Who Watches the Watchmen? An Examination of Police, Racism, and Law

After I finished with college just last December, receiving my bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, I have been searching for jobs in law enforcement and related law fields. Interested in my subject of professional study and being a long-time supporter of the Fraternal Order of Police union (my father is a retired union ironworker and an ardent supporter of unions), my father has kept an eye out for police related newspaper articles in the local paper. Dad saved an article from the February 18th, 2018 printing, an article in the opinion and commentary section by a Peter Moskos, who is apparently “Special to the Washington Post.” The article is entitled “Baltimore’s Police Problems Go Beyond a Few Criminals in Uniform”, and this article is a response to Mr. Moskos’ piece.

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who watches the watchmen? That is the question for many legal minds and social philosophers in human history. While humanity has almost entirely embraced the notion of society over anarchistic solitude, for many of us the certainty stops there. The remaining questions we have about the nature of society, how it should function, how we must manage it, and what our rights are have been in debate since the first societies. From Chico Norte to Egypt, from China to the Indus River Valley, how to run society has been the greatest challenge for humanity since we all decided to live collectively in established civilizations.

The idea of police, compared to the entire 300,000 or so years of human history, has taken place in the blink of an eye. Only within the last 300 or so years was the idea formed that a society needs people to keep watch, keep order, maintain the peace that we have come to expect in society, and defend good people from criminals. The latter was unfortunately really more of an afterthought, however. When we look historically, the first police were the privately hired arms of the rich in bourgeois European high society, dedicated to guarding those nobles’ valuables. With the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through the United States, West Africa and the Caribbean, these guards became glorified slave catchers for plantation owners.

Police have come far in the modern day, but how far have they come, really? No longer simply a private force at the whims of the richest in society, police have a civic duty and a legal responsibility to maintain the highest of ethical standards in terms of their conduct. We should expect this of all of our public servants, but corruption is very much the order of the day. More often than not our public servants are corrupt, bribe-taking, greedy, irresponsible, and cruel. The trust of society, the trust of our people, is paramount, and if citizens are polled about their confidence in their representatives, the response is often negative. Congress itself struggles to maintain an approval rating from the American people that remains in the double digits.

As I wrote in my previous piece to the FNP, we have to remember that police are not legally distinct from citizens. They are not separately classed, like military personnel are. The military has its own command structure, their own separate military courts, and their own military police. Our police are civilian officers, there are no separate courts for police, nor can they only be arrested and dealt with by their own specialized Internal Affairs police. While that is IA’s job, they are not the only ones who can arrest corrupt police. They can in fact be arrested by other departments, other officers, including federal and local bodies. Corruption is corruption, and the police are not legally immunized from prosecution in civilian courts.

Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore resident and police officer according to his article, examines a case of a corrupt Baltimore PD Gun Trace task force. The officers in question in the Moskos piece: Daniel Hersl, Evodio Hendrix, Jemell Rayam, Marcus Taylor, Maurice Ward, Momodu Gando, and Wayne Jenkins; face charges of “robbery, extortion, overtime fraud, stealing money and drugs from victims, some of whom had not committed crimes.” That last part is interesting, likely a result of either Washington Post or FNP editors, and was probably not written by Mr. Moskos. If the victims of these corrupt officers were criminals, would that make this unit’s actions acceptable? Would these crimes committed by police officers cease to be crimes if the victims were criminals? Certainly not. But it is perhaps indicative of the social attitudes of the public regarding both criminals and police.

What I am referring to is a kind of a “black vs. blue” problem. The Black Lives Matter social movement is a modern iteration of black advocacy groups that have been trying to advocate for racial equality and fair treatment of black citizens. At best, spokespeople for BLM believe that they protest in the face of an American society which has not treated them equally, since Africans were sold by their own tribespeople, abducted, raped and killed by European slavers, and sold to plantation owners across the United States and other nations. In the modern day, BLM seeks to address racial inequalities, fight against police brutality, and to address the fractured relationship and lack of trust between American citizens, and the police departments that are required to serve them.

