Police and crime

as elements of a failed attempt at universalization

Imaginary ancient Rome policeman, for those who never studied History

Studying History is in many ways akin to learning a foreign language or living in a foreign country. Things we took for granted, stuff that seemed eternal, are proved to be passing fads; other things, that we took to be peculiarities of our birthplace or epoch, show up as parts of unchangeable human nature.

When someone who has never really studied History gets interested enough in some particular historical period to read solid books about it, a common first reaction is to see all the people involved as madmen. Their actions make no sense, their reactions even less, and their priorities are frankly absurd. Projecting one’s temporal values and prejudices through time, the dilettante assumes the inhabitants of that distant time and place share them. Accordingly, the whole society of that time tends to be seen as a vast and tyrannical oppressing force. It’s the temporal equivalent of the delusion of some American policy-makers, who truly believed that ousting Saddam Hussein and organizing elections would instantly turn Iraq into a Jeffersonian democracy.

Projection is a common mechanism of the human mind; that is what we do most of the time, for it is a shortcut to (some) understanding of other people’s behavior that more or less works most of the time in daily life. In a culturally homogenous society, as most have been in human history, it is a very valuable tool.

However, just as societies and languages are different from each other, the society of any given time is different from that which occupied the same place a short few centuries before. The values and the reasoning of our ancestors are usually as alien to us as those of people from halfway around the globe, or even more so. As a consequence, their society — for a society is made of people, even if it is indeed more than the sum of its parts — doesn’t make much sense, either. The easiest way to deal with it — projection — is the worst, as it will guarantee that misunderstandings will snowball into misunderstandings until there is nothing true there but a few names and dates. All the rest will be farther away from reality than the most delirious work of fiction.

Now, a lack of understanding of History is no big deal when one’s role in society is small enough for our misunderstandings about human nature — our assumption that things are as they had always been and everybody thinks more or less like us — to remain restricted to our personal life. Even more so when one is lucky enough to live in a society that is essentially homogenous in culture.

These days, on the other hand, with both worldwide mass-media phenomena and some of the vastest population movements in recorded History, culturally homogenous societies are the exception rather than the rule. Besides, universal suffrage exponentially augments the perils of not understanding what is going on. One individual deluded about how things work is irrelevant. A few million sharing the same delusion are a potent political force.

While it has been common in all ages to have different populations, different cultures, living close to one another, their interactions were usually limited to commerce and war, and neither leads to the accretion of small misunderstandings the kinds of interaction different cultures produce these days. In Pre-Modern times, it was a given that each culture would be ruled by its own laws and deal with its antisocial elements in its own ways. After all, due to the separation of communities that was taken for granted, most “criminal” issues were internal to one or the other; intersocietal problems were usually rare enough to be seen as the rare exception to the rule. That, by the way, is what is at the origin of the Anglo-Saxon customary law that a criminal shall be judged by “a jury of his peers”, meaning that a member of a given society shall be judged by people from the same society, with the same culture.

It all changed with the arrival of Modernity. One of its main tenets is the universality of its theories and institutions. Modern laws are supposed to be applied universally; Modern morals are supposed to be within reach of anyone’s unaided reflection; Modern men are supposed to be virtually interchangeable, thinking the same, believing the same, and acting the same. Of course, it is pure, unadulterated hogwash. All those theories have always been the domain of a very small intellectual elite, and all truly Modern governments started with the genocide of those who would not accept them. The imposition of supposedly universal laws had much more to do with the Law of the Jungle than with any real progress toward a fairer legal system.

Of one the saddest among so many sad stories is that of the beginning of Reform Judaism. While before Modernity the Jewish communities that lived close to Christian ones, often in different parts of the same villages, were separate and independent, with their own (rabbinical) law courts and so on, the universalizing pretensions of Modernity could not accept it. If they lived in the territory of that Modern government, they should be subjected to the same laws as the rest of the population. After all, Modern government is not religion-based (in the most strict sense; it can be postulated that Modernity is in itself a competing religion), and common crimes against persons and properties should be treated the same whatever the religion of the culprit and the victims.

Some Jews were delighted by it and proceeded not only to accept the new system but also to relinquish their traditional ways of dressing and behaving. They did their best to look just like their (new) “compatriots” and, like them, to make religion a purely personal matter, little more than a weekly obligation. Being Catholic, Lutheran, or Jewish was just a different personal (or familial) quirk, that had nothing to do with life in society.

Having had a strong incentive to study in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish society — for the best students were the ones who could become rabbis, thus ruling over the others, the sons of rabbis would marry the fairest maidens, and so on —, they were quick to transfer their talents to the academic path and many became excellent lawyers or doctors. Others, however, just carried to the vaster non-religious Modern society their lowly trades.

