All across America MAGA youth are sullenly putting away their Antifa cosplay gear, angry over the fact that they won’t be setting any police precincts on fire, or hiding behind throngs of BLM protesters while they shoot at police officers tonight. The conviction of violent MAGA thug Dereck Chauvin on all three counts means that Democrats of all races are feeling hopeful that this could finally be the turning point, that this could be the moment that judges and juries finally start holding police responsible for using excessive force against minority suspects. Naturally, we have to be guarded in our expectations. There will certainly be cases in the future where excessively violent police officers are acquitted and people across the country are left exasperated and scratching their heads. This kind of progress in society is never linear, so we have to be guarded in our expectations. The idea of making police immune for being overly violent in their handling of African-Americans has been a primary pillar of white supremacy since the days of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, progress against excessive use of force by police officers has been slow.  and mostly through the courts.  Cases like Hampton v. Hanrahan and Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics slowly chipped away at the qualified immunity of police departments, and increased the right of the people to seek relief when law enforcement crossed the line. Today, the conviction of Derek Chauvin feels like another bit of progress.

While it is easy when people are frustrated, we should all avoid phrases like “#Defundthepolice” or calling for an end to all law enforcement and incarceration.  We also need to remember that the gun-traffickers, child molesters, serial killers and rapists of the world aren’t going to suddenly decide to behave because some idealist is standing in front of a crowd with a bullhorn giving a lecture on “transformative change”.  Every organized society needs police to  help maintain order, and instead of saying “get rid of the police”, we should be focusing on the need for police reform. Without police, you end up with what’s known as an “honor culture” where people gather together into clans or gangs, and take the law into their own hands, often with very bloody consequences. Often-times, states without any functioning central government end up with a “warlord culture”, where competing clans fight against one another for control of territories.  This is the situation that existed in Afghanistan between the Russian and American occupations, and it’s been the situation in Somalia for many years.  We do not want that here in the United States.

A more productive perspective on policing is what I refer to as “the problem of the fourth officer”, and it’s based on my belief that around 20 to 25% of all American police officers are either racist shitheads, grifters, sexual predators or roid-rage freaks. The racists, grifters and sexual predators all use the badge to promote their personal ideology, financial gain or to satisfy their perversions, while the roid-rage freaks just lose it and then go flying off the handle with disturbing frequency.  I propose that instead of repeating counter-productive slogans, then dealing with the backlash by self-righteously insisting that “well if you’d just learn what that slogan actually means”, or subjecting people to snide jokes to avoid any actual discussion, that people need to use the very clear language of the “problem of the fourth officer” description, and start calling on the three-quarters of American police officers who are decent to get their act together and start calling out bad cops.

Today feels like a good day to get started.

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice” – Montesquieu