A Quick History of Police Misconduct (revisited for Jason L. Riley)

They went to work with unsurpassable efficiency. Full employment, a maximum of resulting output, and general well-being ought to have been the consequence. It is true that instead we find misery, shame, and at the end of it all, a stream of blood. But that was a chance coincidence.

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

The second thing a man will do for his ideals, is look the other way on lying.

All it takes is for police to lie, and the local monitors and regulators of police to look the other way on lying – judges, sheriffs, mayors, the local 51% majority of voters – and the Constitutional system of justice is usurped, and replaced with a tribal one. This is achieved without needing a single vote or even a campaign ad.

I pointed out in a web discussion, police can lie in court, and there is no institution to punish or deter them, they are rewarded in the political process. A stranger responded approximately “I used to be a judge. There were times I knew cops were lying on the stand. But nothing’s perfect, and it’s the best system we have. You want to take it away and replace it with what? Criminals will run wild.”

A judge looking the other way on law-breaking, without the voters explicitly telling him to or knowing he is doing it, is not a system, it is a usurpation.

In a nearby discussion, a retired cop eagerly took credit for, at times, framing the innocent and sending them to prison. He said approximately“Who likes it? Nobody. But that is what is necessary, to pressure them to testify against the big fish whom we know are guilty, but don’t have evidence to prove it.” Police deciding who is guilty and fixing the cards, is a usurpation.

People who have no personal experience with police misconduct, sometimes find it hard to believe. Are these police really all going to lie? It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, or maybe just some weasel who got caught. For people who doubt their neighbors’ sanity for characterizing police lying as a designed and standard practice, I will provide a rough timeline of how police lying became accepted and defended in contemporary mainstream America.

1) OJ Trial, 1995 – This was the TV trial of our generation. For many young lawyers, the impeachment of cop Mark Furhmann’s credibility as a racist provided a template for how to attack the credibility of police. For many Americans, the not guilty verdict of a man who they thought was obviously guilty, showed that defense lawyers were cheaters who were able to hack a flawed and weak process by going after police.

2) Ferguson, 2014 – The popular “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” narrative of a cop killing an innocent black teenager, was not supported by forensic evidence or Obama’s Justice Department. Big Mike Brown was on video robbing a convenience store. This drove the law-and-order crowd nuts. It radicalized defenders of police and prepared them for war, ready to reflexively defend police against any future accusations of misconduct.

3) “Handcuffing the Police”, 2016 – Heather Mcdonald, an academic polemicist with no experience in policing, wrote a book called “The War On Cops”. In it, she argued that police being accused of misconduct, and attempts to hold police accountable, were making life hard for cops and discouraging policing. She said any restrictions on police behavior amounted to “handcuffing the police” and this in turn led to an increase in crime and death. People swallowed this whole based on nothing more than vanity, because it was consonant with their self-perception as defenders of good. They never bothered to look at crime rates in countries where police have absolute power. The Republican Party took this as a moral mandate that all accusations of police misconduct had to be attacked and suppressed, and the accusers smeared, and police had to be defended and insulated from any and all consequences zealously, to save lives and the suburban way of life.

4) 2020 Election – After perhaps 200 years of believing leftists were well-intentioned but naive, Republicans under Trump became consumed with vanity. They believed they were good and Democrats were evil. They adopted a tactic which they previously scolded leftists for, that they could use big government in the form of police, to bludgeon opponents with their utopian vision. The regulation of police is so intertwined with the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, never before in American history was there ever a need for any government institution to regulate police at the state or local level. The regulator was the individual, the regulator was the accused, the regulator was the citizen of conscience. Republicans declared this only historical regulator of police illegitimate, and in doing so declared war on the common citizen. Anyone who so much as jaywalked, deserved whatever he suffered without complaint. Through this battle, Republicans sought to relive the glory and political success of their forebears, who took on the “rehabilitation and root causes” movement in the 1970’s.

So today, the right of police to lie is literally held as sacred by many, a final bulwark, a thin blue line against the disintegration of society. It is just as strange and hard to believe, and just as real, as the worship of cows in India. Police literally must lie to protect us all and save the world from communists. And anyone who accuses police of any misconduct must be destroyed, to preserve our way of life.

The destructive right-wing policing crusade followed a pattern described by Sowell in his 1995 book “The Vision of the Anointed”, for similar social-political crusades on the left:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

This new cop cult even came together around a book – “The War On Cops” – just like the leftist crusades described by Sowell came together around books such as “The Population Bomb” and “Unsafe at Any Speed”.

And any white people who had a bad experience with cops, were demonized as “Marxists” whose desire for police to wear body cameras would bring about the end of America.

And like the disastrous left-wing crusades described by Sowell, the problems being lenient toward police misconduct was supposed to fix, actually got worse. In the summer of 2020, rioters destroyed businesses all across the country. Police were shot and killed by black youths, and white “boogaloos”. The murder rate went up all over the country, including more than 50% in major cities such as Chicago and Atlanta.

When “The War on Cops” came out in 2016, the USA murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000, and anti-cop Obama was President. Republicans who ran on the policies promoted in the book, gained control of the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. By 2020, the murder rate had risen to 6.5 per 100,000. Sowell likes to quote Casey Stengel “You could look it up”. Oh, but that was a chance coincidence.

The murder rate had been dropping for decades, when Mcdonald sounded her warning. And like with so many left-wing crusades, it actually turned around and went up after crusaders were put in charge. Are we to believe, like with everything else, murder would have gone up even more without Mcdonald’s book?

Sowell himself declared of Mcdonald’s book “this book will save lives”. The actual results were simply taken as proof that others were still evil, and even less restrictions on police conduct, and more incarceration, were needed.

Imagine being trapped in prison for 70 years for something that didn’t happen, because a cult of people are too vain to ever admit being wrong.