#YesAllCops Are Bad:
Treatise on the Innate Immorality of the Police
By Thomas Calandra
#YesAllCops
THE “WAR ON COPS” LORE
When you read, watch, click on, and be succumbed by as much news as one open, data-enveloping mind does on a daily basis from the multitude of outlets, angles, spins and political leanings in the current epoch of information,(for the only way to get true unbiased news is to be entranced to a point of physical exhaustion by every thesis of every moment of the news cycle, from every member of the self-anointed intelligentsia, to each reactive diatribe from pundits with over-moralized middle class “common sense” ) you will come to see how the incidences involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Eric Harris, Phillip White, Ruman Brisbon, Tamir Rice, Tanisha Anderson, Keith Lamont Scott and Alton Sterling are not unique, along with the near thousand people unjustifiably killed by the police in 2014, and 1,192 unjustified killings in 2015 (574 were minorities, 511 were white, and 107 were undetermined).
Unfortunately for the hawkish fear-dealers of authoritarians - frightening center-right cul-de-sac dwellers with the decline of societal maintenance – the “War on Cops” is an asinine and vapid mythos.
The truth is that under the years Obama has been in office, there has been no safer era for a police officer to exist; serving and protecting the public with the least likely chance of being gunned down. Far to many meme-laced, emotion-sodden arguments make the horrendous mistake of giving credit or blame for long term, sweeping social and economic transmutations occurring in society, such as crime rates, stock booms, unemployment fluctuations, private sector job creation, STD incidence, Financial collapses, Great Recessions, and the well-being of the economy as a whole - all of which involves unforseen, unpredictable decisions and actions of dynamic, diversely different actors with antagonistly contrastive intentions, and dissimilar, divergent, unalike, mismatched, but uniquely idiosyncratic and important abilities and aspirations that vary qualitatively and quantitatively to such an extent, as to be unanalyzable due to the chaotic wilderness of previous unconscious causes of previous non-statisticized, temporal inhabitants – on whatever President happened to be in office at the time; as if the statist either believed the commander and chief was this omniscient, omnipresent, and (abhorrent to think) omnipotent guardian, or ( even more grim, unendurable, and ultimately more serious) wished them to be.
However, the following data just happens to be structured to display the average number of police officers killed on duty per year for the last five Presidents: For the Reagan era, an average of 101 cops were killed per year; for Bush forty one, an average of 90; for Clinton, 81; for Bush forty three, 72; and for Obama, 62. To be more specific with the data, and to hone in on the more recent “War on Cops” years, 67 cops were killed on duty in 2007, 59 were killed in 2010, 68 in 2011, 47 killed in 2014, 62 in 2015, and at the moment, 126 in 2016. This current swelling in police deaths for 2014 to 2015, and then a drastic incline in 2016, gives the sense that cops are under attack and blue blood is swelling as the law and order of the country overhears it’s own death rattle, and enters decivilization.
Absolute numbers however, though better than no numbers, can obfuscate the reality one is trying to decipher with statistical analysis. The use of absolute numbers as examples of data in public discourse, nine times out of ten, are being used by a fearpusher who wants the weak theories of their pre-confirmed minds made valid for policy enactment, instead of being statistically firm. The human brain has an comfortable ability counting oranges; they see a pile of ten sitting next to a pile of twelve, and after a few moments of counting and ruminating, can infer that one pile has more oranges than the other. The time this task takes can be split in two if, instead of twelve, the second pile has one hundred oranges; The primate mind doesn’t even need to count; the truth is right there in front of their face. The zealot, yearning for their belief's substantiation, will attain and praise the higher absolute numbers as the final breath of truth, and will be self-verified that the United States is a bastion of depravity.
But there are more people living in California than Equador, (38 million to 15 million, respectively) so any statistical comparison of the two entities will involve having to adjust that information to population, because there are going to be more of everything in California than Equador, from murder to engineers to hamburgers.
So far we have shown that the number of police officers killed on duty has been falling not only since Reaganomics, but since Nixon, and even more so, since prohibition.
But we would expect to see the numbers of cops killed on duty to increase by year if the number of officers in general were to increase annually. Same goes for the evident decrease in cops being murdered if the number of police serving and protecting steadily declined.
The latter is true in general for the past two decades, for the exception of the last few years of the 20th century, and again just recently but to a lesser degree; imagine a lopsided U, with the left side longer than the right.
