Actually, no. Most cops I’ve known just can’t stand to have the social validity of their jobs questioned.

Sam, I don’t question the “toughness” or liability you have to face in the course of your job. But please don’t try and make it sound like every cop out there is spending all day every day prying children from smoldering cars with the jaws of life and busting bad, bad criminals at gunpoint, or whatever. I mean, please. It happens, but it ain’t all that y’all do. You all do a lot of standing on the side of the highway pointing radar guns at speeding cars and also a lot of other things that are far more banal.

There are also other “tough” jobs out there- nursing, teaching, custodial work, any sort of caregiving or emergency medical tech job, where people risk their safety and their lives without the added protection of a sidearm. What if those folks decided to “distance themselves from those they deal with?”

But Sam’s reaction is illustrative of the larger point, I think- masculinity isn’t supposed to be “questionable,” just like the “noble-ness” of a job in law enforcement is supposed to be a given.

And I don’t appreciate the tone here. Where’s the moderator???

[DeA: the moderators have been a trifle busy and distracted. “Sam” does sound a bit trollish to me. I wonder if anyone has ever run the stats on domestic violence, wife-murder, marital rape etc, and determined whether being a cop is — statistically speaking — any more dangerous a line of work than being a wife? iirc, being the wife of a cop is more dangerous than being the wife of a guy in some other line of work, since cops (so I have read) tend to take out their job frustrations (and fears) on their families. ]

I served five years in a National Guard Special Forces unit. I can’t tell you the percentage of soldiers whose civilian job was in LE, but suffice to say it was not small. This provided me with a unique insight because while I was living as a heterosexual, Christian, white male (oppressor) at the time and was therefore viewed as one of “us” by them, they would let their guard down and you could have a glimpse of the “real” story. I’ll spare you all but what I found to be the most atrocious example of police excess.

One of my soldiers was a local cop and was always ready with a story of how he had abused his power. The best example of the worst example I think was the time he told us about a domestic disturbance call he went on only to corner this “really big black guy” in the kitchen. He said he could tell the RBBG was thinking of rushing him, but decided not to. This officer was disappointed because he says he was planning to use deadly force due to the person’s size. He was lamenting the fact that he didn’t have an excuse to basically murder an unarmed man he had never met. And this was a story he actually felt comfortable sharing. WTF?!?!

From a more personal experience, I can tell you I was sexually assaulted by a cop who then threatened to kill me if I said anything.

I could go on, but hopefully we can agree there are gross offenses by these members of society who are afforded so much trust. But it is just too easy I think to make them into scapegoats. That serves no purpose but to give me an outlet for my frustration. Ultimately, I feel I must find my own level of responsibility.

That responsibility, I feel, is in everything I do that perpetuates a flawed, corrupt system (paying taxes, etc). Ultimately, until the system enforces a fair set of laws in a just way, it’s a wonder any moral person even enters LE. My prejudice here is as an anarchist, so as you might guess I support limiting laws and other “wild” concepts like civilian policing, the specifics of which are best covered elsewhere.

So if I may also comment on the gender issue, I have again kind of a unique perspective as an m2f transgender woman now. I don’t mean to say you can extrapolate from an experiment where n=1 to the population at large, but I’ll just share my personal experience and opinion. I would have to say there are probably four chief factors in determining our gender-based response to a situation: brain sex, developmental genderizing, hormonal balance and societal expectations (based upon gender presentation). I list these in this order from least to most transient, and I list all four because I feel they do not neccessarily line up uniformly not only in transgender people, but also in others at times. Since this isn’t really the main topic of the post, I’ll save my argument and just give you my conclusion that it is generally a perfect storm of all four which leads one to violent oppression. The factor most out of the norm I would say though is probably the developmental genderizing in these cases. As we used to say, “some people just ain’t raised right.”

STAN: Welcome, Marcilla. I believe we have a friend in common.

Could this be the CHE / CASTRO strategy of preventing the consequences wrought by the free exchange of ideas?

