A Few Bad Apples. . .

For years now, we have been hearing this phrase regarding ultra-violent, misogynist, ableist, racist, white supremacist members of law enforcement who have been brutalizing and killing unarmed citizens. Disproportionately more Black, Brown, LGBT+, poor, and disabled folks. The intent of this phrase is to emphasize that these cops are a small minority of law enforcement. This does a few things. It gaslights the marginalized communities who are massively more impacted by this violence. It provides cover for the officers who enable the bad actors to save face. It allows the systemically white male power structure & media to dig up every scrap of dirt on the victims of state violence to somehow prove that whatever minor crime they may have done is somehow deserving of an extrajudicial death penalty. Many people killed by state violence were literally doing nothing wrong. I am going to get into that too, in a separate post. To start, we need to discuss this pesky "Few bad apples" phrase that keeps getting trotted out.

The phrase "A few bad apples" is a portion of an old idiom: A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. A few bad apples spoils the whole barrel. That is the full saying. Let's dig in. According to Grammarist.com, the earliest known use was found in A Cook's Tale from Canterbury Tales by Chaucer,

"A rotten apple’s better thrown away Before it spoils the barrel."

The bad or rotten apple should be removed from the barrel or bunch. The "rotten apple" can and will poison the apples around them.

How does this relate to violent police brutalizing American Citizens? The police who have committed brutality and extrajudicial killings should be removed from law enforcement. They should lose their badges. Not get promoted, not get suspension with pay, not get moved from department to department, not be given "Qualified Immunity," not be protected by the police unions. They need to be fired and prosecuted. By keeping these Bad Apples in uniform, they delegitemize law enforcement and create/escalate distrust in the communities they are supposed to serve. This means the Good Cops have a DUTY to report and reprimand bad behavior in the field AND within department command & those in charge of departments have a RESPONSIBILITY to take the necessary steps to remove these violent cops from law enforcement. But that has not been what has occurred.

The opposite, in many cases, can be found on internet searches. The Good Cop who intervenes to stop violence and/or reports the bad behavior gets fired. Silence is the same as being complicit. I do understand, economically, if the Good Cop stands up for the right thing, they not only lose their job, they get labeled preventing them from getting employment in other departments and likely will not get unemployment benefits. Those folks have just admitted to having a price tag on their principles. The Fraternal Order of Police and other police unions have built protecting their own good, bad, and ugly, into their collective bargaining agreements. As a union political machine, they have successfully bullied politicians and communities into agreeing to terms directly endangering their most vulnerable residents with little to no mechanisms for accountability. This dynamic did not happen overnight or in a vacuum.

Common themes of training and de-militarization are repeated with nearly every incident of police violence, with no action or follow through. It has become an empty talking point. How did we get here? The credo in many police departments across the country is no longer TO PROTECT AND SERVE, it has been changed --TO UPHOLD THE LAW. This is a crucial change in policing methodolgy from the concept of community policing to broken windows policing. Community policing, according to Everbridge.com, a technology company working with law enforcement agencies,

Community policing is a law enforcement strategy that has been around since the early 80’s in the United States. Most people in the public safety sector have likely heard this term before, but what does community policing really mean?

Community Policing is generally defined as a law enforcement philosophy that allows officers to continuously operate in the same area in order to create a stronger bond with the citizens living and working in that area. This allows public safety officers to engage with local residents and prevent crime from happening instead of responding to incidents after they occur.

How is community policing different from traditional policing?

Intended to prevent crime before it happens rather than responding to crime after it occurs

Focuses on creating a safe social environment

Engages residents to determine which criminal activities they are most affected by, creating an accurate law enforcement priority list shaped by the people who live in the area

Encourages residents to participate with law enforcement in order to keep their own community safe

In its simplest form, community policing creates a partnership between law enforcement and residents. The more involved law enforcement is with the residents they are sworn to protect, the more residents can help law enforcement achieve their goals.

Police get to know residents and issues are prioritized. It focuses on community building and problem resolution before problems escalate. It only works if the people doing the policing are not racist or have racial biases, which, if you have studied history and how law enforcement evolved in our country, you know that is easier said then done. However this methodology historically was less militarized and massively violent than current the current metholody of broken windows with a credo of TO UPHOLD THE LAW.

Broken windows policing is, according to George Mason Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy,

The broken windows model of policing was first described in 1982 in a seminal article by Wilson and Kelling. Briefly, the model focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

The police can play a key role in disrupting this process. If they focus in on disorder and less serious crime in neighborhoods that have not yet been overtaken by serious crime, they can help reduce fear and resident withdrawal. Promoting higher levels of informal social control will help residents themselves take control of their neighborhood and prevent serious crime from infiltrating. . .

