John Minchillo/AP Photo
People protest the police killing, three days earlier, of George Floyd outside the burning Third Police Precinct, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis.
The mob, as many have termed it, had plainly had enough, from a police force that routinely oppressed and now and then killed them, on top of a spate of joblessness, illness, and fear that disproportionately affected them even as the privileged orders looked to be making out just fine. So they stormed the bastion of police power, sacked it, set it ablaze, searched for guns and powder to arm themselves …
Wait—guns and powder? That’s not the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct Station House last week.
Actually, it’s the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, which is to France what July 4, 1776 is to us.
By now—actually, long, very long, before now—it should be clear that America’s police forces are to African Americans and other racial minorities as Louis XVI’s armed legions, in some particulars, were to France’s workers and peasants and middle-class agitators. By 1789, Louis had been compelled to employ Swiss and German units to suppress the French citizenry. It required an outside occupying power to control that restive population—a relationship much like that of many of today’s police forces to minority communities.
Also by now, it should be clear that America’s police are generally the proximate cause of urban unrest, commonly called “riots,” though it’s not intuitively clear why the destruction of the Third Precinct Station House falls under the category of riot, while that of the Bastille is considered a revolutionary action that France commemorates with its signature national holiday.
Why this difference? Louis XVI and his guards and soldiers—those who did not switch sides, as many did, in the summer of 1789—had set themselves against a good 90 to 95 percent of the French people. America’s police, by contrast, have long been used to suppress only a distinct minority of Americans—blacks in particular, but also Latinos, Asians, white workers during labor upsurges, gays and lesbians, and every now and then uppity students and women who complain too much. Though there are large numbers of decent, unbigoted cops, and though their ranks today draw far more from minority populations than they used to, much of the raison d’être of policing, in virtually every nation, is to suppress misconduct in the lower orders, which commonly takes the form of suppressing conduct (no “mis-”) in the lower orders. In America since 1619, of course, that lower order, first and foremost, is black.
This underlying condition invariably reaches a flashpoint, because police forces always contain in their ranks an apparently irreducible assortment of thugs, who are drawn to police work because it enables them to use violence legally. In Los Angeles, where I periodically covered law enforcement when I edited the LA Weekly (because there was no way to cover Los Angeles and not cover the police), it was state violence that touched off the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Rodney King Riots of 1992. The King Riots were a spasmodic response to the mind-boggling acquittal of the four cops who’d been videoed beating King. Beginning then, a rising share (though still quite small) of police violence has been subjected to universal public inspection (one of the underappreciated virtues of the iPhone), engendering both broad condemnation and immediate spasms of retaliatory fury.
Following the King riots, the Los Angeles Police Department was compelled to change leaders and, albeit with glacial slowness, some of its practices. But for all the reforms that many cities have been compelled to enact, police in America remain, fundamentally, enforcers of white supremacy. They do so in considerable accord with the wishes of much of the white citizenry. Most of those wishes are tacit, but it doesn’t take much for them to surface, as was depressingly clear from the recent episode of panic induced by birdwatching-while-black in New York’s Central Park.
Still, the demonstrations that have swept the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder suggest that awareness of the racist essence of policing has spread well beyond the African American community. I covered the 1992 Rodney King uprisings, and the most immediately apparent difference between then and now is the greatly increased racial diversity of today’s protesters. The substantial presence of white millennials in the past week’s demonstrations should come as no surprise; they’ve already distinguished themselves as the leftmost white generation in, most probably, all of American history.
They’re also the most mistrustful of the police. In a poll released Sunday by Elucd, fully 64 percent of Americans under 35 said they felt disrespected by police. The current wave of demonstrations hasn’t had to start de novo; it builds on the success of the Black Lives Matter movement in heightening the issue of police racism and brutality.
For all the reforms that many cities have been compelled to enact, police in America remain, fundamentally, enforcers of white supremacy.
Let’s posit, then, that in the nation’s major cities—in many of which racial minorities and white millennials constitute a majority or near-majority of the voting public—there will be a new push for police reform. But what should those reforms be? Even cities that have adopted the most extensive reforms are places where one cop can murder a black man while three colleagues stand idly by. As Philip McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, the Minneapolis Police Department “is held up as a model of progressive police reform,” with “implicit bias, mindfulness and de-escalation” trainings. None of which was apparently sufficient to save George Floyd’s life.
“There is something fundamentally wrong with American police training, police culture, police organization,” Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Friday night. That culture, he said, “sees the community as the enemy.”