CK

REPLY: Chris, this is a privately run site, at sea among millions of others. It’s called pluralism, so it can’t really correspond to the red-baiting innuendo here to “totalitarianism.” The reason you are even back on probationary status (we can do that, because it is our site) is because I feel like cops, just as ex-soldiers like myself, ought to have the maximum opportunity to understand what they were involved in while there is still time to get on honest and responsible and caring terms with our own lives. The reason you were censored is that your first post was abusive and personalized, and all your posts have that male-dominant vibe that we watch closely here. Many people’s experience with that vibe in real life is one that is associated with real fear and trauma; and it is an offensive and unnecessary method for getting your points across. We are not interested in scaring people away from the site who are scared or offended out of every other public space (virtual or real) already. I don’t post redbaiting either, and not out of “fear,” but because the conversations that have to happen to come to terms with 20th Century communism require a LOT more than sound bytes to even scratch the surface of 20CC’s complexity. We moderate posts here; and there are posts that will not publish. There are even some “rules” available on the site.

Check your machismo at the door, sir.

“You seem to wonder why hundreds of people die - you’re writing tickets man, my mom got jumped, they ran!”

The “occupier” role exists only because of the mandate to control. It is not merely circumstantial; it is the circumstance. ‘I, an American soldier, am here in Iraq for the purpose of controlling you.’ ‘I, a cop, am wearing this uniform and this gun for the purpose of controlling you.’ There are no alternatives in these roles, even if an individual decides to opt out (whereupon a replacement is hired).

The mere act of saying “no” (we should all reflect on the permutations of experience associated with “saying no,” positive, negative, and neither/either) carries with it an implicit willingness to back that NO up with lethal force. [That’s why people like me need to be very careful about accepting positions of authority. We’ve been enculturated such that the act of saying NO triggers an internal dynamic of preparation for deadly conflict. It takes a conscious effort for the rest of our lives to dis-associate all the ways we have to say NO in life from preparation for lethal conflict.] Maybe some sensitive soul will write a small book on all the different ways we experience saying NO. Or a one-act play.

That occupier-abuser-turnkey role is constructed atop another, far more deeply rooted and difficult-to-change role: male. It is this early socialization that begins to snip away at our capacity to experience intersubjectivity. We genuinely fear in some preliterate dimension that we (men) will somehow lose our status as human beings if we risk losing this “male essence” (masculinity).

For another bit of introspective sociology, we might seek in ourselves the ways we react to the experience of fear. The boys-fight-girls-squeal expectations get pretty well reinforced over time, because the roles, and not the circumstances, often determine whether we fight, squeal, or do something else.

There are appropriate times, I think, for fighting, for screaming and running away. But the context is stripped away by these gendered expectations; and nothing is left as point of reference except the gender-scripts. We are never off-stage (as the Bard once observed).

These roles are further reinforced by the fact that dynamic context calls for many responses… so when intersubjectivity, for example, is needed, males drop out in defense of their “manhood,” and women are left to fill the void.

There are good reasons we find little reference these days by popular media or even educators to the Stanford Experiment — which should be right up there with discoveries of new galaxies. It undermines the very basis of the dominant ways of thinking; and it invites us to see things in a very subversive way.

At some point, when the dust clears out this way (literally, almost… we handled three tons of stone yesterday in the 95-degree heat, ensuring that we were nice and wet with sweat as the dust rose and settled, and I looked like a cinnamon-powdered donut when I came home… slightly different smell, however), I hope to tack together a “Homeland Security proposal”; one that calls for the transformation of the police and military as an essential step back from the abyss.

The relationship of cops to citizens, absent the quality of commensality, love, genuine responsibility and community feeling, conviviality, intersubjectivity — is the protection racket model familiar to abused women and children. And their excuses (and the excuses of their sympathisers) for bad behaviour are, for structural reasons, likely to be the same or similar: you’re better off with us than the other team, we’re only doing this for your own good, blah blah.

This is classic abuser behaviour. Me and my younger brother have always been close. But like a lot of older siblings I’d use to use my power to attack him. When I did I used to say “your lucky your not Adam’s* brother”. Adam was a friend of mine who was exceptional brutal towards his younger brother.