Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  And these conflicting conceptions—the “policy” at stake in our unwanted new war—will be deliberated upon by two populations, and not the jihadists and ideologues who started it, in that odd and terrible form of deliberation that is greased with lives, pain, suffering, and loss.

  In this sense, “resolve” is a word that has been grossly misused in recent months, and yet is most relevant. The administration makes it mean resoluteness, a steadfast quality of refusing to change course, in war, regardless of events. The siege of Fallujah in April was even called “Operation Vigilant Resolve” or “Iron Resolve.” Yet the word has a more honorable place in our democracy. It is the oral formula in which all acts of public deliberation are put forward, from town councils to the Congress: “Be it resolved, that…” The significance of a resolution is not its finality, but that deliberation goes on. At this moment, war once again becomes a cause for thinking. The thinking must go on in public. Our administration’s certainties are not America’s. Our resolve is a public self-discovery that has yet to be made.

  [2004]

  SEEING THROUGH POLICE

  A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you. They touch you without consent and in both seemingly friendly and unfriendly ways. The friendly touch is the first surprise. A policeman allowing protesters to cross the street touches you on the arm or back as you cross. Face-to-face, police will put a hand on your shoulder, from the front, intimate as a dog putting his paw up. It is unnerving. Women say male police know very well how to touch, even in public sight, in ways that are professional and neutral, and also in ways that are humiliating and sexual, with no demonstrable distinction dividing the two. The police know, and you know. Like a reversal of electric polarity from protective to hostile, this conversion of mood does not only follow the policeman’s individual initiative. It traces something like an atmospheric charge among police in groups, their silent experience of a phenomenon, their habitual tactics in response.

  In confrontations on a curb (when you stay on your sidewalk, because the public street is forbidden except to police), they may press lightly on your collarbone, “holding you back,” just measuring out the distance with their arms. You can even be held up in this way, if you relax. Shoving you requires a separate, additional level of their energy. Batons and gloves extend the police field of touch, insulating them from the brutality that their arms and hands will do. A gray-haired professor of history I know put his hand on the top rail of a metal police barrier, at a protest, as one will do when standing still. An officer forbade him to touch it. All macho, the historian refused to move his hand. The policeman smashed it with his baton, splitting the flesh but not breaking the bone. That was a conflict over the reciprocation of touch: the rail and the baton were proxies. The unspoken rule is that the citizen must never return touch.

  Singling out an individual for arrest, the next escalation is to grab the citizen body at the neck or shoulders—attacking from the front, black-gloved fingers grip the face, while from behind, the palm shocks the base of the skull—pushing at the fulcrum of the neck to hurl the person down. Sometimes the cop’s left hand pulls up or tears at the arrestee’s shirt or outermost garment while pushing with the right hand. A poet in his forties I know was thrown to the ground like this because he stepped outside a crosswalk at the beginning of a march. Other officers swarm the downed man or woman and pull at arms and legs, and kneel on the back or the neck or head, or mash the face into the pavement under their palm while cuffs go on. The final escalation is punching, beating, or kicking. Sometimes this is reserved for the arrestee on the ground who is already restrained, as a form of punctuation. Sometimes it is done in the van or on the way to it. Police are more likely to do this only when they believe they cannot easily be recorded with cameras.

  The purpose of touching by police is to make persons touchable. Touch readies more touch. It is preparatory. The restraints in civilization on attacking anyone, especially a citizen who portends no harm or threat, are fairly high. For most forms of violence that breach civilized norms, even if it is one’s art or profession, steps of habituation are needed. The “sudden” violent arrest at a protest is almost never sudden if you have been watching the officer and the longer sequence. The process of change in an officer who will then bring someone down is not oriented to the target, but seems interior, oriented to the self; by the expressions that pass over his face, usually in an instant of stepping back, withdrawal, and the cessation of interaction or negotiation or “management,” you can detect a kind of change of availability that prefaces the attack. It very often seems to surprise, even astonish or trouble, nearby officers, when the attack comes, yet they still know to capture and cuff whichever citizens wind up on the ground (sometimes the wrong ones, as the trailing officers will often also push down and even cuff bystanders who happened to get knocked into indirectly in the attack).

  —

  Police are different things to different people. Not because each person has his or her own subjective view on the constabulary, but because the meanings of the functions of police vary with a citizen’s identity, as one or another possible target or beneficiary of policing.

  “Directing traffic.” This function of restricting and encouraging movement through a city may be the very oldest job of police. Police maintain a spatial order. The most manpower and work time are still devoted to it. What is traffic? Certain neighborhoods contain certain types of people and behavior. Others contain others. Various subjects must move through corridors of the city to redistribute themselves over the course of the day and night. But they must not unsettle police’s fundamental sense of who belongs where. Today, when police are accused of racial bias in their traffic stops and pedestrian searches and must justify themselves, they speak with pride of the fact that they will not just stop and question black people but also stop and question white people caught in black neighborhoods and rich people cruising in poor neighborhoods. This, to their minds, is parity. They don’t recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same for the activities of life.

