What Does It Mean To Be a Good Cop?
Dr. Ibram X Kendi, a noted scholar, and Professor who focuses on race in America appeared on Brene’s Brown’s “Unlocking Us” Podcast this week to discuss several of his books. The main book Brene Brown wanted to highlight was his book “How to be Anti-Racist”, a New York Times best-seller that describes Kendi’s approach to understanding and uprooting racism in America. While on the podcast Dr. Kendi stated:
“…if a racist idea is any idea that suggests that a racial group is superior to another racial group, in other words, a racist idea connotes racial hierarchy, then what’s the opposite of that? The opposite of that is ideas the connote racial equality, that challenge, directly the idea of racial hierarchy…. There is no in-between racial hierarchy and racial equality. Either all racial groups are equals or certain racial groups are better than others, and so there is no ‘not racist’ idea, There is only a racist idea and an anti-racist idea. It’s the same thing with policy, if a racist policy leads to racial inequity, then an anti-racist policy leads to racial equity. There is no in-between inequity and equity. If racist policies lead to injustice, then by contrast, anti-racist policies pursue justice, there is no in-between injustice or justice. And so then, when you take the person, you have people who are either expressing racist or anti-racist ideas, so in any given moment, they’re either being racist or anti-racist.”
Brene Brown was vocally amazed and showed her admiration for Dr. Kendi and this profound insight. I also found it insightful, but intuitively, I knew this to be true already. Being Black in America, we don’t get the luxury of believing that anyone can be neutral. Many of us intuitively know that if you are not for us, you are against us. If you are not fighting oppression, you are allowing it to continue, that even goes for people within our own racial group. Being anti-racist requires actively pursuing and manifesting ideas that seek to dismantle racial hierarchies, dismantle racist policies, and dismantle a racist system. If you are not actively choosing to do that, you are perpetuating that system. I fundamentally believe all of what Dr. Kendi said to be true; that, there is no middle ground, and therefore there is no “not racist” or “non-racist” category, only anti-racist, and racist.
Hearing this and recognizing my own belief in this idea led me to consider an important topic of discourse in America right now: Police. Many people around the country, right now, are advocating and promoting the idea that not all cops are “bad” (aka racist); there are good cops. This is an argument we hear all too often, especially, during times when police violence against Black people takes the national spotlight. If we believe this argument, AND we believe that there is no middle ground, as Dr. Kendi argued, then, the opposite of a racist cop has to be an anti-racist cop. “Good” cops must be anti-racist. They must be actively fighting to dismantle the racist system. I am not writing this to argue about whether good police officers EXIST, instead, I am seeking to explore what it means to be a “good” cop and thus, an anti-racist cop.
Police departments in the United States have a long and infuriating history of racist policies, behaviors, and actions, dating all the way back to the “slave patrols”, from which they derived. Slave Patrols sought to enforce laws that kept black enslaved people in submission and maintained order. In the early 19th century, municipal police departments popped up with the same mentality: maintaining order. This time it was not about enslaved people, so much as it was freed Black people who were rapidly inhabiting urban areas. After the Civil War, states began instituting “black codes” to uphold the same racial hierarchy, and then when those became illegal, the system adapted to this situation by introducing “Jim Crow” laws. Throughout this history, because of the roots of these departments, brutality against black bodies was rarely punished or reprimanded. During that same era, police were used as political weapons to not only enforce racist laws but to actively deter change to those policies. Police were used against activists, organizers, and protesters throughout the 1960s and 70s. In the decades after that, the racism inherent in the system escalated even further through the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black people. The system has not changed much since the various eras detailed here. Black communities and urban areas are still over-policed. The belief that police are there to “maintain order” rather than stop crime clearly still exists, based on how police have gathered more and more militarized weaponry. The ways in which cities across the country are responding to protests right now provides evidence that police are still being used as political weapons to hinder policy change.
If we believe there are “good” cops and thus anti-racist cops, that means we believe there are cops actively fighting to disrupt and dismantle all of the ideas, policies, and systems surrounding policing. A “good” cop then would be fighting for things such as decreased funding of their own department, less militarized weapons, more non-police interventions for petty crimes in urban areas, and would not stand for being used as a political tool to quash activism and protests. An anti-racist cop would not only NOT DEFEND cops who use excessive and illegal force but would immediately and actively pursue ACCOUNTABILITY and justice for every victim of police brutality. An anti-racist cop would actively strive to dismantle laws such as “qualified immunity” which help support the systems that allow officers to remain unaccountable for their actions. An anti-racist officer would actively pursue dismantling policies and structures that, in all honesty, keep them employed and make their current job what it is, in hopes that a better and more equitable system will be designed.
If we believe that there are “good” cops (aka, anti-racist) cops then we must accept that not committing brutality is the bare minimum of a decent human, and not adequate to be qualified as good. We must accept that not shooting unarmed black men and women is not enough. We must know it’s not enough to not use your knee to crush a person’s airways for over eight minutes. It’s not adequate to not raid into a woman’s home unannounced in the middle of the night and fire multiple shots without any verifiable evidence of wrongdoing. A good cop is more than someone who doesn’t commit the atrocities of “bad” cops, its someone who DOES dismantle the systems that allow those “bad” cops to thrive. With that being said, now, do you still think “good” cops exist?
