July 3, 2020
I've been doing a lot of thinking recently, so I started a blog. We've had about three weeks of heavy protests after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and then another week of off-and-on events. After an initial burst of momentum things seem to be quieting down - calmer protests, fewer government concessions. Here in Chicago, I'm not aware of any change in CPD policy; in Minneapolis there's some debate on whether their City Council's 12-0 vote to defund MPD will have any teeth at all.
I often find myself interested in systems, especially those composed of people. I perennially return to Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy (PDF) about the inevitable tension between the goals of a group as a whole and those of its individual members, and how the resulting behavior is often orthogonal to the goals of the system's designers. In Institutional Failure as Surprise I was introduced to a framework to see real-life organizations, not just social software, as machinery. Here, the "code" is written in procedure and rules, and both the servers and users are fallible humans.
Just like biological organisms or colonies, groups of people are subject to evolutionary pressure. Subcultures are constantly springing up and moving in random directions. Online and in real life, these groups of people can be very small - a group of college buddies, the comment section of a blog. Most of them die, but sometimes a culture stumbles upon an adaptation that increases its fitness. Groups can expand: fraternities place a heavy emphasis on recruiting and colonizing new colleges, and Christianity and veganism alike give followers a moral obligation to proselytize. More perniciously, long-lived groups have usually developed mechanisms to prevent change and reinforce existing cultural dynamics. Online communities become "echo chambers" as members are presented only with information that reaffirms their worldview. Subreddits like /r/the_donald and /r/TumblrInAction crawl slowly to the right: from edgy memes to ironic conservatism to unquestioning reactionism. Fraternities, sports teams, and navies continue to haze because each new generation thinks they've gone through too much to give up the tradition. Without external force, like the threat of a hazing investigation, reinforcing tendencies can cause tradition to build up on itself and intensify.
In online spaces, this trend of extremism is limited. If the water heats up too fast, the frogs jump out. As communities veer to the right, they shed some moderate members and pick up new members from the wilderness. But people in the real world, with strong personal connections to individual group members, have a much harder time resisting extremism.
I've seen a lot of people express thoughts something like "I know so-and-so, and he's always been nice to me. How can people say all cops are bastards?" I'm sure there are some cops who really are as good to the community as they are to their friends and family. Even by the numbers, it seems like it'd be hard for every cop to be a bastard - there just aren't enough bastards to go around. There are only a few thousand Klansmen left, and police outnumber yearly robberies 2:1. So how could ACAB be true? Why would people put that on a sign if it's so obviously false?
The answer to the question, of course, explains why reform efforts and consent decrees have failed for decades. In fact, police reform including additional training has sometimes made things worse. Everyone from civil rights attorneys to police chiefs will tell you that "culture eats policy for breakfast". And right now, police culture is both toxic and self-propagating.
It seems plausible that a a significant number of police applicants have violent or abusive tendencies. That's just what happens in jobs that hold power over people. But what happens during training and on the force is the real problem. More than anything else, US police culture drills into officers that they are constantly under attack by criminals, that the only people they can trust are each other. Their job and that trust is a matter of life and death. Training shows them grainy videos of cop killings over and over again and tells them anyone on the street could have a gun. They attend talks by Dave Grossman, who teaches that they must embrace their responsibility to kill. Anticipating objections, cop culture says they're sheepdogs protecting sheep from wolves, and dogs look like wolves to sheep. Officers are given corrupting amounts of power and protected from the consequences of misconduct with qualified immunity and police union contracts.
New officers see what happens to "good" cops who report misconduct or try to stop it in the moment. They might be run out of the department or abused by other police. But most importantly, officers are taught a good cop is unable to trust fellow officers to have his back in this dangerous world of criminals. The most famous example is Frank Serpico: abandoned by his squadmates during a drug bust, shot, and left to die after exposing widespread corruption in the NYPD. Sure, it was 50 years ago. I think it's been happening for 50 years. Serpico himself thinks it's gotten worse. If anything, the recent rise of the Blue Lives Matter mentality has made it more clear than ever before that the foremost priority of police is the protection of other officers, not the public interest.
The problem with American police is not that all cops happen to be bastards. It is that the American system of policing selects for and produces bastards. To change the culture of thousands of police departments would be a titanic task. It would require sustained effort and political capital from politicians, Democratic and Republican, nonchalant about reform and uninterested in abolition - a fundamental change in the government's monopoly on violence. Reform would require buy-in at every level, from police chiefs to individual officers. Both reform and abolition would also require societal changes: police officers won't feel safe while there are still more guns than people in the United States, and we can't roll back law enforcement without at the same time fixing the conditions that cause crime. After every riot, the government response is the same. I doubt we will see meaningful change in the next few decades, but I am proud to join my brothers and sisters trying anyway.
Black lives matter,
Gabe