Why Do They Hate Us?

"Why do they hate us?" I heard this question a year ago from a young man who had just dropped out of a state university engineering program because it was "too hard" and was pursuing one of the most remedial and disgraceful programs offered by any educational facility: criminal justice (talk about an oxymoron!), police science or law enforcement. Pick a program name, they are all the same and they are all equally simple.

My response was lame, at best. "You're kidding?"

The kid was, of course, excelling at the idiot program because he is of normal intelligence and moderately conscious. If you are unable to pull an "A" in classes like:

• CPS 103 Particular Forms of Crime - Analysis of conventional property crime, criminal markets, criminal organizations, white collar crimes, and corporate crimes. Consensual and non-consensual delinquency, and "victimless" crimes. Factors that can be used to differentiate several dimensions of forms of crimes. (4 credits)
• CPS 105 Deviance and Social Control - Competing theories of deviance, deterrence and control, relations between deviant actors and reacting audiences, and how deviant individuals explain or justify their behavior. 
• CPS 170 Domestic Violence - Comparative approach to power and violence in family systems including detailed and in-depth analysis of the devaluation of family relations. 
• CPS 171 The Criminal Mind - Psychological aspects of criminal behavior, personality of criminals, the psychological processes affecting behavior, and the violence that is often associated with criminal behavior. Dealing with fear and anger, offering and counter-offering, and negotiating in high-risk situations.
• CPS 172 Comparative Police Systems - Selected police systems in the United States compared with a variety of police systems in other countries. 

Honestly, I can't go on. The titles of these classes sound like exactly the kind sociology program titles that would study the anti-social behavior of police officers around the world.

This goofy kid appeared to be completely clueless about why ordinary citizens hate the police. Even in St. Paul, where the local police and country sheriff's deputies went 1968 Chicago-style on local and visiting protesters during the 2008 RNC debacle, it appears that a police candidate can remain ignorant of the history of the occupation he desperately wants to join. He asked me, repeatedly, to cite reasons why so many citizens "hate cops." As you might expect, he had excuses for every abuse and every anti-social police act committed in modern history. As I should have expected from someone so disconnected from human history, he imagined none of this violence applied to his possible future.

It's hard to imagine this level of avoidance, but it's critical if what's left of our society expects to create "order" from the chaos of corporate socialism and pusedo-capitalism. The fact is, fear is not respect. Fear is a close emotional relation to hate and as far from respect as love is to hate. While there are cops who deserve respect for trying to do the right job in a system designed to repress human dignity and freedom, most are exactly the vicious characters pictured in these video links and the photos on this page. For example, any animal capable of intentionally smearing pepper spray in the eyes of environmental or political protesters is unfit for socialization. Any society decadent enough to instruct its stormtroopers to commit such a crime is undeserving of history's charity. Cops have been used to break up legal protests, as strikebreakers, as an armed force dispossessing citizens of their legal property, and as a protection force for corporate criminals and other organized crime figures since the middle of the 1800's.

The fact is, most of us don't hate cops. We do fear them, however. They represent us in our national decay and "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Cops serve the worst of our society and repress the best. Regardless of the deranged fairy tails Hollywood and television create of hard-working, dedicated, clever police protecting society from terrible criminals and solving complicated crimes, many cops are nothing more than lazy, cowardly, tenured, over-armed, arrogant, brownshirt terrorists who repress any attempt of the public to regain control of their nation. (Not just true in the US, but in many corporately controlled nations.) What kind of person wouldn't fear that kind of police force? When some citizens get past fear and hate, and act accordingly, we call that "revolution." Remember that when you finally get your corporate welfare job and are asked to remove your badge and any other form of identification before committing a psychopathic act of brutality. Being ignorant of your own motivations and the history of your chosen occupation is no defense. When you are the fist of repression and the weapon of fear, you will have to get used to being the object of fear and hate.