In 1997 there were 1.113 million police officers on duty in America, in 2000, that number rose to 1.176 million, then again in 2002 to 1.202 million. However, just two years later that number was cut by half to just 664,000, stayed the same in 2006, but than rose slightly to 808,000 in 2008, dropped to 745,000 in 2011, but then for 2013 and 2014 the number of police officers rose to and has been hovering around 900,000. This lopsided U should be a downward slope if the presidential police murder averages simply reflected the parallel decrease of officers in existence. But it’s not. Why?
Well, first, your ears should have pricked up because of my usage of absolute numbers when concerning the annual cop population. The statistics we should analyze are on duty cops in proportion to the general population. As a result, we will get the number of police on duty per 100,000 population. Of course we all know that the United States population has been increasing over the years: in 1997 in was 272.65 million, in 2006, it was 298 million, and currently it is a little more than 321 million. Bare this in mind when we learn that the population of on duty police officers proportional to the U.S. population in 2000 was 416 cops per 100,000 U.S. Population, 226 per 100,000 in 2004, 220 in 2007, 262 in 2010, 283 in 2014, and 278 in 2016. Here we see an immense decline in the number of police officers serving and protecting 100,000 people, even though the totals of police officers serving the population took a lopsided U shape. Now we can factor in the data of cops killed on duty proportional to the general population per 100,000. If the war on cops was increasing, we would see the ratio increase with the general population, with a boom from 2013/2014 to the present. In 2000 it was .028 cops killed per 100,000 US population, .031 in 2002, .030 in 2004, .022 in 2007, .019 in 2010 and 2013, .014 in 2014, back to .019 in 2014, and .039 in 2016.
The last year’s surge was more of a last sigh; returning to the Bush forty three epoch than some contemporary policide Holocops.
The slight uptick in 2016 of police deaths could be that the cops on duty to population ratio increased; though only slightly, from the 220s of the Bush years to the 280s of the most recent Obama years.
STARVING COPS
Forget about corrupt cops, or jerk cops, or power hungry cops, or even the racist psychopathic ones who use the uniform for their sick delusions; take the straight arrow cops, the “by the book,” serve and protect cops, who very well could be the majority: the good cops. Their job is to serve and protect the community, and to enforce the laws that the public legislative has made with the power back by the community who votes. However, the police are also a public enterprise paid by the usurpation of taxes. The community needs the police and they pay the taxes to afford this security. For communities that need more police than others, say Detroit, they spend more money on police than say, communities like Ipswich, Massachusetts. There is no reason for Ipswich to pay as much as Detroit for police, just as it is as equally ridiculous for Detroit to pay as much as Ipswich does for police. But what happens when a community that normally has crime rates to that of Detroit starts to slowly come to have crime rates of Ipswich? For the people of the Detroitish community, this would be a very good thing; human suffering would be diminished some: Less murder, Less rape, Less assault. Not only that decline of criminality, but the tax money that was collected to fight this crime could now be redirected to other public services. This emancipation from a gangland and future investment is good news for everyone except for the cop, because the cop is getting fired. The police enforce the laws and bring criminals to justice, but with less crimes being committed, there will be less need for so many police officers. Therefore, in a literal sense, the police depend on the immorality of the community in order to have a job and economic security. Not in the black and white, racist structure of America sense of systematic that Sociologists say (and depend on; for without racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia existing in our world, they would be out of a job and possibly in jail) but in the banal, coggish sense of systematic, which depends on immorality in order to pay for the existence the system. As James Madison wrote, "if men were angels no government would be necessary." The less quoted second part to Madison’s edict is, “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” What would the social reformer do for money if society was perfected? If the system was no longer racist, sexist or classist, how would those who make money by writing books, giving lectures, and going on 24 hour media outlets to inform us, the un-Harvarded vulgar, why the system is so? How are we to pay these hyper-tenured morality mavens’ rent after the riddle of human struggle has been solved by listening to them?
So what if it is true that police depend on crime to keep their jobs, and prison guards depend on criminals going to jail for a paycheck? This doesn’t mean we don't need them. Crime isn't going away any time soon, right? Someone might say and expect that a reduction in police presence would cause crime to shoot up. Perhaps, but only if it is true that the sole reason crime is committed is because no police are around to catch the immoralists, which of course isn't necessarily true, nor factually true at all, just as it isn’t true that the only reason people don’t do heroin is because it is illegal. Heroin is still illegal and more and more people are injecting themselves with it and dying from it despite its illegality.
Yet, over time, crime has decreased immensely, regardless of the fact that so has the police presence in the nation, both in absolute terms and in relation to the American populace.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm.
