Commentary: We are not all having the same conversation about police. In our attempts to engage the topic, we tend to look at the police in distinct ways.
One perspective sees the police as individuals. A human being wears that uniform. These are men and women doing grueling and dangerous work, people with families and personal lives, who may find themselves in harm's way on any given day. They may have to make life or death decisions in chaotic situations. They are entrusted by society with enormous power and wide discretion. Upheld as heroes, they are also fallible human beings who are often targets of violence. From this perspective, the police officer is a worker, serving the public at large: their mission is service.
Another view of the police, especially on the anti-authoritarian left and right, focuses entirely on their function in society and their coercive power. The police officer becomes an instrument of social control. To the extent that society and its rulers are unjust, police represent power rather than justice. From this perspective, they are not representative of labor, but of management. According to this view, a minority are served and protected while the rest of us are policed.
That is about as far as most American conversations about policing get. People identify one another according to these camps, and instead of viewing that as the beginning of a dialogue they view it as the end. The other side is alien, so no conversation is possible.
"Black Lives Matter" is not an anti-police movement, though it protests unjustified police shootings, racial profiling, corruption, and faults in the criminal justice system. BLM's ultimate mission is to humanize black lives in a social structure that regularly dehumanizes them. This is an historical function of oppression: the oppressed are turned into objects, and so are the people who carry out the oppression. The shared loss of the oppressor and the oppressed is of their own humanity.
Police officers are the human beings that society puts on the front line of what our social arrangements do to people. They are neither labor nor management, in a corporate sense: they are soldiers, exposed to parallel dangers and trauma. The project of reform will never become coherent until we come to grips with what we want police officers to do, and who this "we" really is.
Democratic dialogue and meaningful reform must begin by rehumanizing everyone cast as the other. "History," wrote Martin Luther King, "is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals who pursued [the] self-defeating path of hate." The path from chaos to community is human solidarity, which like love is not a thing but an activity. Borrowing from the writer Edward Bond: American society is not becoming less humane due to violence; we are violent because we have not become truly humane.
This is why we have yet to achieve a civil dialogue about guns, race, policing, or social class - which are ultimately dialogues about power and freedom. Have you noticed the way a shopping cart will list in a certain direction if a wheel is stuck? It might even collide with other people or merchandise. As historical beings, we have a wheel stuck and our cart is listing in a violent direction. It is only through a consciously humane process of dialogue that society can see to that wheel and decide which way it wants to steer.
A revolution of values rooted in human solidarity will take us places we scarcely dream of today.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the Desert Sage column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com