These criticisms brought forth by BLM are, in my opinion, absolutely correct and true. In my education I have argued against police brutality, government surveillance, and the private prison industry, and I have cited numerous studies and academic articles written by criminologists and sociologists who have concluded that there are biases against nonwhites in American police, the courts and judges. One such example is that while hard drug use (such as crack cocaine) is relatively equivalent among black and white criminals, black criminals are more likely to be arrested for drug use, and often are given higher punishments for the same drug use. This is but one example of many inequalities that BLM seeks to address, and for that I agree and support Black Lives Matter in that regard.

Common criticisms of BLM from their opponents claim that it is a black separatist movement, even a black supremacist movement, which advocates for restructuring society with black Americans vaguely on top. The worst criticisms claim that BLM advocates for genocide against white people everywhere. In truth, there is a large variety of sociopolitical thought in BLM; its largely decentralized nature contributes to a variety of message and opinion within BLM. While undoubtedly there are black advocates who would express a hatred for larger American society, others advocate for peaceful and positive relationships with police, while others still believe the idea of peace between black citizens and white cops to be a pipe dream. There is no one single message of Black Lives Matter, and being that it is hard to pin down, it is understandable that there would be an equal variability of criticism and support for Black Lives.

Reversely, Blue Lives Matter is a reaction to the former, at best believing that police who place their lives in danger daily are undervalued, underpaid and underappreciated. Given the fact that police are among the highest risk jobs in America for alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide, I would partially agree. The worst spokespeople who advocate for Blue Lives Matter believe that crime in American society can be attributed to angry Americans, usually nonwhites such as black and Latin citizens, who want nothing more than to commit crimes with impunity, murder police officers at will, and contribute to the degradation and downfall of American society out of sheer hatred and spite. Compared to Black Lives, there appears to be less of a wider variety of opinion in Blue Lives.

In my studies and interactions with police, it is also worth noting that police are also frequently underpaid in many American cities. Poverty is a problem for nearly half of American society, flat out. Police are not often immune from that poverty, and it is poverty which is a huge killer for millions of Americans, in terms of homelessness, hunger, illness, malnutrition, and exposure to the elements. Police often struggle to make economic ends meet as well, and while this may explain some amount of police corruption, it does not excuse it. Even if something is understandable, or even sympathetic, whether or not the action is acceptable to society at large is a separate question. For the good of society, for its health, the answer to whether police corruption is acceptable is always no.

I have grown up with a large amount of films surrounding police, and the struggles they face. Those films often depict corruption, depression, suicide and violence. Some films have attempted to justify and explain away police corruption as a matter of survival, such as Training Day, Brooklyn’s Finest, or Narc, while others have tried to examine the consequences of that corruption, such as The Glass Shield, Serpico, or Netflix’s recent Seven Seconds. These depictions of police give us much to think about. Police corruption and brutality are undeniably abhorrent and must be stopped with great diligence and extreme prejudice. It is important for all of us to remember that police are human. When police commit crimes, they must be dealt with fairly, but also harshly. The responsibility of police to act lawfully and with justice is not just a legal demand, it is a social need. We cannot treat corrupt officers with “kid gloves”, nor should we forget to honor and uphold the good officers who are trying to help their communities, but we have to clean up the muck at some point. We cannot stand idly by and do nothing.

The communities themselves, local municipal government, community panels, even small communities in the projects and ghettos, are still of paramount importance to society. It is not enough to say that “these are our people”. While this is true, police forget that they are part of the people, and the people forget this as well. We are the people, and we should all be uniting together for our mutual survival in society. But fear, hostility, years of past violence and crime, so many circumstances have led to this divide between people and police, carved into the face of American society like a hot knife through butter. Whether or not these scars actually heal, however, is our collective responsibility.

I agree with Mr. Moskos that the War on Drugs, as was begun in the Nixon administration, is a massive failure, and has done nothing but imprison many people who perhaps should not be. It has failed to break the drug cartels which make billions per year in drug trafficking. Most Americans are unaware of the fact that many police departments will arrest young drug users, confiscate their drugs, and then use those same confiscated drugs in plainclothes drug busts, use the drugs themselves, or sell them. Many corrupt narcotics officers will sell drugs under the guise of “undercover operations” for their own monetary gain, necessitating they steal drug evidence from evidence lock-ups. This does not happen only in movies, but does occur in real life. Local news in Detroit reported on November 10th, 2017 that Detroit police officers posing undercover as drug buyers got into a fistfight with a different department’s officers, who were posing undercover as drug dealers. Questions of whether or not those drugs have been properly signed out of evidence and not stolen should be asked, but of course this is subject to an internal departmental investigation.