  “Catching criminals.” This is the activity police truly like to identify with, however little of their time it occupies. Occasionally police stumble on red-handed robbers, or thugs fleeing an assault. The bulk of “catching” people lies in traversing the city, as necessary, to find some people on the word of other people. Police act as go-betweens for antagonists who may even be practically within arm’s reach—yelling outside their cars in a fender bender, or giving opposite accounts of a domestic dispute. Real “investigation” and “detection”—the glorious business of tracing an unidentified malefactor after the fact of a crime, without just finding out, from the witnesses closest at hand, who did it—is an activity that exists in police departments, but only among a tiny number of specialized personnel who don’t even have to wear uniforms.

  Where the police identify a crime against the city, state, or law, rather than an affronted person—the so-called victimless crimes of illicit possession, unlicensed work, or unlicensed sale—we can best speak of another police function as distributing crime. The legislature declares certain objects and unlicensed commerce illegal. The police then go and distribute these violations. Street drugs are made illegal (prescription drugs are fine), hidden and unlicensed weapons are illegal (mostly carried by those on unsafe streets, which is to say the poor), flawed cars are illegal (unlit taillight, noisy muffler, unpaid insurance). Thus police spend a large part of their time distributing crime to the sorts of people who seem likely to be criminals—the poor and marginal—and the prediction is prophetic: these people turn out to be criminals, as soon as they are stopped and frisked and forced to turn out the contents of their pockets or glove boxes. (Leave them alone, and most would never be “criminal” at all.) The majority of violations technically listed in the tables of the law are of no interest to uniformed police. Those committed in
the course of doing business, in the professions, and in government aren’t likely to be actively detected or sought by anyone. They are accidentally or competitively disclosed—leading to the awkwardness of the need of some settlement, which is then dealt with by regulatory agencies, guilds, or accrediting bodies, plus, at the far extreme, civil-court proceedings and court-mandated money exchanges. Very rarely are police or even criminal justice ever brought in.

  The most admirable and defensible of the exemplary police activities is “keeping the peace.” It is also the least discussed, the least subject to written laws and directives, and the vaguest. In a democracy of equal citizens, people will inevitably conflict, even through no fault or crime of one party or the other. Someone will take advantage, or threaten. The role of the police here is to pacify—and pacification, in a civil democracy, is no bad thing intrinsically. It is a vital, valuable thing.

  Enforcing racial terror: this exemplary function, unofficial or officially denied though universally known, owns no familiar phrase. In recent decades, African-Americans have made proverbial the facetious offenses that police seem to be pursuing: “driving while black,” “shopping while black,” “walking while black.” The history of racial terrorism by whites is old. Police have gradually taken up its responsibilities in a process that goes back more than a century. Police departments’ role in racial terror has survived even where racism has waned and their forces have integrated nonwhite officers. Racial terrorism is simply a part of the job for local and metropolitan police forces in America—any policing at the level of the city, broadly construed. This may have been replicated in foreign municipalities, as in London policing of Caribbean and South Asian populations, and Paris policing of North Africans in the banlieues. Racial terror does create enormous complications for any ordinary theory of what American police do, however—just as it carves a fundamental division between the experience and expectations non-African-American citizens have of police and those held by African-Americans.

  —

  I would like to add a different essential function of police: being seen.

  If you want sometime to sympathize with police, watch young ones when they don’t know they’re observed. The young cop stands on a corner, squinting in bright winter sun. Pedestrians approach from every side, with questions, asking directions, or start talking without introduction, boring him, because he is part of the street like a stop sign. Or, as one does with a stop sign, they ignore and veer around him (sometimes deliberately, pointedly, despising him for his uniform).

  You can see how hard it must be to ready a face for each of these people that will look authoritative rather than deferential. Between encounters, you could watch the front fall, strained by all these obligations. That is why our comic picture of a moment of rest for the harried policeman requires he take off his patrolman’s hat and wipe the perspiration from his face, as if smoothing down the instrument that’s put to such exhausting work.

  The basic ambition of a policeman is never to cease to project force, stolidity, an unbroken front, seriousness, intimidation. But that’s impossible. Policing contains daily humiliation at each inevitable failure of the policeman’s front. The uniform itself, the badge in its widest sense, like the luster of all shields meant to dazzle, is meant to maintain this front regardless of the individual inside. But the uniform can never succeed entirely. You would need RoboCop. All police are mortal. There is something in the cladness of police, their preoccupation with holding the uniform together, that makes us aware of all their armor’s shortcomings, or inspires imagination of these human beings naked, their uniforms taken away. The traditional English name for the mana with which police uniforms are invested is surely awe. Erving Goffman, in his famous conceptualizations of front, face, and performance, recalled Kurt Riezler’s point that the inevitable obverse of awe is shame.

