If you look suspicious, you probably are

by David Benjamin

“The police are not here to create disorder. They are here to preserve disorder.”
— Mayor Richard J. Daley

MADISON, Wis. — When I expressed hope that the nationwide outcry for police reform might finally reduce the toll of unarmed Black people killed by cops, Smedley laughed into his hat. “Better,” he said, “you should fire up the searchlights and send out the bat-signal.”

Smedley, who wears Coke-bottle eyeglasses and tends to twitch involuntarily, is a sociologist and management visionary whom I consult whenever I’m bewildered by the great dilemmas of modern life. He proceeded to set me straight on the possibility of “de-funding,” demilitarizing and humanizing America’s law enforcement infrastructure.

“For two hundred years,” he said with a knowing sigh, “our urban police officers, from their first day of basic training, have been told that they are myrmidons patrolling Occupied Enemy Territory. By necessity, they follow an unwritten code of raw, jungle survival. They are the apex predators, free to act as they feel, to shoot, to kill or to bestow a capricious act of kindness, without question or consequence. They are the Lion King. A cop can be a saint saving babies from a burning hospital and — in the next moment — a sadist with the morals of a death-camp commandant. The fate of subject creatures in the ’hood is entirely up to the cop on the beat and how he feels on any given day. A spat with his wife, an F on his kid’s report card, a twinge of sciatica or a bad cup of coffee can send him into a simmering fury. This ‘mood-based policing’ is a tradition that society should openly acknowledge and embrace, because the alternative — transforming the police into a rational, caring engine for conciliation, brotherhood and social service — is a perilous delusion comparable to turning a snakepit into a petting zoo. Bear in mind, that we recruit cops not out of the Ivy League but from the thirtieth percentile of public school graduates. We give them crappy pay and run them ragged. Their working conditions are onerous, their bureaucracy is byzantine and their marriages end almost universally in bitter divorce. They suffer pathologies that make PTSD, family annihilation and bleeding hemorrhoids look like a case of the sniffles. The only people who trust them less than the folks on the street are their own bosses. Every year, thousands blow their own brains out. Each one of them, frustrated by the job, despised by the people they’re assigned to ‘serve and protect’ and armed to the teeth, is a ticking bomb overloaded with grievance.”

I conceded Smedley’s thesis but wondered. What can be done to prevent these hard-pressed guardians of law and order from seeking catharsis — as they’re prone to do — by unloading their clips into a twelve-year-old Black boy and then claiming the kid’s Snickers bar looked like an AR-15?

Smedley’s response was a little surprising.

“First thing,” he said, “we enlarge the target demographic.”

I didn’t quite understand. Smedley said, “Police violence — which is protected by an impregnable “blue wall” of omerta and a centuries-old tradition of official tolerance — can’t be stopped. But it can be organized and scheduled. Democratically. Through the designation of Misbehavior Zones, or MZs.”

“Misbehavior Zones?”

Let’s use Chicago, for example. Under my plan, once a month, the combined area police departments announce that it’s high time to make an ‘example’ of, say, ten square blocks somewhere in Chicagoland. A neighborhood is selected, literally, by flipping a dart at a map. It might be in the heart of the south-side ‘Black belt.’ It could be the leafiest street in Lake Forest. Then, for one hour after midnight, police vans with loudspeakers roam every street announcing that the neighborhood has been named a Misbehavior Zone where anyone spotted on the streets for the next 24 hours will be shot on sight by a platoon composed of that community’s most emotionally disturbed, pissed-off and trigger-happy cops.”

“Does this idea,” I asked, “have a motto?”

“Of course,” said Smedley. “‘If you look suspicious, you probably are.’”

“There’s something about this plan that still doesn’t quite seem fair,” I said. “Isn’t this a pretty clear violation of people’s Constitutional rights?”

“Technically, yes, but so is what happened to Tamir Rice and Breonna Taylor,” said Smedley, citing two examples of police impunity, “The rule of thumb, since time immemorial is this: You’ve got twenty people in the street. You shoot one, the other nineteen have rights. The dead one is what the Law calls ‘moot.’”

“You can’t have Constitutional rights,” I conceded reluctantly, “if you’re pushing up daisies.”

“There you go!” Smedley said. “But you know what the silver lining is?”

“I can’t imagine,” I replied.

“Your basic MZ curfew isn’t fixed at 24 hours. It can be over in a minute,” said Smedley. “As soon as the angriest cops in the clean-up crew nail one person — just one — that’s it. The quota’s filled, and everything goes back to normal. Folks can come out of their houses, stand over the corpse, say, “Gee, what a shame,’ and feel great about being alive.’”

“And what happens to the cop?”

Smedley laughed. “The police issue a report that the dead person was raving, naked, holding an infant hostage and waving a grenade launcher. The police chief schedules a ceremony to award the shooter a medal for valor.”

“Shoot first, issue a statement later?” I said.

Smedley nodded. “And drop the body-cams into Lake Michigan.”

“But why?” I demanded.

“Why?” said Smedley, aghast at my naiveté. “Look, son, the Black folks on the South Side, or in Harlem, or everywhere in Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, you name it, have known — from birth — that they’re walking around with a bull’s-eye on their forehead. Every poor person in America — Black, brown, Asian, even a lot of luckless white folks in some places — understands that if he (or she) inadvertently gets onto the wrong side of an irritable cop, he’s likely to end up dead or bleeding on the pavement, and facing — if he survives — life in prison for assaulting a duly appointed officer of the law. All we’re doing with this nice orderly MZ system is spreading this blue cloud of everyday menace over every community at every level of social status. Folks in Scarsdale and Menlo Park will be just as scared of the cops as the denizens of Bed-Stuy and East Palo Alto.”

“Hey, y’know, there’s another silver lining,” I offered. “They’ll know when the cops are coming to get them, and when to duck.”

“You got it,” said Smedley.

“Not only that,” I added as I warmed up to the idea of scheduled therapeutic police raids on randomly chosen Misbehavior Zones. “Maybe when the residents of gated communities and lily-white suburbs realize that the arbitrary violence of bitter, ill-trained and bigoted cops might reach out and shatter their own cozy cocoons, there might be a movement among the rich and powerful to finally improve education, training, pay, working conditions and mental health care for police forces all over America!”

Smedley patted me on the hand.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he said.