All forms of violent crime is reduced from just 20 years ago. Same with nonviolent crime: Murder, down; Rape down; Assault down; Kidnapping down; Theft down; Even Hate crimes are down despite what your news feed and social science professor tell you.
So what are the police institutions to do with this “good” news of an enlarging population voided from inexistence - entering the world de-immorilized somehow - unconsciously and unpermittedly designing a copless cosmos? What is the good cop to do after spending all that money on a criminology degree from college, a year of training at the academy, and however many years they have spent on the force, when the gentle officer’s superiors inform them that “cutbacks might have to be made,” due to unfortunate set of circumstances of the public unknowingly refusing to commit enough crimes to justify a paycheck? What are that cop's superiors to do when they themselves are told that they -the Brass- will have to take pay cuts, because the state is no longer willing to dole out tax dollars to a public service that isn't needed as much anymore?
The answer is that out of self interest, (the only reason anyone does anything) the police - no matter their morals or individual character, their goodness and do-gooder-ness - will either invent problems that require them to act, or see problems that are not there, in order to have a reason to be around to collect a pay check: They charge more for parking violations, probable cause will expand because they need to increase their probability of finding a crime, and Minor nonviolent drug offenses are now major ones. Like being arrested for driving on caffeine. Google it.
The police need you to give them an excuse to pull you over, to search you, to mess up.
This is why five of them are there to arrest you for selling loose cigarettes, selling music on the street, or giving food to homeless people. Their livelihood is dependent on you harming your neighbor, burning churches, or worse, touching them; and every moment of your acriminal cop-starving existence that you don’t, is a checkmark against the suffering police on the balance sheet, and one more mark closer to a pink slip. So in a country where crime is decreasing, especially major violent crime, crimes like traffic violations and drug use, become seen as extra hostile and more sought after to the justice system, because that system needs such violations in order to maintain its existence. This goes for cops, but it also pertains to Correction officers, judges, and prosecutorial lawyers. They all depend on and look to seek out sin in order to feed themselves. Combine that atrocious system with the innate flaws and imperfections of human nature, and you have a magnificent algorithm for producing unnecessary harm.
Many #bluelivesmatter vocalists or “War on Cops” prophets decree that “its just a few bad seeds; most cops are good who do good for the community.” Some say that the police should be seen with a different pair of moral lenses, much like all public service officials are seen with second shadow of sacredness; as if being a comp controller is morally equal or functionally useful as a firefighter. This exceptionalism mentally, sometimes spiritually, trusted onto the job of the officers and thus the officers themselves, is the kind of single counter argument that is seen with flag burning as an exception to free speech, social security as an exception to budget cuts, or guns as an exception to most American's willingness to hand them over after any crestfallen tragedy. This final exception enrages American liberals who can not see the importance of guns to those whom the liberal view as dissolutioned denizens living in the middle earth of America: the giant swaths of land that to the New York liberal and the Los Angeles Democrat is one giant Texas, with North Carolina, Minnesota, and Alaska, as it’s major cities.
But, whatever your political allegiance, if you fail to begin your arguments for gun control with the immediate discussion of disarming the police, then you are either at best not a serious person for whom we should all ignore, or else a statist whose position is that private, self-purchased guns need to be confiscated when too assault-ish, and controlled a nd manufactured from the start to be barely deadly for the general public, but the guns of Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, Kenneth Boss, Paul Headley, Michael Carey, Marc Cooper, Gescard Isnora, Michael Olive, Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, Rolando Solano, Darren Wilson, and Daniel Holtzclaw; Because “they were trained and passed a test."
Don't be scared. That's what Google is for.
But the difference between gun owners and cops is that gun owners are people, (some good, some bad, some insane, some sane, some responsible, some madness on stilts) and police officers are a job. An occupation which inevitably forces them to do wrong, and puts them in situations where they can, as detective Rust Coyle informs us, “hurt people with impunity.” And despite the individual cop’s morals, dispositions and level of insanity, they still require the public to eat one another for simple job security. Steven Weinberg said of religion, "In a world without religion, good people will do good things, and evil people will do evil things. But if you want good people to do evil things, that takes religion." The same thing goes for the state, and putting on a police uniform.
Motives don't matter. Hence the cop problem. If they did, then the "some cops are good" argument would have merit. The motives of the preacher standing on the street corner yelling at you that you are going to hell unless you change, to him is the same motive as him pushing you out of the way of a runaway bus: to him, he is saving your life; he is saving your soul from eternal torment. Submit to Christ on the rack, and your soul will be in ecstasy forever. The motives of the racker are purest. The engineer of the Judas cradle was be the kindest man of antiquity.
