Confusing conversations about police violence

When the videos came out of Rodney King getting assaulted, I found myself in a conversation with a Libertarian (call her Emma Libertarian) who said something along the lines of “What the police did was justified because he was driving drunk.”

I don’t exactly remember what I said, but I think I tried to point out that a beating is not the punishment for drunk driving, that King hadn’t even been convicted yet, so shouldn’t be punished, and that beating would be cruel and unusual punishment. What Emma was advocating would violate the Bill of Rights at least twice. To me, that seemed the opposite of Libertarianism.

I misunderstood Emma’s commitment to Libertarianism.

There’s another conversation in which I’ve found myself so often that I’m not even sure I can pick a specific episode (call the interlocutor Hubert Lawandorder). The police officer does something illegal—in other words, commits a crime—and the victim of the crime refuses to go along with it. And so the officer escalates the situation, and the person who objected to a crime being committed ends up arrested or perhaps dead.

So, for instance, an individual gets the attention of a police officer. An officer insists that the person leave their house, submit to a warrantless search of themselves or their home, not have a gun, confess to a crime, not ask what the charge is. What’s confusing about this conversation with Hubert Lawandorder—which I have had far too many times—is that Hubert agrees with me that the officer is violating the rights of the accused, and even violating very specific laws and regulations. We agree that the officer is breaking the law. But Hubert, who sees himself as a believer in Law and Order, not only believes that the police don’t have to follow the law they are supposed to be enforcing, but that the officer is justified in arresting anyone who objects to the police officer’s illegal activity, and that the officer is justified in escalating the interaction.

Hubert, like Emma Libertarian, believes in police vigilantism. To me, that seemed the opposite of supporting Law and Order.

I misunderstood Hubert’s commitment to Law and Order.

There are lots of ways of explaining why they don’t see their position as contradictory, and I kept thinking that with Emma it had to do with varieties of Libertarianism, and with Hubert it was something about a higher Law. I misunderstood that too.

I realized that I’d misunderstood why they didn’t see their positions as problematic when disagreeing with a Hubert Lawandorder, and I finally asked the question with which I should have started every one of those conversations: “So, if a police officer asked to search your house without a warrant, you’d say yes?”

[I’d sometimes asked, “If a police officer handcuffed you just because you asked why you were pulled over, would you be okay with that?” And Hubert would say, “I’m always polite and deferential to officers, so that would never happen to me.” That response meant we ended up in a weird argument as to whether the victim of police abuse had been polite.]

But the warrant question got a different response. Hubert would say, “No, I wouldn’t let the police search my house without a warrant.”

And, then, quite often, Hubert would say, “But I would never give the police reason to suspect me.” So, it wasn’t about a principle of searching with or without a warrant—it was about a failure of imagination.

It was at that moment that I realized that, while both Emma Libertarian and Hubert Lawandorder talked a lot about principles (people should respect the constitution, people should respect the law), that talk had as much relation to their thinking as the word “quality” (in quotes) in a business logo has to the quality of the products. It’s just a sales pitch.

Were those actual principles, they would apply across groups, and they didn’t. Emma Libertarian wouldn’t think it okay if the police pulled her out of a car and beat her just because they thought she disrespected them. Hubert Lawandorder wouldn’t say “Well, okay,” to a no-knock warrant that meant people who might not have identified themselves as police crash into his house at night with weapons drawn. It isn’t that they thought police vigilantism was always right—it’s that they couldn’t imagine it happening to them. They imagined themselves as people protected, rather than endangered, by vigilante police not beholden to the law.

They did so because of what’s called the “just world model.” The “just world model” says that, if something bad happens to you, it’s because you did something to deserve that outcome. The just world model is attractive for two reasons. First, like all magical thinking (if you do this, that will definitely happen), it takes a world of inexplicable outcomes, a world we can’t actually control, and draws it into our control. It enables Emma to believe that something like police violence won’t happen to her because of what she does. [1]

Second, and closely related to the first, it says that we aren’t called to help the marginalized—the poor, ill, elderly, the victims of racism–, nor are we facing systemic injustice. The just world model is radically individual (which is why it’s so closely associated with neoliberalism). If you fail in life (or get cancer, or get shot by the police), it wasn’t because of larger issues of poverty, pollution, racism, or a police force indoctrinated to see itself as an army of occupation.[2] The just world model says we earned what we have, and are entitled to keep all of it.

The just world model is racist.

