Who Do the Police Really Serve?

Officer Joe Gutierrez draws his sidearm on Lt. Caron Nazario, Dec. 5 2020

In Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she describes how frighteningly easy it is to get stopped by police. Traffic laws are so intricate and specific that many motorists can’t drive three blocks from home without violating some arcane regulation. It’s certainly illegal to stop drivers for being Black, but it’s completely legal to stop drivers for irregularly signaling a turn, stopping to far from the line, or having a nonconforming license plate frame.

Though Windsor, Virginia, police stopped Army Lt. Caron Nazario four months ago, his case achieved national status when body camera video emerged this weekend. Literally the next day, police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright on an outstanding warrant. Both men were stopped on flimsy traffic pretexts: Lt. Nazario had no license plates (because his SUV had transit tags), and Wright had an illegal air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror.

Americans aren’t supposed to be afraid of the police. White Americans have this nominal notion that police represent us, and strive to preserve our well-being. Yet the flimsy reasons these two Black men got stopped, and the rapid escalations into violence, bespeak an organization that deliberately wants to instill fear in citizens. “I’m honestly afraid to get out [of my vehicle],” Lt. Nazario says on camera. “Yeah dude, you should be,” an unidentified officer responds.

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

This Judge Dredd-level behavior has no place in advanced society. Daute Wright died barely ten miles from Minneapolis, where former officer Derek Chauvin currently stands trial for executing a civilian in broad daylight for a non-capital crime. The law becomes, not what legislatures ratify, but whatever police say. Consequences happen only when public outcry requires states to make the occasional blood sacrifice to appease the hoi polloi.

Importantly, when someone gets held responsible for actual transgressions, like Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis or Officer Joe Gutierrez in Virginia, it’s always individuals. Even though Chauvin killed George Floyd surrounded by three other police officers, and Gutierrez was only one of at least three officers to draw sidearms on Lt. Nazario, yet in each case, only the most egregious individual faces any repercussions; other officers, and the brass that supports them, continue on, wholly undeterred.

Protesters assemble following Daunte Wright's murder, April 11, 2021

Our justice system begins with a secularized Calvinist assumption that humans are wholly, unremittingly depraved. People supposedly do right only when compelled by threats of violence. And certainly, that describes some people accurately. Yet notice against whom that violence gets arrayed: until Sunday, I, a White man, had no conception that any jurisdiction had laws against hanging air fresheners from your mirror. Black Americans are regularly stopped for crimes White Americans don’t even know exist.

Police exist not to preserve justice—which they never could anyway, because we lack a meaningful definition of “justice”—but to serve the Calvinist power structure. Though religious Calvinism preaches that we can’t know who’s saved or damned until God’s Judgement Throne, secular Calvinism clearly knows the Elect: those who have property. Notice that, in police mentality, passing a counterfeit $20 bill is a capital offense, but wage theft isn’t. Money equals righteousness equals power.

Notice the sequence here. Where a religious moneybags like Joel Osteen might suggest that righteousness causes reward, the secular Calvinist believes reward causes righteousness. Rewards signal God’s favor in advance, even if “God” in this circumstance isn’t a literal deity. Indeed, to preserve this structure, God must remain entirely figurative and disinterested. We elect leaders based on wealth and worldly reward (the numerical majority of Representatives are millionaires), and assume they’ll handle public trust responsibly.

Then those leaders, already well rewarded, pass laws so arcane, nobody could possibly follow them all. And they authorize police to enforce these laws with remarkably wide discretion, through tools like “qualified immunity,” “probable cause,” and “pretext stops.” Because the rules, and the rule-keepers, exist to enforce secular Calvinist morality, under which the poor are bad people, specifically because they’re poor. They need punishment to direct them into moral wealth, especially if they aren’t White.

George Floyd, Caron Nazario, and Daunte Wright needed punishment for their own good, because punishment will cause moral correction. This is especially ironic, because two of them were punished for having cars, in one case a new car, while the third was punished for believing he had money. This reveals secular Calvinism’s moral vacuity: it punishes first, and hardest, those trying actively to comply. Because, to the secular Calvinist, some people naturally deserve punishment, regardless.

So sick of reading tweets telling Black people how to properly respond to police interactions.

Only one person in a police interaction has been trained (and is being paid) to deescalate the situation.

— Chanel Ali (@chanel__ali) April 12, 2021