Given the manifest shortcomings of reforming the police, the McHarrises suggest alternatives, such as emergency teams of health care workers, mental-health experts, social workers, and other “conflict interrupters” sent to manage emergencies involving substance abuse, domestic violence, homelessness, or mental health.
Those are programs we should certainly initiate, but I’m not sure they go far enough. Invariably, there will be incidents—lots of them—requiring the presence of cops. And the problem with that isn’t just the inadequacy of training, culture, and organization, as Patterson notes. It’s also with a sizable fraction of the people who become cops.
In most police forces, the majority of officers come from the white male working class. As everyone who has followed recent American politics knows, this is Donald Trump’s most solid political base, a base that wouldn’t be backing him if it didn’t already harbor the racist fears and anger he routinely encourages. Like his helpmate Rudy Giuliani, Trump spurs cops to express that anger in their actions. And in almost every one of the most notorious cases of police brutality in recent years, it’s been white cops who’ve turned Trump’s violent recommendations into action.
To be sure, there are black and Latino cops who are brutal, too; police work itself may be inherently brutalizing, though there are certainly officers who resist brutalization. But at minimum, it surely would be prudent to take white cops off the streets and put them behind desks, to make the recruitment of minorities and women the departments’ top priority, to create local-residency requirements that make departments look more like the cities they police, perhaps even to experiment with neighborhood residency requirements. As white cops are the tinder that sets off urban conflagrations, civic peace—much less civic justice—demands such reforms.
And what of the spasmodic fury we’ve seen in the past few days? All of it is understandable, some of it—certainly, the mass peaceful protests—has been both positive and absolutely necessary, while other aspects may induce the kind of backlash that usually brings right-wing demagogues to power. For all the attention the media have given the most violent protests, however, it’s surprising that there’s been little or no notice of how even these violent protests differ decisively from those of 1965, 1967, 1968, and 1992: There’s been no gunfire and, consequently, no deaths. Unlike the white militia types who’ve shown up at state capitols brandishing semiautomatic weapons demanding to reopen America, none of the current protesters have been seen to carry guns. And so far, the police and National Guard, in clear contrast to their conduct in earlier uprisings, have had the good sense not to use real bullets when opening fire—a policy shift rooted at least in part in the leftward shift of the nation’s cities and their elected officials. (Rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, and other projectiles, of course, can cause serious injury.)
But if the small minority of violent protesters are confining their damage to property rather than attacking life and limb, they’re still inflicting deep personal damage to business owners and their employees, some of whom are exemplary community citizens. Such acts are a form of “blaming the victim” (even if it’s victims who are blaming the victim), and at no time more than now, with so many of those businesses on the verge of folding due to the pandemic, and with so many retail workers already facing the prospect of prolonged unemployment.
Even cities that have adopted the most extensive reforms are places where one cop can murder a black man while three colleagues stand idly by.
Ever since Watts 1965, urban uprisings have prompted large numbers of whites to elect law-and-order demagogues, even in presumably liberal terrains. Watts was followed one year later by the election of Ronald Reagan as California governor; the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit and those following Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder one year later, by the election of Richard Nixon as president; those following a race-based killing in New York and the King riots in L.A. by the victories of two bring-on-the-nightsticks Republicans (Rudy Giuliani and Richard Riordan) in those otherwise Democratic cities’ 1993 mayoral elections. To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump has already embarked on a similar course of demagogy in the wake of the fury following George Floyd’s murder. He plainly hopes to rouse the fear and anger of enough white voters in Minnesota and other swing states to squeak past Joe Biden in November.
Will Trump’s racist rants be as effective? It’s hard to say. Reporting on and the filming and airing of police murders of African Americans have become so much more pervasive that they clearly have produced changes in public sentiment. They’re one reason why decarcerating district attorneys—until the last couple of years, an absolute oxymoron—have come to power in a number of American cities. But cities are the center of American liberalism and the places where minorities often constitute an electoral majority. We don’t know how a Trumpian adaptation of Reagan ’66, Nixon ’68, or Giuliani ’93 will play beyond the city lines: Surely, his base will love it, but how it will be received by swing voters beyond his base remains to be seen.
What we can be certain of is that the destruction of Station House 3—the unoccupied (because evacuated) station where the four cops involved in George Floyd’s murder all worked—will not be the basis of a national holiday, despite its clear parallels to the sacking of the Bastille. In both instances, the building under attack perfectly symbolized the oppression of an entire people. That should be grounds enough for Americans of goodwill to recognize the appropriateness of the Station House’s destruction, though what really matters is whether we can craft an egalitarian regime to take its place.
