Restoring Democracy to America by John F. M. McDermott

Author:John F. M. McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

The Roots and Consequences of Illegal Police Behavior

A more effective, less corruptible police and a police inclined to champion, not subvert, constitutional standards are very closely related. Both require that we do away with militarized police institutions, which are now the norm. After over a century of experience we have learned the hard way that they are not really reformable. The problem in both cases—technically effective policing of crime and constitutionally friendly policing—is rooted in the military form of the police institution itself. There is a profound design fault here, not a reparable failure in a viable institution.

The initial and continuing rationale for the military form of the police institution is that it alienates the police from the policed and thus ensures that the former’s loyalty will be to the authorities and against the urban mob—almost no matter what. Other chronic police problems flow from that same matrix.

As we know vividly from the police shows and films, police intelligence about crimes is crucially dependent on informants, that is, petty criminals who learn about one another’s crimes “through the grapevine” and in other informal ways. The police get this information by threatening (illegal) violence on the petty criminal and by “looking the other way” at his or her crimes. Informants are essential to crime control, for without them the police would usually not know where to look or whom to look for. In fact, this simple acknowledgment of what seems an elementary fact of policing contains not one but four major faults of the modern police institution. It is a devastating admission.

First, police dependence on petty criminal informants stems from the fact that normal communications channels that ought to exist between police and policed have been blocked by the designed-in alienation of the police from the communities of law-abiding citizens they ostensibly serve. As we know, this blockage is acute and even dangerous in the relations between big-city police and the minority and immigrant districts, but it is present in almost all urban police/community relations. I repeat the obvious: this is a design feature of the modern police institution, not an unfortunate side effect. By heroic efforts and under ideal circumstances, one can limit the harmful effects of such alienation, but by definition heroic efforts and ideal circumstances will be relatively rare. What it means is that the police can have only a marginal effectiveness in policing ordinary crime. That is the price we pay for the relatively unconditioned loyalty of the police to abstract “authority” and not to actual citizens, to “law and order” and not to the actual laws on the books.

There is more: the informant system requires that the police look the other way at whole classes of petty criminals and their crimes. The leverage that a police officer has against a potential informant is that the latter has broken the law and that this can be “winked at” in exchange for information. Accordingly, much burglary, mugging, low-level drug trafficking, pimping, prostitution, gambling, car theft, pocket-picking, labor-and immigration-law violations and such are permitted by the police as a normal condition of policing.

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