t/w: discussion of how toxic lawless police culture, and the GOP’s weaponization thereof, might just be the proximate cause of downfall of representative democracy in America.
(Also, how we should have listened to Black people about this, years ago. FFS.)
Portland’s entire police crowd-control unit, 50 officers in all, have resigned en masse from their assignment, in protest over a fellow officer being indicted for assault. The “whole bunch” is sticking up for the “bad apple” who physically attacked a photographer at a Black Lives Matter protest last year:
But although they resigned from the assignment, those 50 cops will remain employed: “The assignment is voluntary and the officers will remain on the force and continue their regular assignments.”
Fuck that. They should all be fired. All 50 of them. Immediately. For insubordination, and for encouraging lawless violence against the public they are sworn to protect and serve. (“Can’t do that because the police union will go apeshit,” you say? Cool. Disband it. I’m anti-“abolish the police,” but pro-“abolish police unions.”)
We CANNOT keep coddling this culture of entitled impunity and grievance-mongering lawlessness among armed agents of state power.
“ACAB” is wrong (and deeply unhelpful). Most cops aren’t bastards, individually. But police culture is utterly rotten, broken, and lawless at its core. It encourages a sense of aggrieved entitlement, a tolerance of unnecessary violence, and a toxic type of camaraderie that views basic accountability as an unfair attack by an ungrateful public.
This a BIG fucking problem. Far bigger, I fear, than most people have fully grasped yet. I believe it may be the most problematic of all the (many) problems threatening our Republic right now, when you think the worst-case scenarios all the way through. Our failure to rein this shit in might be what ultimately dooms America:
Police culture, broadly speaking, is so rotten that good people who try to improve it are powerless to do so. And worse, culture molds people. Peer pressure doesn’t just affect kids! Even a basically good person, if their workplace culture is a toxic shithole of lawless entitlement, impunity, and me-against-the-world grievance, is likely to start exhibiting more & more shitty, entitled, grievance-fueled, lawless behavior, as time goes on.
Of the 50 cops who resigned, how many do you think are routinely assholes in their everyday lives? How many regularly act lawlessly on the job? I bet it’s a minority. Probably a quite small minority. Yet they ALL went along with this stupid-ass “protest.” And it’s easy to understand why. Imagine you’re an officer in that group, and you secretly think the indictment was justified, but your 49 colleagues are all acting pissed about it. Are you gonna be the one guy who defies the herd, and risks being ostracized and mocked and hated? Or do you go along to get along? This is what a rotten culture does to people.
I feel fairly hopeless about this problem, because I don’t know how to fix it without a cross-partisan civilian political consensus, and we have the exact opposite: we have one major party that’s weaponizing the problem for political advantage, thereby worsening it. And I fear “weaponizing” may eventually not just be a metaphor. 
In a future hellscape scenario where state or national legislators (and/or armed insurrectionists) try to outright steal an election, and America’s pro-democracy faction (i.e., Democrats + horrified principled ex-Republicans) takes to the streets by the millions in armed peaceful protest, a la Belarus or Tahrir Square or Hong Kong or [insert your preferred example of recent mass protests by pro-democracy factions in other countries; bonus points if you can think of one that was *successful*], and force the authoritarians to either (1) restore democracy, or (2) reveal their true colors by going Full Tiananmen on us…
…in that awful scenario, I have a fairly high degree of faith that the military will always follow & honor the constitutional order to the best of its ability. But I have no such faith in random state & local police departments with military-grade weapons and a longstanding culture of entitled, lawless grievance that happens to align perfectly with Trumpism, and that increasingly views Democrats as the enemy because we’re the only ones trying to rein in that toxic culture.
And because I know I can’t trust the police, writ large*, to act within the confines of the law in that situation (*obviously this doesn’t apply to every police department, still less every police officer, but broadly speaking it’s true), I know beforehand that taking to the streets en masse if there’s a stolen election, even in totally peaceful protest, carries a lot more chaotic risk than it should. And that knowledge will affect decision-making, at all levels.
The potential risk of police violence won’t stop me from protesting like hell on behalf of the Republic, if (heaven forbid) a true election-theft scenario unfolds. But that’s easy for me to say, as a white dude in a blue state. Truth is, it’ll make a lot of people hesitate, understandably so. And it’ll make a lot of politicians hesitate. And make a lot of military leaders hestitate, in certain scenarios where that would be at issue.
It’ll also worsen the temptation, in a lot of bad scenarios that I can imagine, for pundits and opinion-makers to call for “calm” and “cooler heads,” instead of calling plainly for the restoration of democracy, because of the fear that comes with the knowledge that there’s a well-trained group of heavily armed people, cloaked with a veneer of authority, who basically answer to no one, and who have a frighteningly high potential to become (or at least to turn a blind eye toward) a rogue quasi-paramilitary element that’s willing to escalate things toward a bloodbath.
In other words, a top-down order may not be necessary for the “Tienanmen” scenario to materialize. And that knowledge changes the incentives for everyone — and may prevent the pro-democracy faction from having, in the first place, the support needed to be as (nonviolent but) unyielding as we would need to be.
I’ve been worried about this police thing since last June, around the same time I realized that America’s guardrails were gone. I do sometimes worry that I sound like some the-end-is-near lunatic when I say this stuff out loud, but ultimately I think my lack of normalcy bias is an asset to clear thinking in these strange and menacing times.
I initially thought/hoped we’d dodged the bullet when Trump lost, and then when January 6 failed. But now, with the GOP acting like more of an authoritarian party every damn day, I’m more worried than ever about the future of the Republic. And I think the intersection of the GOP’s draft into authoritarianism, and police culture’s drift into violent, aggrieved impunity, is a critical aspect of the threat.
Future doomsaying aside: in the here & now, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, because anything Democrats do to chip away at the lawless entitlement in police culture worsens the sense of grievance (and targets it more and more at one particular political faction, namely…us), but catering to the grievance culture worsens the sense of entitled impunity!
What we need is a responsible cross-partisan consensus to fix this, but obviously that ain’t happening, and so we’re stuck….which is a very bad place to be, what with the looming possibility of massive civil unrest if an election is genuinely stolen.
This issue scares me, and I have no answers. Just worries.