The Unreachable Standard of Liberty
Policing in the United States has made liberty a laughable fantasy for too many.
“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” — John Locke
Every once in a while the United States of America shows us what it is, truly. It reveals itself from under the mint-green veneer of “bring me your tired, your poor,” and shows that dark and rotting underbelly that exists beneath the talk of life, liberty, and property. Beneath the symbolism, the patriotic odes to itself, and the self-serving desire to never reflect on the realism of these things, sits a history that we often acknowledge but rarely handle. Too often, these conversations get bogged down in a place of the “patriotic,” the defenders of these symbols, dismissing the critics as haters and as people just want to see America fail. Too often, these criticisms are leveled with class theory and obfuscated with other problems that may serve as convenient excuses and explanations for those who would like to say that these problems go away if we solve other problems, as though racism and systemic issues can be solved by simply changing the angle of the oppression that we enact and do not confront.
For the last 250 years, we have kicked the can down the road to the next generation, and the next, and the next, and the next, in dealing with the systemic and structural inequities that plague the promise of our nation. For nearly 250 years, it has been an empty promise for many, that one could come to America for a new life and for better opportunity. The world heard our government shout “liberty,” and those who heard “hope” came to knock on our doors. For too many of them and their kids, and their kids’ kids, the door has remained closed. The fear that they were escaping followed them on their heels, the fears of starvation and violence, of homelessness, and a lack of opportunity to change. For too many, the decision to come here wasn’t one that they made, a fact that has caused our nation generations of pain and suffering. The fact of the matter is that we didn’t build this system, we didn’t choose this system. For many of us, the fact that it needs to change can be a difficult one to bear. But the opportunity of hope and change comes, as it did for our parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents, for us to decide what we want to do with it.
We need to decide if, for yet another century, liberty will continue to be an empty promise for millions of our neighbors.
If there is one lesson I’ve had forced into me over the last year and a half, it’s that police forces are not forces for good. They are not designed to be benevolent, they are not trained to be helpful, they are not funded to be kind. Police forces, whether they are state troopers, local uniforms, Federal police, or military, exist to exert force. They exist not to defend the rights of the people, but to be the hedges that define whose rights will be protected and who they believe the threat to those rights are. They are the shield crafted by systemic racism to defend the racial hegemony of the United States, always working to remind those who are not within that circle of racial power that they are to be kind, courteous, respectful, and a perfect citizen following all laws at the same time regardless of circumstance, or they will be killed as a threat to the rights and way of life for white people and their children.
Now, after decades of manufactured compliance and covering up for lynchings using “qualified immunity,” police brazenly violate the rights of the people in communities across the United States without the fear of consequences. If American citizens were treated as police treat Black and brown citizens in the United States abroad, we would have declared war years ago. They are not there to ensure the rights to life, liberty, and property. In video after video, they violate these rights on the state payroll and then use further threats and intimidation to ensure that anyone who attempts to hold them accountable knows that their lives can be destroyed by the state for that attempt. Look, for example, at the activist leaders from Ferguson, Missouri. Six men who were connected to the protests after police killed Mike Brown in 2014 are now dead in apparent homicides, with police unable to find the killers. In a 2019 story in the Chicago Tribune, county spokesman Shawn McGuire is quoted as saying “It’s tough to come up with a motive without a suspect.” Current Congresswoman and then-activist Cori Bush is also quoted in the story, saying her car had been run off the road, and shots had been fired into her car. She, and others, suspected white supremacists were responsible. That doesn’t directly implicate police, but in the United States, white supremacists and police are inseparable in the most crucial way. They’re often the alter egos of each other, running patrol routs in uniform during the day and infiltrating both riot police and protestors at night to cause chaos and an excuse for violence. You don’t need everyone to be a white supremacist when the training sees every instigation as a threat of violence and responds with crushing, unconstitutional force, you only need a few to agitate in the uniform and a few out of it to light the fuse.