It may seem weird to say that it’s racist, since it doesn’t say anything about race, and neither Emma nor Hubert said anything about race. But racism isn’t necessarily about what you’re aware of believing—it’s often (most often?) about what you’re able to avoid thinking, seeing, or imagining.

Since racism is a “hot cognition” issue, it might be helpful to talk about the just world model in regard to something not about race. The just world model says that people who are financially successful did something to deserve it, so they must have good judgment. It’s interesting to think about the number of CEO who were praised as geniuses just before they were exposed as frauds (such as Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay, or Adam Neumann). It’s a scam going all the way back to the Segestans (who conned the Athenians)—if you look wealthy, people will think you are.

They’re often successful in that scam for quite a while. So, were those con artists good people whom you should trust because they were rewarded with wealth? The just world model says they are. The just world model says you should have given all your money to Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Kenneth Lay.

The just world model gets you scammed.

And it does so by triggering an aspect of confirmation bias that enables deflection of uncomfortable information. That was a complicated sentence. Here’s what I mean. We are primed (biased) to notice information that confirms what we believe. Let’s imagine that I believe that people who own poodles are snobby jerks, and I love Great Danes. I am likely to notice every instance of a poodle owner being a jerk. More important, I’m likely to interpret ambiguous data (a fight between a poodle and Great Dane) as the poodle being at fault. If it isn’t ambiguous (the Great Dane attacked the poodle), all of my first impulses will be to blame the poodle—it provoked the Dane; it deserved it. That is the just world model.

What’s funny about people who believe in the just world model is that, when they find themselves on the wrong side of policies or decisions, they whine like an over-tired toddler. Where is your just world now?

The just world model is a complete failure of empathy. And that’s why it’s racist.

A white person saying that anyone who gets shot by the police deserved it is unintentionally acknowledging that we have a system in which white people are protected. Because they’re admitting they don’t think it can happen to us. All those white people confronting POC in parks, pools, sidewalks of their own homes—that wouldn’t happen to me. Not because I’m polite. But because I’m white.

If you, as a white person, have any POC in your world (if you actually “have a black friend”) then you have heard them describe experiences with the police you have never had. If you have never heard (or listened to, or read about) those experiences, then you’re racist. Not because you act with feelings of aggression, but because of your failure of imagination. You never listened.

If, having heard that POC behave just as you do, and yet they get hassled, harassed, or even arrested by the police, and you still blame them for what happened, you’re racist. You’re also an asshole.

If a POC individual can behave as well as a white individual, and get shot or arrested, then policing is racist.

And here is the other point. If police officers can’t enforce the law without thereby making themselves someone who should be arrested for violating the law, then there is something very wrong with the system. We need a different system.

The argument that the police shouldn’t be held to the law is an admission that it’s a broken system—it isn’t about a few bad apples.

When pushed on this point—that they don’t imagine themselves on the wrong side of a vigilante police officer who will violate the law in order to arrest them–, people with whom I’m arguing sometimes show what’s really at stake. Some of them say that it’s okay for the police to treat white people differently from African Americans because African Americans are more criminal. (This claim is often premised by “I’m not racist, but it’s a fact that…”) They say that the African-American community (that isn’t always the term they use) glorifies criminality, promiscuity, drug use. Their evidence for this stereotype about the African-American community is what their media tells them about rap music. (I’m not kidding—that’s what they cite as evidence to me. Sometimes they cite Ben Carson saying the black community is bad. They used to cite Bill Cosby, but they don’t anymore.)

Emma and Hubert are racist. They might never have said the ‘n’ word; they might even give to “liberal” causes; they might have a relative or friend who is POC. But if they refuse to see that policing is racist, it’s because they’ve got blinkered loyalty. And it’s blinkered to keep them from acknowledging racism.

Ian Kershaw, a scholar of the Holocaust, famously said that “The road to Auschwitz was built with hate, but it was paved with indifference.” I would put that somewhat more strongly. It was paved by people willing to rationalize the injustice. Emma and Hubert are busily engaged in paving a road.






[1] Self-help rhetoric does this a lot. (“The three tricks that successful investors have…” or CrossFit). I should say that I, personally, have found a lot of self-help rhetoric tremendously helpful. When it gets into reinforcing the just world model is when it makes claims about “all you have to do is” or this method “guarantees” an outcome. Anytime it says that success is guaranteed if you have sufficient commitment or will, it’s toxic, and quite possibly a scam.

[2] The just world model simultaneously reinforces privilege (of class, race, ableism, gender) and denies its existence. But that’s a different post.