Maybe you’ve seen this cop meme floating around. Maybe you think in makes a good point.
It doesn’t.
First off, note that because it’s a meme, it is both overly reductive (“THE LEFT” to which it alludes is not a monolith, but a collection of political philosophies, often in conflict with each other, that have as their intersection belief in egalitarian liberal ideals and democratic processes in opposition to social hierarchy) and misrepresentative (it presents the fringe view that “THE LEFT thinks all cops should be judged as bad people” and misleadingly suggests that it is commonplace).
That said, the meme question can be rephrased into the less click-baity question which a person might ask in good faith:
Why should we not hold Muslims as a whole accountable for 9/11, but we should hold the police as a whole accountable for acts of its relatively few bad apples?
To that end, here is a good faith answer.
The difference is because these two situations are not at all equivalent. Here are three reasons why.
Reason 1. The attacks on 9/11 were not orchestrated by Muslims, but by al-Qaeda, a terrorist group whose members happen to be Muslim (but subscribe to a particularly toxic interpretation of Islam). A comparable analogy is the Ku Klux Klan, an American terrorist group whose members happen to be Christian (but subscribe to a particularly toxic interpretation of Christianity). Just as we do not hold all Christians accountable for KKK violence, neither should we hold all Muslims accountable for al-Qaeda violence.
Said differently, “Muslim” does not equal “member of the al-Qaeda group,” but “cop” does equals “member of the police force.” The second is at least an apt comparison.
Reason 2. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization; the police force is not. Al-Qaeda’s purpose is to terrorize and harm the American public; by contrast, the police’s purpose is to serve and protect the American public. We should hold the police to a higher standard than a terrorist organization. Consequently, when the police terrorize the very public they have sworn to serve, when they break the laws they are meant to uphold, it is a far more egregious violation of the public trust. And even if such police terrorism is “the actions of a few,” any other officer who fails to take action against it, who fails to speak out and prosecute their brothers in blue, who aid and abet their terrorism by hiding behind qualified immunity or the “Blue Wall”… that officer is just as guilty of violating their public trust. (For example, the 2 Buffalo officers who pushed over and cracked the skull of a 75-year-old protester are bad cops; the 57 other officers who resigned in solidarity with them when they were reprimanded are also bad cops.)
Said differently, the since the police are specifically charged with upholding the law, the police as a whole should be held accountable for when they allow their members to violate it.
Reason 3. As the past two weeks have indicated, it’s not just “a few” bad cops. It is an “us versus them,” fear-based “warrior training” mentality that pervades modern police training. Here is a montage of police violence of just the past fourteen days, which has been mercifully limited to just 5 minutes.
Defund the police. Black lives matter.