The killing of Black Americans in American streets is not simply mounting evidence of a problem of white supremacy, it’s also a mounting case of the unconstitutionality of modern law enforcement. Killing unarmed children, like Tamir Rice and Adam Toledo, men compliantly exercising their Constitutional rights like Philando Castile, choking the life out of a subdued man like George Floyd, drugging and strangling a compliant Elijah McClain, the questionable “suicide” of Sandra Bland in police custody, the murder and cover-up of the death of Laquon McDonald, these cases and every unjustifiable case in the United States point to a clear and present pattern of cruel and unusual punishment unequally carried out by the forces of the law and are the highest of violations of the first, second, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution on the part of American police forces and the local governments they represent. Policing, in its present state and every state prior to this point, could be reasonably called a standing constitutional threat to the rights of every American simply by the way that they are able to act as judge, jury, and executioner with no basic limitations on their ability to carry these actions out. To put it simply, without a real physical way to stop officers from killing everyone they run into, they can justify and explain every violation of the rights of the people in the community they are hired to patrol to avoid consequence. Justice after the fact does not mean that the rights of the person killed were protected, it means that their violation was consequentially addressed. A just system has guardrails to prevent their violation in the first place.
All of this is to say that the mere idea of policing is anti-liberty, as it exists specifically to deprive entire groups of people of the rights to which they are entitled. Consistently denying the right to life, through the inequal application of enforcement to laws that deprive those who survive of the liberty of living a life unencumbered by the state, and have the fear of their property being destroyed simply for fitting a description that may or may not be accurate, centered around the color of their skin. Add to this the dangerously volatile existence of white supremacy in police and military forces, and you have institutions that are not only built on histories of racism, but that have taken on and maintained molecular-level racism that is as dangerous as it is difficult to detect. The only answer is to remove this danger from our streets. This racism is not cancer moving through a police body that will need extensive surgery and care to eliminate, this is a virus that has infected every cell of the brain of police forces, leaving them at the mercy of the virus to use other, uninfected parts of itself to lash out and destroy. This is a virus that will need to lead to the elimination of modern policing. There is no cure, there is no way to simply remove one or two members of departments and watch this go away, it’s not a case of a few bad apples. It is decades and decades of police forces becoming more and more militarized in both material outfitting and mentality. They see themselves as soldiers in a war, a war that was turned into a race war by supremacists joining the ranks. The police were built as slave patrols, and despite the efforts of reformers, that fact is baked into their DNA. Police can never be reformed because they are serving their intended purpose.
So we have a decision to make. Reform, defund, abolish, these are not options that can work with either other. We can either abolish the police as local governments see fit, on a local level, and enshrine the full protections of the rights of the U.S. Constitution to everyone in our local communities, or we can keep them at a lower dollar amount and enact reforms as a half-measure to ensure the comfort of white residents and the continued sacrifice of the full benefits of citizenship to our Black neighbors. The fact of the matter is that the police are an occupying force, and occupying forces are not your friend. They may seem friendly and kind in the nice, white, suburban neighborhoods. The local traffic cop might be a nice 13-year veteran, your kid might even want to become a cop from those interactions. But the moment you are perceived as a threat, they will crush you. For many Americans, and for all Black Americans, skin color is an immediate perception of a threat.
For me, there is no compromise. Government exists to protect the rights of those who can’t defend themselves, and any government program that denies the rights of the individual for no reason other than to uphold a system of order that is patently unjust is one that must be destroyed. There is no reforming a system that is designed to uphold inequality, and there is no compromising with those who believe in racial supremacy. Their ideology must be wiped from the face of the earth, but I will compromise and settle for their ideology being wiped from the face of our government, and for many that face is the badge and gun of the American police officer. That badge and gun, regardless of the city on the badge, is a latent threat to everyone they encounter: “comply, or die.”
I refuse to subject any of my neighbors to that fear, or that edict. Non-compliance is never a reason to kill, beat, maim, injure, or threaten. There is no excuse for the police. I refuse to give them any ground to justify their unconstitutional behavior. If we’re going to reach the unattainable standard of liberty in this country, it must start in our communities, and it must start with ensuring that the next generations of Americans have equal and peaceful interactions with their government. There is only one solution, in my mind.
For me, and my family, we will support the abolition of the police force.