Police First Politics Is A Threat To Democracy Part II

Recent high-profile police shootings, reporting on cozy relationships with militias, & vigorous endorsement of a candidate who attempted to overthrow an election all show the extant threat of police

Aug 21, 2024

In Part I of our series on the perils of policing to democracy, we ended with law enforcement’s troubling support for Trump, a Presidential candidate who led a movement to overturn the results of the last election and has repeatedly refused to say he will respect the results of the upcoming one.1 Police support for such a candidate is one of the reasons why it is a direct threat to democracy in the US.

Trump’s appearance in Howell, MI, explicitly laid out the Trumpist anti-democratic appeal to the police and why we’re seeing a more explicit alignment with paramilitary and militia movements that are actively opposing democracy within its ranks. As police flanked Trump, he described his appeal to women voters in particular as that of protecting against “plunder, rape, slaughter, and destruction of our American suburbs,” referencing the idea that immigrants bring a unique civilizational danger which is the same idea the far right has promoted.2

Trump’s “Camp of the Saints” inflected vision of a society where rapacious immigrants inundate white people is shared by both the far right and law enforcement.3 What was being hinted at with the “thin blue line” imagery is now being said aloud throughout the conservative project, from official material from the Trump campaign to proclamations from militia leaders.4 When the Governor of Texas refers to people crossing the border as Hamas shortly before pardoning someone for murdering protesters, he’s using dog-whistle rhetoric that both police officers and paramilitary organizations widely understand.56 This shared framework provides a point of connection for militias openly plotting to overthrow democracy with the police, who are ostensibly meant to protect everyone within it.

The recent ProPublica report on American Patriots’ Three Percent “friendly sheriff's list,” along with their success in infiltrating police departments, brings this point home. Within it, we see their leader lamenting, “Our country is being invaded at the Southern border,” using the same rhetoric as Trump, Abbott, and other conservative politicians when he continues with “Haitians, Middle Easterners, South American invaders that are coming in.” This shows one explicit point of connection in thinking between the right, law enforcement, and armed right-wing groups.7 Another is in a shared antipathy with left-wing protesters, also discussed in Part I. On both perceived “threats” to their vision of the country, the police have not only been lenient in allowing armed groups to menace and even kill protesters, but we’ve also seen law enforcement and paramilitary organizations work directly together through the reporting on AP3 mentioned above with the piece providing extensive evidence of law enforcement on the border working in collaboration with the militia as well as police asking them to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests in Oklahoma City for surveillance purposes.

In addition to this recent reporting, last year, the supervisor of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department surveillance branch was indicted for providing information directly to the Proud Boys.8 This pattern of police and paramilitary cooperation is growing, not slowing. The police in Los Angeles allowing counterprotesters to attack students calling for a ceasefire in Palestine was highly predictable given what we know, and with the continued protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza happening, it’s only a matter of time before we see this combination lead to violence again.9

A serious intervention is needed. The first step is changing the national conversation to highlight these dangerous and anti-democratic patterns. Instead of treating each incident of police and militia violence against protesters as an isolated incident, we must connect the dots and highlight the concerted erosion of democratic rights that this intermingling of forces represents. This also means affirming the right to protest rather than smearing protesters as dangerous and criminal for exercising their First Amendment rights.

In addition, we need to be explicit in saying the rhetoric of right-wing politicians and thinkers committed to holding some Americans as “more equal” than others and migrants as menacing masses of invaders is being put into action by the police who support them.

In response, we need to bolster the principle of civilian control and clarify that everyone is entitled to the rights and representation necessary for a legitimate democracy instead of giving deference to law enforcement first. This requires not centering the complaints of police spokespeople but the people directly affected by the erosion of public safety. Rather than legitimizing racist fallacies, uplift the voices of those subject to community violence and over-policing. This would mandate a renewed and more in-depth focus on local efforts to divest from policing and reinvest in the community and public health resources needed to promote a genuine vision of community peace and growth. These initial steps would go a long way towards recognizing and girding our society against the threat to democracy that policing has come to represent.

Police First Politics Is A Threat To Democracy Part II

Recent high-profile police shootings, reporting on cozy relationships with militias, & vigorous endorsement of a candidate who attempted to overthrow an election all show the extant threat of police

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