suspicion is “articulated.” When a citizen dies unnecessarily at the hands of law enforcement, those who empathize with the victim see a person—an individual—destroyed. As the inestimable, inherent value of personhood remains the cornerstone for moral and ethical judgement in and across most cultures, outrage grows out of whatever extent it seems that acknowledgement of the victim’s personhood was suspended and the degree to which our shared notion of justice encourages and dismisses it. However, to those who fail to empathize, the victim is not a person so much as part of a situation that involves an officer of the law. Accordingly, the officer of the law is also not so much a person as a professional representing a system designed to normalize or standardize situations—especially those perceived to be tenuous and volatile. He or she has to make every encounter something the broader culture and those who hold the power within it can understand or accept. If he or she doesn’t, it threatens far more than the officer involved. It challenges what she or he represents-the shared ideal of what people who claim the culture as their own can or should expect out of one another to feel safe, etc. Accordingly, the victim might have been a legally innocent person or, at the very least, not a person who posed a peril worthy of deadly force. But that doesn’t matter. Likewise, the responsible cop might or might not have been a racist among several racists in any given department. Maybe he or she was simply reckless. Maybe he or she was simply a coward. But that doesn’t matter, either. Neither matters to those primarily concerned with the ideal of “law and order” by any means. What matters to them is the shared ideal of what they think should be normal behavior in any situation. At least as much as law, order supersedes the inherent value of personhood and its wide, variable range of performances as the cornerstone of ethics or justice. And this is a problem. I could tell you that this problem is implied by design--that it is what some call a systemic issue. But you need to know a bit more than most about the origin of American policing to understand. What was originally, essentially a community volunteer’s job, policing as we know it became a centralized, bureaucratic, professional public service in mostly northern cities during the early to mid 19th Century. And, honestly, it was more of a response to the
“articulable reasonable” perception of “disorder” amidst the growing industrialization of thriving urban centers than any credible proof of a rising, sweeping tide of criminal activity. Before I knew that, I never thought to question why politicians of a certain rhetorical species tend to tout support for big budget, right-at-all-costs policing as “law and order.” Think about that. What defines the order that law enforcement doesn’t already entail? That takes us back to what I was saying about preserving normalcy/ normality and the cultural expectations that accompany it. Dr. Gary Potter of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies explains research indicating how modern police forces developed as publicly funded strong arms of commercial/industrial interests: “These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for-profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the "collective good." Accordingly, “order,” then, has always been about normalizing or preserving behavioral standards that most expediently mediate a compliant, highly hierarchical working populace organized according to class differences and an environment most conducive to thriving markets and commercial activity. Potter goes on to argue, “Defining social control as crime control was accomplished by raising the specter of the ‘dangerous classes.’ The suggestion was that public drunkenness, crime, hooliganism, political protests and worker ‘riots’ were the products of a biologically inferior, morally intemperate, unskilled and uneducated underclass.” In the Northern cities, this “underclass” was largely comprised of destitute European immigrants crowding into ethnically homogenous neighborhoods desperate for access to the “American Dream.” Towards the end of the 1800s, these workers were routinely targeted with preemptive force and violence for attempts to organize and execute labor strikes for fair wages and safer working conditions. In the South, of course, and all over a nation where the defeated Confederacy’s influence would spread like crazed hounds on the trail of emigrating freedmen, the underclass—
HIGHLIGHT 23
