Using stasis to expand productive policy invention
“All cops are bad” – this kind of lazy thinking that is not only dismissive but a refusal to address the problems facing the police state (as it reveals itself more and more to only be this) is a phrase that should be altered to “All cops are cops.”
It’s weird to think of a cop as a Swiss army knife. A cop – based on what they are meant to do and their training – is really a steak knife. It’s difficult to think of a diverse police force, or a police force that would be able to respond to a number of situations out there. But since neoliberal faith has destroyed all public institutions, gutted them, or made them functionally a joke there is little left to do but call the police for every situation that requires government intervention.
Realizing that cops are cops – they are there to stop, halt, detain, and intervene in criminal situations – means that we limit the conception of the police as a multitool. Instead we realize how inadequate it is to have the police come to every single crisis moment that happens. Instead, we should reserve the police for particular kinds of interventions, then create other organizations to respond to issues that do not require the full force of the state to stop something.
This makes me think back to rhetorical stasis, that ancient world conception of how to find the controversial points in an argument or debate. Stasis theory was used, and is still taught, as a method to explore a controversy to determine the best place to hold the disagreement. By “hold” we mean something similar to the ancient Greek word stasis – a point of no movement, frozen (not temperature), where the force is high but motion is not happening. In the case of “All cops are bad,” people have decided to have the argument around the stasis of degree, or quality: How intense? How harmful? It’s a debate about degree or amount. I think this is a mistake as it encourages us to “measure” the individuals who are cops against one another, or take the set of people who serve as police, and equate them all with the worst possible actions of the police.
Instead of a judgement on the nature of the person or the title or organization – “All Cops are Bad” – it might be better to provide a more definitional approach rather than qualiity (using the old stasis terms). “All Cops are Cops” indicates that the police attract a person who wants to do police work, comes with training in police work, and does not offer much else. Police are trained to enforce the laws. This seems like it’s at the center of things. After that you could make claims like “The police protect the public.” This is a bit harder to prove but you could make a convincing argument here based on what police are taught and paid to do. As you move out from this, it becomes more and more spurious to prove. This is where you might get the idea that they are “all bad.”
In a recent book, Benjamin Bratton argued that the only part of the state apparatus to survive both neoliberalism and the COVID fiscal cuts is the police. This means the police will be relied on for just about any public need that requires state intervention. If we want this as our world, we should either alter police training, or have the police serve as one branch of a response force that is publicly funded for the variety of things that require state intervention to protect citizens. But in order to get here, we should stop looking at the quality of the people in uniform and just the uniform itself. Cops are not failing in totality; cops are cops. Sometimes – very rarely – this kind of legal force is required. But it shouldn’t be the first response. Realizing that cops are cops – and only cops – is the starting place to have the “defund the police” conversation, however that naming is a lot of trouble too.