America’s Broken Law Enforcement Model — What We’re Too Afraid to Fix, Pt. 2
To Protect and Serve? Or To Enforce?
After watching the video of Alton Sterling being shot by Baton Rouge police, I struggled, yet again to make sense of how a situation could escalate so quickly.
Tragedies like this always leave me contemplating the meaning of things. Things I normally don’t think about. Things I usually take for granted. Like the terms: ‘law enforcement’ and ‘protect and serve’. On a whim, I googled the definition of ‘enforce’, and the following synonyms stood out:
impose, discharge, execute, prosecute, involuntary, forced, imposed, inescapable
To me, these words have the sounds of forearms pressed against windpipes, knees in backs, and guns to chests. The kind of actions you might take if it was your job to impose your will on someone. Yet ironically, law enforcement officers are also deemed to be keepers of the peace. Let’s be honest. You can’t be both an enforcer and a peacekeeper. You’re either doing one or the other, but not both at once. Enforcing, by its nature, requires a disturbance of someone’s peace. Either the enforcer’s or the one being forced upon.
When encountered with resistance, peacekeepers defuse. Enforcers escalate. And that’s what you see in the Alton Sterling video. In the Philando Castile video. In the Sandra Bland video. In all the shocking and outrageous videos that we’ve seen so many times, when the law enforcers involved are met with any type of verbal or physical resistance, the law enforcers escalate the situation. And they continue to escalate it, until a lethal outcome results. Until a person committing a fairly minor offense is dead without trial or conviction.
And, in many of those cases, they’re well within their rights as enforcers of the law.
“This is potentially a state authorized killing,” (Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar) Moore said. “It gives law enforcement officers the authority and mandates them to kill when in defense of themselves or others.” (source)
Under what’s known as public duty doctrine — a policy established with the 1855 Supreme Court case South V. Maryland, and echoed as a law enforcement best practice in articles and thought pieces from law and order experts and officials — the police have no duty to protect individual people, only the general public. The police protect the general public by enforcing the law. If, in the course of enforcing the law, the police injure or even kill an individual? No harm, no foul. They were just doing their job.
Wendy McElroy, a feminist anarchist writer explains the impact of this doctrine in her essay, ‘The Police ‘Protect and Serve’ The State, Not You’,
“…the police department exists to enforce the law. Policemen serve the government, not the people. And uphold the law with total disregard for whether their actions create or prevent violence. For example, if government decides that certain forms of adult consensual crimes must not be tolerated, then the police will draw their guns and barge into otherwise peaceful bedrooms. To uphold an unjust law, they will create violence and victims.”
So now, we have at least two powerful factors at work: Cops who are constantly stressed and on high alert, some with biased, prejudiced or racist attitudes about the predominantly poor and predominantly black and brown communities they work in, and a police system that promotes, permits and protects enforcing the law to the point of lethal escalation without any sense of duty to individual citizens.
What could possibly go wrong?
READ: America’s Broken Law Enforcement Model — What We’re Too Afraid to Fix, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5
