Slap on the Cuffs!

As Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, and subsequently, President Obama have made clear, there can be no denying the unfair and frequently brutal treatment men of color have long faced in the realm of “law enforcement” in the U.S. It would be a shame, however, if this very necessary discussion of police actions and race were to short circuit what is arguably an even larger and more universal problem: America’s (or at least prosperous America’s) increasing acquiescence to a “slap on the cuffs first, ask questions later” brand of authoritarianism.

I grew up in an America where there was still a healthy skepticism about the motives of people who chose to spend their life in blue uniforms. We knew and acknowledged there were a lot of good and law-abiding cops. But we also knew that there was a considerable number of them for whom wearing the badge was mostly about belonging to a fraternity that gives them the right to capriciously lord their will over others.

This skepticism has largely disappeared in the wake of 9-11, supplanted by a media-fueled idolatry of all things having to do with the military and law enforcement (“our brave men and women in uniform”). Emblematic of this new civic religion is the practice of wearing of NYPD and FBI caps and t-shirts.

This public cult of cop worship has had the effect of further emboldening the cohort of power-trippers in uniform as they go about their daily business. They know a public weaned on a steady diet of their supposedly universal virtuousness (and with it, the supposed omnipresence of readily identifiable “bad guys”) will almost always give them the benefit of the doubt. So why hold back?

A middle-aged black guy in Cambridge gives you more rhetoric and vocabulary than you feel like hearing on call, “Slap on the cuffs!” and write a police report painting him as “unreasonable”. A kid videotapes the police roughly arresting one his classmates in the school cafeteria after a completely non-violent senior prank (as happened not long ago in these parts), confiscate his camera, “Slap on the cuffs!” and press charges on him that prevent him from graduating and that imperil his college career. Protesting citizens making politicians and patricians of business feel uncomfortable by gathering outside the site of a board meeting or convention? Trump up a pretext about a “security perimeter” (don’t recall seeing any mention of such a thing in the Constitution) and “Slap on the cuffs!”. A few people wearing anti-Bush t-shirts at a presidential speech in 2004? Follow the directives of White House operatives and “Slap on the cuffs!”. And on and on…

The problem police mistreatment of minorities, especially males of color, is all-too-real in today’s America. It must, however, be seen in the broader context of our consumption of simple moralizing storylines, and the enormous sense of license these narratives give to the fallible and often power hungry people (in this sense, they are no different than the rest of us) we have charged with the patently unattainable goal of “insuring our safety”.