I also agree with Mr. Moskos that oftentimes higher ups are aware of the corruption going on, allow it to happen, and then when it is politically convenient for those “leaders” to do so, they enact some self-serving reform initiative that does not solve the problem, but Band-Aids over it, lines the pockets of city officials, and the corruption continues. Another point I agree on is Moskos’ advocacy for peer review of police officers, as a means of both self-regulation and mutual peer regulation. I am also glad that Moskos recognizes glaringly obvious and scientifically explained racial disparities in American society, though we seem to perhaps disagree that the causes of violence and crime are largely tied to economics. Finally, I also agree that in communities where violence is high, there is a great deal of difference between the ideas of “more police” vs. “better police”, and that we also as a society need to prescribe to our police how we need them to operate, to tell them what we need them to do, as well as what not to do. But that is largely where my agreement ends; other points I do have to contend with.

As a former Baltimore citizen and officer, I would expect Mr. Moskos to have some knowledge of crime trends in that city, although I am tempted to ask where he obtained the statistics which fuel his myriad claims that crime is down, and that more black Americans want more police in their neighborhoods than whites do. These things may be true, but ideally I would love to converse with Mr. Moskos about statistics, how we interpret them, the pitfalls of relying upon statistics, and how people tend to cherry pick statistics that serve their points of view, while ignoring other evidence, no matter how much, that does not serve their views. I’m sure he and I would agree on much, and this is why I prefer studies and academic journals to sheer statistics.

The concluding point of Mr. Moskos’ piece is that he appears to believe that the buck stops with leadership, as if he is saying that there alone is the problem. While he recognizes the systematic racial inequalities in our society, and while he decries police abuses and corrupt officers, I am not exactly on board with saying that bad leadership is the one and only problem. Furthermore, he seems to decry the economic relationship to crime, or the reality that poverty often turns people to crime, as a contributing problem within the American racial dialogue. The main points of Mr. Moskos’ argumentation are the following:

“…A specialized police unit cannot survive for years as a criminal enterprise without the implicit or overt — acquiescence of higher-ups. Effective leadership could have prevented this. Bad leadership has consequences…Discussions of violence too often turn to society’s inequities, which are indeed important, but not so much to day-to-day policing…Officers on patrol cannot wait for a more just or equitable society before responding to a citizen’s complaint. Police must deal with society’s cards as they are dealt…And yet somehow, we act as if these inequalities appear only the moment police show up…Calls to remove police from the street are tone-deaf to those who live in high-crime minority neighborhoods…An understaffed police force is tired…What is falling by the wayside is proactive, get-out-of-the-car policing that confronts known criminals and solves problems before a serious crime is committed…Corrupt police officers deserve special blame for committing crimes while in the public’s trust. But for a wounded Baltimore to rise again, city leaders, both elected and appointed, must accept their responsibility and get things done.”

To a certain extent, some of what Mr. Moskos says is true, from a certain point of view. But too much of what he says reminds me of Ray Liotta’s character Henry Oak, in Narc, who rightly blamed city officials for their corrupt failings, but hypocritically failed to see his own. A violent, racist and corrupt cop who regularly committed police brutality, Henry Oak condemned police administration and city officials for “race referendums and riots”, but failed to recognize that attempting to murder unarmed, arrested suspects, and trying to pin his old partner’s murder on two innocent black men somehow didn’t seem to address the problem. While Mr. Moskos gets many things right, in my opinion he appears to get some things wrong. This would be like blaming the siding falling off on one’s house for the collapse of the house itself, when in reality the support beams are rotting and the foundation is old and crumbling.

Corrupt officers, apathetic police leadership, city officials on the take, lawyers who are focused on their payday and not justice, jurors who don’t give a damn about a person’s life or their civic responsibility, judges who rely more on their personal beliefs and biases rather than an accurate legal analysis, the private prison system which rakes in millions from racially based drug laws, and an Attorney General for the DOJ who is more motivated by fears of black activists and Muslim terrorism than he is of actual white supremacists in the process of murdering our people with their disgusting rallies; all of these are to blame for the systematic racism, and legal and policing problems in our society. I encourage retired police who are angry at society not to take the heavy-handed notion that what society needs is more force, more violence, more guns and more death.

