Bad Apples and Spoiled Barrels

One of the many weird things about living in a country where almost everyone gets their food from sealed packages and in Happy Meal bags is that a lot of the phrases we use every day lose their meaning.  For example, “one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel.”  When was the last time you saw a barrel of apples, if ever?  I know people who have never picked an apple from a tree and a few who think apples magically appear in their parents’ refrigerator’s crisper drawer.  That “bad apple” phrase has been distorted and manipulated by politicians and media until it has become meaningless, but not to those of us who have apple trees and harvest them every fall and count on storing them well into the winter.  

 In 2020, Trump’s 6^th National Security Adviser from his 1^st term, Robert O’Brien, speaking about George Floyd’s murder, said, “There are some bad apples in there. And there -- there are some bad cops that are racist. And there are cops that are -- maybe don't have the right training. And there are some that are just bad cops. And they need to be rooted out, because there's a few bad apples that are giving law enforcement a terrible name.”  Like many of the people who misuse this warning,

O’Brien clearly had no idea what the word “spoiled” means.  We’ve had bad apples in our police departments for as long as we’ve had police departments in this country.  We’re to the point, now, where the problem isn’t that other good apples are being contaminated by a few bad apples, but that there are so many rotten apples in the barrels that the barrels themselves are contaminated and decaying. 

One easy way to determine if a department is full of corrupt cops is counting the number of cops in a department who support a felon for President. There is no law-abiding way to take that position and in both the 2016 and 2024 elections it appeared that most US cops are Trumpers. 

 

One of the worst police departments I’ve ever experienced is in St. Paul, Minnesota and, this week, the St. Paul cops took a stand to make us all knowwho and what they represent: corruption and violence.  And you know they are not proud of what they are doing because, like Trump’s January 6^th ICE gang, they are wearing bandit masks even in their own communities.  

Masked and armored with their badge numbers hidden, like their ICE partners, the St. Paul “rapid response teams” stormed a neighborhood, using violence and intimidation to try and subdue the people who they are supposed to “protect and serve” in an entirely predictable manner.  If any police department in the country deserves to be defunded, it’s this one.   

 

And there are far more barrels full of rotten cops than anyone wants to admit.  The reason is that we keep imagining that a couple hundred years of rotten apples has just contaminated a few of the apples in the barrels.  Correcting that mistake was what the “defund the police” movement was all about.  Police and the ruling class fought back with propaganda, myths, and foolishness, but the only way to make our police departments “protect and serve” the communities who fund those departments is to create effective incentives and punishments that make the few decent cops root out the majority bad cops. 

 Minnesota has an unearned reputation as a “liberal state,” but since the state is 30% rural and a lot of the urban areas are contaminated by rural immigrants and rural goobers are 90% “conservative” (a synonym for “timid”), the state is often as backwards as the rest of the South and Midwest.  And that is not a compliment.  The St. Paul cops proved themselves to be defund-worthy during the 2008 Republican Convention and they are repeating that performance today.  The city’s police department has had a long and infamous friendly relationship with the Mob and gangsters in general.  Today, with a President who is closely connected to the Mob and a federal Department of Random Deportations operating with literally no legal justification or restrictions, the St. Paul police are in comfortable and familiar territory.  St. Paul police Chief Axel Henry excused his department’s joyful participation in “crowd control” with the claim that “the street was compromised with foot and vehicle traffic, and a dangerous situation was unfolding.”  As in the 2008 Republican convention, the danger all came from overzealous, violent cops who were getting to play with the lethal and non-lethal toys in a safe (for them) environment. 

One of the reasons Dallas, Texas was where a Presidential assassin was successful in 1963 was the city’s police department’s comfortable relationship with the city’s mobsters.  From years of nancyboy, cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover’s Mob connections and corruption and reckless incompetence, the FBI did as bad a job of protecting the President as they did the country throughout the Cold War years.  Eventually, the once-competent and functional US Justice Department launched an investigation into the Dallas police department and, as a result, in the mid-60s hundreds of cops were fired and the Dallas police department became smaller, more competent, and (for a while) actually attempted to “protect and serve” the citizens of the city.  To this day, the Dallas police department is an outlier in the corrupt, decadent state of Texas, although it is by no means exempt from the rotting barrel syndrome. 

I moved to Dallas in 1967 and, after some job shuffling, I ended up (believe it or not) being the department manager for a big box store’s downtown drug department.  Our employee break room served as a de facto coffee shop for a lot of downtown cops.  I got to know a few of them and heard lots of stories about the cops who’d been fired by the Justice Department’s investigations.  It was a non-stop horror story told by the not-rotten apples who’d been exposed to the contamination in the barrel. 

The problem with bad apples is that their contamination spreads quickly through the whole barrel.  If they aren’t removed quickly, you have to toss the entire lot, minus a few outliers.  The “few bad apples” argument is irrational nonsense.  A “few salvageable apples” is more realistic, at best.  St Paul’s police department is a well-known case of a barrel full of rotten apples.