These were the ones who became enthusiastic flowers of the Zionist movement. On the other hand, both the new higher class of “Enlightened” Jews and the traditionally religious were against it, for different reasons. While the latter believed that mass migration to Palestine should only happen after the Messiah came, the former saw their “deliverance” from traditional life as a messianic phenomenon in itself and argued that it would be a betrayal if they transferred their allegiance from the universalist Modern governments that had trusted them with citizenship to some newfangled purely-Jewish society elsewhere. And now for the saddest part: for many of the most important intellectuals in the new class of Jewish professionals, that Modern government that so strongly deserved their allegiance was the German one. Little did they know.

Likewise, Napoleon offered both Jews and Muslims in the North-African French colonies a choice: if they relinquished their traditional privileges of self-rule (rabbinical courts, etc.) they could become full French citizens, the equal of any Frenchman from Europe. The Jews accepted it; the Muslims didn’t. Later, when Argelia became independent, most of its Jews had to flee to France, as the Muslim majority saw them as French, no longer as (a different kind of) native.

Now, back in our time, these questions are becoming more and more important. The reason is simple: the universalist dreams of Modernity have become so undone few can give them more than lip service. In the beginning, they were an exercise in wrestling common mores from the religious sphere, while pushing their religious origin underground. With the exception of the new political crimes, which often included allegiance to “outdated” institutions such as the Crown or the Altar, the definitions of (and penalties against) crimes against persons and property remained largely the same.

In other words, just like in any society, be it an Ashkenazy shtetl in Eastern Germany, a Catholic village in Spain, or a Lutheran harbor town by the Baltic, there was a continuity in the popular perception of what a criminal was. Criminals were antisocial elements, people who did not follow the (largely unwritten) rules that govern social behavior. They took what did not belong to them, they killed, raped, and preyed upon honest people.

The main difference, though was that the universalizing Modern governments, in their pull for central and impersonal control of society, did not want to leave the punishment of criminals in the hands of smaller spheres of society, be they religious, based on ancient ties of mutual service and protection, or whatever. Thus was born this most Modern of all institutions, the police.

(In the interest of full disclosure, let it be known that the author is a retired forensic investigator. A cop.)

Before our times, all kinds of city services were called “police”. Garbage collectors were called “police” (while many policemen today say they are garbage collectors, it is not the same thing), as well as the gardeners of public spaces, pot-hole fillers, whatever. Makes sense: “Polis” is the Greek for “City”, and thus everybody who worked for the polis, for the maintenance of communal order, was a polis-man.

The new police forces, however, were a different thing. They were the first to make a profession out of what had been before one of the many responsibilities of anyone who had that capability: discover culprits and bring them to the judge, and prevent crime whenever possible. It was very practical for Modern governments, as they served the double function of both making yet another detail of common life the business of a central government and making it easier to mix the new political “crimes” and the traditional antisocial acts in the heads of the great unwashed.

As with everything in Modern governance, the new institution grew to gigantic proportions and became so enmeshed in people’s common lives that nowadays it seems natural to have a vast array of important (in both time and money) but otherwise useless societal elements that only exist in the function of the police, as for instance the whole panoply of paperwork around the act of driving a car: license plates, registration, driver’s licenses, and so on.

Nonetheless, the function that grants police forces their legitimacy still is investigating crimes and putting some effort into preventing them. But what is a crime?

Leaving aside political “crimes” and the “crime” of not being a part of Modern society that justified the genocides of early Modernity (ask the Vendéens, the North American Indians, or the inhabitants of Canudos), a crime is basically an antisocial act, an act that goes against the mores of society. But Modernity took away the religious underpinnings of societal morality, substituting “because I say so” (often in the more polite form of “a law was passed by Congress and signed by the head of the Executive”) as the only reason for identifying an act as “criminal”. It’s a circular argument: doing this or that is wrong because it is a crime, and it is a crime because a law says it is, and the law says it is a crime because it is wrong. It’s rootless, and when the old-time religion that gave its roots loses its societal importance, there is nothing to hold it.

Now, Modernity grew out of a religious quarrel. Luther created a new religion, that got the support of powerful princes and managed to become established in most of the boondocks of Northern Europe. The endless wars between the followers of the new and the old religion had no clear winner and thus made religion unviable as cement for European society. That is why the Modern trick of pretending that what had so far been Revealed Truth could be explained as the sheer fruit of unaided reason sounded like a neat idea at the time.