So what is my solution? What does a 29 year old struggling professional and academic trying to escape poverty; what does this student of law and law enforcement believe we ought to do? We need an overhaul. We need communities, even neighborhoods, to have some measure of oversight of their local, county, and state police; and the larger the jurisdiction should mean larger oversight. Eliminate any and all quotas on arrests and tickets without fail or hesitation. Congress must pass legislation to end the failed War on Drugs, and work toward freeing millions of non-violent criminals who were arrested on pot charges.

We need to overhaul how the federal government cares for our veterans, and we need to rethink whether allowing former military personnel, some of whom may have slipped through the cracks in the VA system and may have undiagnosed mental illness or trauma, into the police force or as school security guards. Enough of a military culture of authoritarianism, relying entirely on obedience to a higher rank. We need to reform both how our military and police forces operate, and rethink what leadership really means. Mass obedience, mass right wing party line politics within policing and the military, small fascist units within the US military, the “Thin Blue Line” culture that separates police from citizens and antagonizes citizens, the “Blue Code of Silence” culture that enables corruption within police, all of these things need to be absolutely destroyed.

We need an overhaul of training standards, to include not just martial and marksmanship training, but to include more extensive legal training, more conflict resolution, and more psychology. We need better screening of police officers, to catch those with too much anger, too much aggression, and racism, and weed them out. Violence should be a last resort for an officer, but just like tendency of psychiatrists to rely too much on medication, too many officers shoot first and think after. What should be a last resort has absolutely become the first choice of action. Such violent people and racists simply are not fit to be officers, period.

Such an idea has been criticized as thought control, as if racism has no bearing on policing, despite a declassified 2015 memo from the FBI, entitled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement”, stating that actually, thousands of racists have infiltrated police departments and prisons across the nation. What’s more, they don’t always have to sneak in; sometimes officers who are sympathetic to white supremacy will give racist groups access to their police networks. The threat of white supremacy within the US is real and palpable. It is estimated that over 1000 Americans have been killed by white supremacist actions within America since 1990 alone, not even counting the 130 years or so since the creation of the Klan. For our society to have a terrified outward overemphasis toward statistically lower international terrorist violence is like looking toward the shore for the Vikings to invade, while ignoring that the forest we live in is on fire, and our own guards are holding the torches. Indeed, who watches our watchers?

I advocate for a zero-tolerance nationwide ban on steroids for officers, by federal mandate; something I note that certain Fraternal Order of Police leadership have long been limp-wristed on. NJ.com reports that, “Ed Brannigan, who represents more than 16,000 officers as president of the state chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said that while he doesn’t perceive steroid use as a widespread problem in law enforcement, the union could be persuaded to go along with a testing policy.” I advocate for legislation that enables fully legal scientific study of recreational drugs, in order to have full knowledge of their harmful effects and benefits, and reschedule all of the drug classifications based on their actual danger, and not just on their perceived danger. The fact that marijuana is legally perceived to be among the most dangerous drugs is insane, and not supported by what limited scientific information we have.

I support a federal mandate that imposes strict body camera regulations on all departments nationwide, without exception. The endless American legal debate over the Tenth Amendment, and what powers should be given to the states over that of the nation is not relevant anymore, in this particular subject. “State’s rights” should have no bearing on what standards we need to hold all police to. The answer to that question is unequivocally “as high a standard as we possibly can”, and the fact of the matter is that in some states and some local PDs for a myriad political reasons are not on board with oversight and prevention of police violence, either because it impacts some officials’ own massive wealth, or they’d rather watch millions of poor American working class slowly die in a Bureau of Prisons network that is estimated to be 47% over maximum capacity by 2020.

I argue against any bans on higher intelligence officers, as some state and local jurisdictions have done. I propose we eliminate the system of bail bonds and legal fines as punishment, which ensure that the rich are able to enjoy freedom in spite of their crimes before prosecution, or simply accept a fine from the court and buy freedom, while the poor are forced to remain in prison before their trials, and cannot afford to simply purchase the reinstitution of their rights. I propose legislation which makes it illegal to discriminate against former felons because of their criminal history. Even rehabilitated felons in the United States are treated as second-class. I propose a complete dismantling of all private prisons, a massive reduction in incarcerated people in the United States, and federal legislation that eliminates and bans the for-profit prison system as well as private police services, which are focused on allowing racially prejudiced legislation to remain law, for the sake of profit.