Yet, continuously, the push back comes in the forms of personalized anecdotal examples or worse, experiences, declarations of relationships and familia ties with cops (thus making the rebuttaller mistake their emotions with being epistemologically sound on the topic) or sharing articles about cops pulling over to play a night game of basketball with some urban youths, thus firebombing the notion that cops are racist juggernauts hunting black people, and leaving #blacklivesmatter to supposedly weep in their sordid wrongness.
These terse, subjective, and poorly thought out counters purely encapsulate what cognitive psychologists call the “narrative bias”: where the more detailed narrative given increases the probability in the mind of its likelihood of happening. Of course it isn't more probable, nor does it even come close to mildly infrequent. News worthy stories are rare by definition. But it is not a cops job to call for backup to have a pickup game with a group of teenagers. If one saw this magic moment walking home one night, anyone’s first impulse would not, nor should not be a heart warming Michael-Bay-ian gush of emotionality, but should be a conscious state of pragmatism and moral utility, and to ask oneself, “why aren't those cops doing their jobs?” Somewhere on a college campus a girl is getting raped - rape, which happens more often than homicide by a factor of ten - and this narrative of cops and kids having a basketball game is supposed to make us feel as though cops' motives mean something? Even this absurd after-school narrative displays the immensity of the cop problem, and how even with immortality still permeating society in some degree, the police are impotent in helping us.
Sadly the dismal coin has two sides.
WOLVES DRAPED IN ARMY FLESH
Capitalism is the great engine of turning “luxury into necessity,” wrote the Nobel winning Austrian economist Ludvig von Mises. For finding ways of making what could only be affordable to the Kardashianish echelon to be attainable to the commoners. This went for automobiles, computers and cell phones, and it will soon be for 3D printers, biomechanical anatomy and private travel in space. The unfortunate corollary is that this also goes the same for M16s, armored tanks and SWAT teams.
What use to be affordable only to the NYPD, the LAPD, and the Chicago police departments, can now be gotten by the police departments of Ipswich, Massachusetts and Ferguson, Missouri. Of course, like a ten year old boy with a new water gun, or a MR I machine for research lab, or a new bureaucracy for a government, one feels the need to use the toy even when they don't have to. Because of this, Swat team raids have gone from 5 per year in the years when crime was high to thousands of raids currently when crime is at an all time low. If one so desires a perfect statement of these implications, they need to read the book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko. This militarization of the police is due from the US Department of Defense selling off its surplus of equipment from the past two administrations overestimate of needed power in Iraq and Afghanistan - right after their desertion in 2011 and 2014, respectively – to state and local police departments for prices just above cost, and sometimes below. The new cop is draped in army flesh.
With thousands more SWAT raids occurring with hundreds more departments around the country, this could account for an increase in cops killed on duty, because raids are dangerous and they involve more cops; which makes more likely a cop is going to be harmed, even if the overall number of cops in existence has been cut in half since the Clinton administration. However, cops deaths are in decline along with their employment. Yet, this also could explain the increased number of unjustified killings by police in recent years, because SWAT team raids are dangerous for whose home is being raised, and are more likely to end in macabre. The unjustifiable portion comes to view with the knowledge we have of crime in free fall: more raids are happening in a country on innocent people to which we have statistical evidence to prove is true. If departments are having to justify using this newly attained hardware, a small number of cops could still do a lot of damage by assuming that this anti-insurgent garb they adorn is a reflection of its urgency in a demoralized society. Or maybe the police who are told to routinely stop black males now have m-16s. Maybe they are bored and have three units surround every pulled over car, so the driver appears to be in Nuremberg after reaching for their license and registration. Or maybe cops don’t need black, Kevlar, faceless face shields.
Finally, the subject of police brutality outrage, and the anti-militia cop sentiment suffusing the public discourse is a unique quandary, because the topic is a very politically unifying issue. For some reason it is an issue that has apolitically abnormal playdates: The small government conservatives who are afraid of a national police force are on the same side as the liberal minded factions who view police brutality under more sociological lenses. Perhaps they have different theories of causality, but none the less they share a foe within their otherwise un-unifiable ideologies. But with crime rates going down, and the last breath of the war on drugs starting to leave lungs of the polis, (along with the dying statist elders who started it) and this odd bipartisan multilateral action beginning to take head against the institution of cops (good or bad), are we perhaps going to witness an unconscious materialization, or communal organization of a liberated society where the police not only be not necessary, but not wanted even if they are needed?
With crime submerging into the dark wilderness of the past, the very nature of policing becomes excessive.