First, agencies have applied broken windows policing in a variety of ways, some more closely following the Wilson and Kelling (1982) model than others. Perhaps the most prominent adoption of a broken windows approach to crime and disorder has occurred in New York City. In other agencies though, broken windows policing has been synonymous with zero tolerance policing, in which disorder is aggressively policed and all violators are ticketed or arrested. The broken windows approach is far more nuanced than zero tolerance allows, at least according to Kelling and Coles (1996) and so it would seem unfair to evaluate its effectiveness based solely on the effectiveness of aggressive arrest-based approaches that eliminate officer discretion. Thus, one problem may be that police departments are not really using broken windows policing when they claim to be.

These methodologies have been around since the early '80s, but the '94 crime bill, in combination with urban community officials such as then Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley in '96, conflating broken windows with zero tolerance, changing credos TO ENFORCE THE LAW, and militarization via federal alottments of military surplus equipment without proper in depth and repeated training on situational awareness and de-escalation, a prevailing attitude of "we write the reports," the failed and racialized WAR ON DRUGS have created the environment we have now. Militarization aand training. I will start with militarization.

The Charles Koch Institute defines militarization as:

Police militarization is defined by scholars as the “process whereby civilian police increasingly draw from and pattern themselves around, the tenets of militarism and the military model.” This process tangibly occurs when a civilian police force adopts the equipment, operational tactics, mindsets, or culture of the military.

They continue with the explanation of how local departments acquire military equipment, how those acquisitions were limited under the Obama administration and then expanded under the Trump administration, how that equipment has been deployed, and the tactics used in conjunction with this equipment:

Public awareness and coverage of police militarization has largely focused on the acquisition of military equipment by police, such as armored vehicles, aircraft, and weapons. Since the early 1990s, the Department of Defense’s 1033 program has provided local law enforcement agencies access to military-grade equipment. This program, now expanded by President Trump after President Obama attempted to limit its use, allows local law enforcement agencies to receive excess Department of Defense equipment that would otherwise be destroyed because it was no longer useful to the military. Over 8,000 law enforcement agencies have utilized the 1033 program to access more than $6 billion worth of military equipment such as night-vision goggles, machine guns, armored vehicles, bayonets, grenade launchers, and military aircraft. Other items that can be accessed by local law enforcement agencies through the program include field packs, canteens, sleeping bags, and ponchos.

The increased use of military equipment has coincided with an increased use of military tactics, such as SWAT teams and no-knock raids, by law enforcement agencies. In recent years, police departments from Ferguson, Charlotte, and Southampton have received criticism for their use of military tactics. One study found that use of paramilitary-style teams by law enforcement increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1980.

The Charles Koch Institute goes in depth with other problems regarding militarization, incentives, and the circumvention of oversight. I encourage you to read it thoroughly. I am only highlighting 1 more section because it is important for the next section: TRAINING and the community and human costs of not getting proper training.

Furthermore, regulations that accompany the receipt of property under the 1033 program create perverse incentives for local law enforcement agencies to ensure they are able to retain the property for their department’s use. First, police must use any property acquired through the program within one year of receipt, otherwise they must return it to the Department of Defense. Second, law enforcement agencies are responsible for all of the transportation, maintenance, and conversion costs of this equipment. Although the initial zero cost for the equipment may be appealing, the insurance, fuel, storage, training, and cost to convert the equipment for law enforcement’s use can be extremely high. In some instances, these costs are too expensive for many jurisdictions to justify retaining the equipment if it is not being used on a frequent basis. This creates an incentive for the agency to utilize the equipment in circumstances where it may not appropriate or reasonably necessary simply to justify its retention by the agency. It also encourages police to shift resources away from catching individuals who are the largest threat to public safety to activities that will reap financial benefits for the department through civil asset forfeiture or seizure of property associated with low-level drug possession.

Many of you are already seeing the Constitutional, economic, and over broad way this has affected your communities and those around you. Especially with training needed and not being completed. The article mentioned the high cost of training. There is a higher cost to not doing that training. That cost is human. There is also the license to brutality mindset -- I will cover this in a post with appropriate content warnings. Beau of the Fifth Column covers police training and other issues in his videos. He explains it better than I can. Below, give the videos a watch. Really LISTEN to what he is saying.

Means at Hand and the Responsibility to Act:

Police Perception and reality

There are a LOT more videos by him addressing a variety of issues. I am focusing on the police videos. I did not use ALL of the videos in the playlist.

That is where I am leaving things for now. Brutality on minorities with context and specific examples will be in the next post with content warnings. Please read, listen, and think. The few bad apples need to be removed, not protected.