The Police Can Still Choose Nonviolence

Read: The absence of legitimate authority in Baltimore

Understanding why typical law-and-order policing isn’t a good solution in these tense situations shouldn’t be hard. Protesters have come to the streets because they are rightly angry at police brutality, furious at the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. For communities of color, these are the latest incidents in a decades-long pattern of repression by the police, with a lineage stretching back to slave patrols. Some white protesters may have awakened to the problem only after the death of Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray; even they have many examples of needless deaths at the hands of police in the past few years to draw on.

To expect that protesters are going to react well when police, many of the officers dressed head-to-toe in military gear, start corralling them or blocking them off or pinning people to the ground with their knees, is delusional.

This isn’t a case where the cops can present themselves as a disinterested third party simply keeping the peace between the protesters and their targets. They are the targets, not only because police violence is what sparked the protests, but also because the reforms the protesters demand, from ending qualified immunity to abolishing police altogether, will affect those officers.

Police also face the stress of having hundreds or thousands of people chanting slogans at them. This comes with the job—officers have to be able to keep cool in challenging situations—but all too often, some of them are unable to do so, and it’s no surprise that this problem recurs during police-brutality protests. The result has sometimes been police deploying excessive force against protesters demanding an end to the use of excessive force by police.

This creates a conundrum: The police are the body that society has granted the authority to deal with disorder, and a monopoly on the use of force to accomplish it, but if the police hadn’t already ceded their claim to legitimate authority and judicious use of that force, the protesters wouldn’t be in the streets in the first place. And while the relationship between the community and the constabulary is not the same in every place, the past several years have demonstrated that few American cities are without tensions around policing, notwithstanding apologist rhetoric about “a few bad apples.”

Who, then, will keep the peace? Some governors have called in the National Guard, a step that President Trump has encouraged. But given the militarization of the police, as my colleague Nick Baumann writes, there’s not a lot of space between the tactics of police and those guardsmen and women to begin with. And given the anger in many cities toward the federal government as represented by President Trump, the Guard isn’t likely to fare much better. The president himself seems determined to crank tension as high as he can.

When rioting breaks out, it’s common for the press and politicians to call on protesters to observe nonviolence, usually with rote reference to Martin Luther King. But in these cases, the community has been brutalized by the state in the first place, and so the police are the ones with the ability to break the cycle of violence.