. Bullying. And that person inevitably becomes what we know as a “bad cop.” This system attracts, tolerates, succors, rewards, and shields these people in much the same way the Catholic priesthood historically attracts, tolerates, succors, rewards, and shields pedophiles.

In other words, bad cops aren’t a rare, inevitable exception. They’re a logical product of a specific type of system. They’re features, not bugs.

(And no, misconduct by law enforcement officers isn’t limited to Blacks and Latinx victims, but the whiter [and more male] you are, the better your chances.)

Blinded by Privilege

When we see video every day of racially-inflected Police violence, it’s beyond arguing that the problem is a “few” anything. The cases we have actual footage of just from 2020 adds up to more than a few. How big does that number grow if we believe even 10% of what minority citizens tell us?

Absolutely there are good cops. But we’re methodically, systemically producing a huge number of bad ones, and the good ones – out of fear, perhaps, and certainly facing overwhelming odds – can’t do anything about it.

Most Americans view this conversation through the lens of privilege (and I include myself here – it took a lot of years before I began listening to what our racial minorities were saying). All manifestations of mainstream society – schools, religious institutions, governmental agencies, all filtered through a media that’s pathologically uninterested in alienating advertisers and audiences – advocate for “personal responsibility” and “accountability,” which, in a vacuum, are wonderful goals. In the context of an adversarial system built, layer by layer, on centuries of class and racial inequality, though… In this context, it isn’t hard to understand “personal responsibility” and “accountability” as code.

That is, by any reasonable measure, the definition of a broken system.

“Defund the Police” is a Regrettable Turn of Phrase

At a minimum it’s bad PR because it suggests anarchy. It seems to indicate that the solution to everything is to dispense with all law enforcement. That’s ludicrous, and it isn’t what is intended. A few people might believe it literally, but not many.

The actual argument is that law enforcement needs changing. “Reform the Police” is closer, although that, too, isn’t quite right because “reform” is an incremental word and what needs doing isn’t “fix A,” it’s “replace A with B.” Higher recruitment standards. More stringent training that replaces militarization with an intense focus on community engagement. Federal, state, and local civilian review and oversight. De-escalation and non-violent outcomes. A collaborative ethos instead of an adversarial one.

Of course, this isn’t just on the police – our crime problems and our race tensions are features of the bigger system, which structures and perpetuates inequity and desperation by establishing that some citizens are less than others. So we have a lot more work to do than just law enforcement. But law enforcement isn’t a bad place to start.

Individual vs System

Americans are wired to confuse the individual and the collective. If I say “Republicans are bad,” “my brother-in-law is Republican and he’s wonderful” is sufficient rebuttal. Somehow a single exception disproves the 99.99% rule.

We can’t make progress on this (or any) issue until we can consider aggregates. The individual tells you literally nothing about the system and the system is useless at predicting the individual. This is why we have terms like “sample size.” When n=1 you have literally zero way of knowing if you’re looking at a rule or an exception.

Officer Joe & Father Fred

Joe is a model policeman who’s being unfairly judged by the public due to the actions of others (actions he’s as appalled by as we are). But “Joe is a good cop” tells us nothing about the officers he works with, or the officers a town over, or officers in the next state, or officers on the other side of the country. Joe’s goodness is completely meaningless in a discussion about Police.

Here’s the bad part if you’re Joe. When people dismiss legitimate concerns about systemic Police brutality because Joe is good, they help insure that the problem never gets fixed. Which means Joe will continue to be unfairly tarred. Every time the latest Derek Chauvin commits an atrocity, Joe’s reputation takes a bit of a hit. Guilt by association. People are a tad less likely to trust him.

He’ll never get the respect he has earned as long as other officers are casually murdering people in the streets and politicians, backed by millions of voters, defend the broken system.

Father Fred may be the soul of piety, but that’s no excuse not to deal with the problem of pedophilia in the priesthood. The same goes for the Police.

Instead of supporting a process that systematically and predictably attracts and empowers thugs, racists, and bullies, we need to objectively analyze that system and overhaul it so that it doesn’t produce “bad apples.” If we need to see an example of what this new approach might look like, we might start by examining Camden, NJ. Or, for that matter, most any advanced democracy on the planet.

This is how we transform our society into one where people everywhere see a blue uniform and their instinctive reaction is to smile, not run.