Law Enforcement: What it Means to Provide a Legitimate and Stable Social Order

FBI.gov, accessed 5/16/2018

Law enforcement in the United States is under assault by the society at large. The reason for this, from my perspective, is that law enforcement personnel have been allowed to get away with capricious and violent activity in the name of enforcing specific rules in the society. While this may seem like an intuitive method for law enforcement, it the evidence that I have been seeing is that the caprice and violence actually hurts the officers' ability to maintain the peace, and ultimately erodes the social order that is needed to support economic and social activities among people.

To enforce the law, in my definition, means to create and preserve an order in the society that enables humans to safely and predictably interact with one another without having to worry too much about if one or more people will hurt them or their property. If a person or property gets hurt or damaged, law enforcement provides the recourse for the defendants to get satisfaction and potential compensation for the damages that were done to them or their property. In this light, we can see that enforcing law is a necessary, if sometimes immediately unpleasant thing for an individual or group of individuals who break those laws, that needs to be carried out in our society. As mentioned previously, the written law enables human beings to interact with one another and their environment with some sense of security and predictability. But when law enforcement becomes aggressive towards citizens without accountability, or focused on the minutiae of the law, rather than the basic principle of keeping people safe and providing a legitimate order in society, the order that the officers are attempting to create and preserve for peoples' safety becomes eroded, and citizens no longer become safe or willing to abide by the social order that has become illegitimate in their eyes. Officers make their own jobs harder, their own institutions less sustainable, and the social order that they're charged with creating and maintaining less present when they are allowed a blank check to act and unlimited discretion without accountability. This isn't helped when officers are recruited from people with anti-social psychological phenotypes and aggressive tendencies. When people without empathy, care, and a sense of positive consideration for others are recruited to be officers, without effective training in those traits and related skills, and without real accountability, one is left with the situation we have now, where officers seem to regularly misbehave and abuse their privilege than help maintain public order and safety. If power brings out peoples' true personality without inhibitions, and reduces care and consideration for others (as the literature would suggest), then we have enabled people with the worst possible traits to be allowed into the thin blue line without having recourse for training or eliminating those who will not work well in such a role. To put it simply, the bad officers make it harder for the good officers to do their jobs at all, and they erode the perception of legitimacy in the social order, and thus, eliminate the social order itself gradually over time; the jackbooted ones destroy the order they're trying to create through their poor choices and anti-social behaviors.

What then can be done to counter this slow slide to irreversible conflict? I would suggest that municipal governments (the civilian side, not the uniformed officers themselves) re-evaluate what they're checking for in their psychiatric evaluations and background checks to make sure they're getting well-adjusted and pro-social individuals onto their forces first. The next step would be to redo the training programs that officers receive, putting less of an emphasis on enforcing legal minutiae and more on de-escalation, confronting prejudicial biases, and protecting and serving citizens well. The new program would be a mixture of law, sociology, psychology, and social work, combined with a thorough check to make sure the individual in question is a basically kind and caring person with real mechanisms to enforce rules on the officers in question, such that they cannot behave violently and capriciously without the real threat of penalties and possible black listing from all municipal police forces. Detective work would continue to help identify anti-social elements within society, while the emphasis on enforcing minutiae would subside for a more comprehensive approach to addressing the root causes of crime and criminal behavior. There will always likely be those who are just not willing or able to abide in the legal order. Those individuals must receive their due process when caught, and be checked either with social rehabilitation and help, or removal from common society for others' safety if their case proves to be intractable.

Without this comprehensive and different approach to law enforcement, I worry that the people who chose to wear the uniform and be police officers will ultimately lead to the destruction of the social order I know they care about through their ill-conceived methods of trying to produce and maintain it. Humans are not governed well by force or deception. This may be a value-laden perspective. However, I would argue that these are the values that help human societies do better than the alternative values and perspectives that are out there based on my observations of history and human behavior in groups. I believe that having a social order is better than not having one. How it is created, and what kind of order is created are questions that are extremely relevant in the production of our world, and ones that can ultimately be answered with evidence gathered over time from many different examples and scales.