Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed comment. I did hesitate to write about police, because I agree it is a complicated topic. I don't feel confident about any overarching, coherent opinion of the police institution. I do think the core argument in this piece is sound, though, even though I recognize all the complications you mention.…
Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed comment. I did hesitate to write about police, because I agree it is a complicated topic. I don't feel confident about any overarching, coherent opinion of the police institution. I do think the core argument in this piece is sound, though, even though I recognize all the complications you mention. Police are only one of many solutions to violence, and possibly not the best, especially (as you point out) considering the common problems in implementation details; yet empirically they're the solution that virtually all modern, more-or-less liberal states have chosen. Is that an accident of history or a culturally evolved optimal solution? I don't know.
The general insight is extensible, in any event: that if we think of a particular function as distasteful, ugly, repellant, disgusting, then that is a kind of contagion that sticks to anyone who has to carry out that function. And we have to imagine that in turn has consequences psychologically etc.--*so much* of our cultural representations of police, our endless numbers of TV shows etc. takes up that point, that being associated with violence and having a sanctioned right to violence 'seeps in' to police as individuals over time.
Thanks for this thoughtful and detailed comment. I did hesitate to write about police, because I agree it is a complicated topic. I don't feel confident about any overarching, coherent opinion of the police institution. I do think the core argument in this piece is sound, though, even though I recognize all the complications you mention. Police are only one of many solutions to violence, and possibly not the best, especially (as you point out) considering the common problems in implementation details; yet empirically they're the solution that virtually all modern, more-or-less liberal states have chosen. Is that an accident of history or a culturally evolved optimal solution? I don't know.
The general insight is extensible, in any event: that if we think of a particular function as distasteful, ugly, repellant, disgusting, then that is a kind of contagion that sticks to anyone who has to carry out that function. And we have to imagine that in turn has consequences psychologically etc.--*so much* of our cultural representations of police, our endless numbers of TV shows etc. takes up that point, that being associated with violence and having a sanctioned right to violence 'seeps in' to police as individuals over time.