  The coupling of awe and shame among police comes out in our awareness of police symmetry and asymmetry. A shield is worn on the peak of the hat, while a second one covers the heart. The gun descends from one side of the utility belt, and, traditionally, the stick hangs from the other. Sometimes a heavy flashlight substitutes. Looking at individual police, they almost always seem lopsided. The belt pulls down on one side. The blouse comes undone. They are constantly hiking up their pants. The regulation shoes are the same as those of nurses, waiters, and mail carriers. Heaviness gathers at the waist, in a sedentary, slow, caloric job. There is something in police that droops.

  The symbol of police in this dimension in North America is the donut. The donut is equivocal. It is not loved as apple pie is. It has no national or official standing as apple pie does. It has a local message only. Donuts, like other deep-fried delicacies, do not travel well. Yet donuts have our rueful affection. Really, it is the pursuit of coffee that drives police to donut shops. Donuts confirm what they will not admit with their badge and gun, that they are the ones who must be awake all the time, in public, in the extremely boring job of sitting in a place, either thereby to assure passersby and the public that they are sitting there, watching, or to ensure that other people don’t sit there. This sitting is being added to their nature; the stasis gathers at their waists. They are living traffic cones. Traffic cones, too, would drink coffee and eat donuts to stay awake.

  Most surprising, perhaps, is that the more time you spend looking at police, the more you see that the law is not a true resource for them. A rationale, yes, but a thin one. Police lack law. I didn’t notice this until I really started watching them, thinking about what I had seen, reading about them and reading research done on them. The original television version of Law & Order split each episode into two parts. First, policing; second, courtroom proceedings. It took me years to notice that the title was backward. Police are order. This explains the police perception of, and anathema toward, any symbol of disorder or mess. In their daily practice, police pledge at every level to avoid mess or clean it up. The cliché from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, her cross-cultural study of the constitution of dirt and taboo, holds up here: What we call dirt is only “matter out of place.” Police clean up.

  It is always hard to remind or convince police that their stated loyalty is to the Constitution. It’s not their fault, really, so much as it is the fault of a municipal organization of authority that keeps legal thinking at a level “above their pay grade.” A bad consequence is that it’s quite difficult to make police feel responsible for civil-rights violations or unjust laws, since rights and the law of the polity are not theirs to know or decide. The police reformer David Harris describes the experience of a friend in the Oakland Police Department, directing police retraining around racial violations, which crystallizes a general truth.

  In 2001, Captain Ron Davis, a twenty-year veteran…led an in-service training session on racial profiling….Davis began by asking the assembled officers a simple question: “What is your job?”…“What I want to know,” he asked, “is, what is your mission, and the mission of your department? To what are you dedicating your time, day after day?”

  Most of the answers were variations on “fighting crime”: “Catching bad guys”; “Getting criminals off the street”; “Keeping the streets safe from predators”; “Chasing crooks”; “Taking down the guys that need to be taken down”; “Responding to nine-one-one emergencies”; “Helping the department achieve its goals”; “Carrying out the chief’s orders.”…Then he asked, “What does your oath say? When you graduated from the academy and became a cop, you all raised your hand and took an oath. What did you swear to do?”…Silence….Eventually, an officer gave Davis the answer he sought: “We swear to uphold the law and the Constitution.” Another officer spoke up. “Well, sure, that’s the oath,” he said, “but everyone knows what this job is really about.”

  I’m not sure anybody knows. Not us, but also not police themselves, not politicians and government, and not political theorists.

  —

  Part of the reason police seem at prese
nt unreformable is that they have no intelligible place in the philosophy of democracy. It’s possible they never have. When our theories of democracy took shape, police as we know them were a minor tertiary agency and an afterthought. If police don’t take stock of the Constitution, I sometimes wonder, might it be because our Constitution can’t conceive of them?

  “Police” as a word and concept exists in Europe from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries forward, as a word for the administrative state management of population and territory—Polizeiwissenschaft, for the incipient German bureaucracies. Modern Anglo-American police forces date to the urban development of private hired watchmen and guards for merchant or guild-professional spaces. Benjamin Franklin helped reorganize and rationalize one such force, among his many civic projects, in Philadelphia before the American Revolution, as he relates in his Autobiography. Their major urban institutionalization occurred in London under Robert Peel in 1829 in the Metropolitan Police Department (yielding officers nicknamed “bobbies,” for their founder, and the traditional abbreviation for the department, “the Met”).

  This metropolitan form of police organization marked a dividing line with the tradition in Europe. On the Continent, crown monarchs had kept even the prosaic functions of policing tied to the sovereign. This meant that the European tradition, emanating from France, wove military power, spying, and control of the poor in with urban regulation and penal justice. First abolished by the Revolution, police surveillance was reconstituted a decade later under Napoleon. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault described the position of European police with the 1768 motto of Vattel: “By means of a wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience.”