This supposed “Reason”, nonetheless, soon grew to unexpected lengths. First political opposition became “unreasonable” — therefore criminal. Later, absolutely nonsensical stuff like car plates, fishing licenses, or laws mandating nutritional data on bottled water further diluted the very concept of Modern “crime”. There was nothing under it, nothing behind it, but the Modern superstition that man-made laws could create new “crimes”. Now, what if this belief was also diluted?

Well, diluted it was. Later forms of Modernity had as their immediate predecessors, and therefore as enemies to be fought against through new laws, not Pre-Modern societal institutions but other forms of Modernity. The venom they would have turned toward Church and Crown before had to be turned now against other, equally Modern, institutions. At the same time, those unable for any reason to join the greater Modern society could no longer be genocided with impunity. However, the very fact of their marginalization makes it much easier for them to leave Modern superstitions aside and create subcultures that mostly ignore the (Modern) values of the larger society. In a way, now we have the worst of both worlds: different cultures live close to one another, but they are neither independent nor (almost) fully separated.

The larger Modern society still determines the legal standards of right and wrong, but both the members of socially outlying groups and the supporters of alternative forms of Modernity insist on pointing out that the Emperor’s new clothes simply do not exist. To make it worse yet, Modernity essentially defanged all forms of lower social collaboration. Between the naked Modern emperor and his most unfortunate subjects, there are no intervening social institutions that could give the outcasts an alternative object of allegiance. Even families have been basically dismantled; in richer countries, the general rule is for children to barely know their grandparents and to ignore even the names of other members of their extended family.

I am talking here about subcultures that, while obviously minorities in the larger society, are big enough to create serious problems for it. At this point, what is the role of the police? And, even more important, what are the limits of its legitimacy? After all, it was its actions against what was generally agreed upon to be crimes that allowed police forces to overreach and, for instance, arrest political dissidents.

As an aside, police action against political enemies is a feature, not a bug. Since their inception, police forces (again, they are a quite recent social actor) have protected the rulers and bullied their opponents. It would be funny if it was not tragic to see how outraged American rightwingers seem to be because the FBI harassed Trump and hid the evidence of Biden’s crimes. Have they ever heard about a guy called J. Edgar Hoover?! The FBI has always been a pretorian guard, a political police. They even went after John Lennon!

The official role of police forces is to apprehend antisocial elements. When they arrest people that everybody sees as threats to society, people that are the exception to a general acceptance of societal mores, they gain the legitimacy necessary for political actions in the strict sense. However, “politics” also comes from the same Greek “polis”. Police forces are social actors, whose role is to preserve “normalcy”. To take away the guy who is different, who does not fit, who does stuff nobody else does.

When there are large swaths of a Modern “community” that do not share the values of the larger society, minorities that do not believe the same things to be right and wrong, the police finds itself in a conundrum. Their action against the members of a minority will be seen as external oppression by their peers within their community. After all, the imposition of the values of a theoretical universal society denies them, and their subculture, their right to be judged by “a jury of their peers”, that is, by people who have the same sense of right and wrong.

There are plenty of these societies of outcasts from Modernity. In Europe, Muslim preachers and ethnically-Muslim gang members work together, forming a parallel society that manages to control some neighborhoods. In Latin America, the rootless children of migrant laborers often form violent “gang” subcultures, also controlling territory in several important cities. In the US, the same happens with the descendants of slaves.

Members of the cultural majority that controls the legal system tend to see as antisocial what is against their social mores, even if it is just normal behavior within the subcultures on the margins of the Modern system. As the Modern solution for the traditionally tiny scattering of antisocial elements is the police, they tend to see what is in fact a cultural shock as a crime problem, a police failure, to be solved through better and more efficient police work.

It just cannot work, because it’s not about members of a society that deviate from its mores, but about intersocial conflicts, about members of a smaller society that get into conflict with the larger society while following the mores of their own community.

I am not saying that it is not a problem. I am saying it is not that simple a problem. It’s a problem in the very fabric of Modern society, the Popperian falsification of absurdities such as “Constitutions” (magical pieces of paper that would “constitute” — that is, create — a society from above), Rule of (man-made) Law, and so on.

It is not a simple problem, and there are no simple solutions. “Better policing” is throwing gas on the fire, as the “better” it is for the majority, the more oppressive it will be felt by the minority. It just cannot be solved within the universalizing framework of Modernity, because that framework starts from a false presupposition that there is but one general culture, one universal standard of right and wrong.

As Modern societies decline, this problem will become more urgent, and its consequences worse. The reactionary vision of those who still adhere to the superstitions of Modernity will fan the flames until the contacts between subcultures and societies revert to the historical normal and the larger society accepts the autonomy of the minority, restricting contacts to trade. And war, of course.