I advocate for judges to be legally forced to set aside personal beliefs and biases, and ensure proper judicial decisions based on thorough legal analysis and philosophical considerations of jurisprudence, and that if judges do get caught discriminating against people in their rulings, they must be disbarred. Judges are not immune from prejudice or corruption, and the belief that they are is idiotic. Instead, we must make it easier to disbar judges if they commit crimes, or are shown to be unfairly prejudiced.

I advocate for restructuring the Supreme Court out of a “majority rules” Democrat vs. Republican political bias, and instead insuring that our Supreme Court judges make legal prescriptions based simply upon legal philosophy and constitutional interpretation, not based on their personal prejudices. If anyone should be able to remain politically neutral in the face of divisive politics, it should be the Supreme Court, but instead our judges are allowed to hold strong biases, even to the point of conflict of interest. I advocate for federal law enforcement agencies to aggressively prosecute white supremacist violence, to keep all racist individuals out of all police, prisons, and federal agencies, period. And if the current Attorney General cannot fulfill these desperately needed reforms, then he should step down for someone who can.

We need to listen to our black communities, not try to exterminate them, blame them for all of society’s ills, and lock them away. I am a white man. I recognize that no matter how empathetic I am to black people’s plight, on some level I just don’t really “get it”, and I may never. I’ve never been turned down for a job because my name is uncommon, or ethnic sounding. Only once have I ever been rejected by someone I cared about, because of the color of my skin. For fear of her family finding out that I am white, and because they believed that their daughter needed to be in an arranged marriage in order to preserve Nigerian culture, this young woman I had dated for months felt like she was forced to obey her family. She chose Nigeria over what she really wanted, over her desires and over myself. She chose tradition over love, and it was one of the most painful things I had ever felt. I will never forget her crying, and telling me that I needed to let her go, because she had to do what her family wanted.

That experience pained me for about a year before I was able to move on. But it made me realize that if I can feel that badly over one instance of my skin color being perceived as a negative and keeping me from doing something I wanted, how would I feel if it happened to me repeatedly over the majority of my life? That’s the kind of moment that puts things into perspective for people who have never faced that kind of discrimination before. There should be no barriers or inequalities in our society, and the fact that they exist means that we need to destroy them.

If we believe that people are equal, then it is time to treat them that way. A white cop playing basketball with black kids in the projects is a paltry billboard sentiment, not policy change. Policy change would be ending the drug war, putting millions of released black and Latin nonviolent inmates into education and work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure nationwide, and eliminating racially prejudiced policies by ending the three-strike system that was instituted under Clinton, and increasing the burden of proof on officers who seek to engage in Terry stops. Terry stops (also called “stop and frisk”) as established in Terry v. Ohio, mean that an officer is allowed to temporarily detain any person on suspicion that they are in the process of, have committed, or will commit a crime.

But the officer has to have “reasonable and articulable suspicion” in order to justify the detainment, and must be able to explain that suspicion. With the sheer number of stop and frisks that are racially targeted toward black Americans, police must be barred from abusing that ability to oppress members of our communities. If North Korean police did the same to Americans, we would call it oppression. And yet when our own police do this en masse to a specific demographic within our community, instead of standing by our people we simply say “they’d have nothing to worry about if they have nothing to hide!” The same argument is used to justify mass unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens, justified under the USAPATRIOT and USAFREEDOM acts, an abuse of the controversial Section 702 of FISA.

With great power does come great responsibility, and there are too many in our government who seek to abdicate that responsibility entirely. As a citizen and a student of law, I believe that to blame leaders for systematic failures is tone deaf, Mr. Moskos. It is a partial response, like trying to hold together failing concrete with Band-Aids. You need to blame the system, then take it apart, fix and replace what needs to be fixed and replaced, and then you put it back together. That is the only way that our country is going to remain standing. If we do nothing, a second Civil War may erupt, and suddenly many military and police personnel will find themselves bewildered to be standing on the side of racist fearmongers, just as they claim they felt when they realized that the men they were marching with in the Charlestown rally were actually Neo-nazis. You’d think the mass chants of “Jews will not replace us!” would have given that away.