At the same time, police have a stressful and dangerous job, and most work hard to do a
tough job well. There are a few bad apples, but the problem goes beyond that. There also
is an institutional culture that communicates... what exactly? That black men need to be
immediately and consistently submissive? That if they don’t they present an existential
threat? That would help explain Eric Garner, but not the numerous men who have been
shot as they ran away. Nor does it explain the way Sandra Bland was mistreated.
All true, yet we need to discuss these pressing issues without fueling populist rage more
than necessary. I spoke with a lawyer who’s a class migrant about the neighborhood
where he grew up, in Staten Island, which voted heavily for Donald Trump:
It’s full of New York City civil servants—fire fighters, cops, garbage men—and Trump
spoke very directly to those people. Most people are working class and antagonistic to
Black Lives Matter. People are scared for the cops. After Eric Garner, one guy walked
up to two cops in Brooklyn and murdered them. He made a post on social media, and
then went and shot them in the head. Many people I know hate [New York City Mayor]
Bill de Blasio for the way he reacted to the Eric Garner thing. And police officers don’t
take kindly to people saying they are racist, terrible people. Neither side is giving
honest credence to what the other side is saying.
Shifting the tone of the debate about policing is similar to the shift I’ve seen in my
lifetime in attitudes toward the military. When I was in my teens and images from the My
Lai massacre were in the news, people spat on soldiers returning from Vietnam.
Eventually we stopped. Some 40 years later, we now thank soldiers for their service. We
thank them even though the military is still a very flawed institution where women
soldiers fighting in Iraq were more likely to be raped by a colleague than killed by enemy
fire.^270 We need to change destructive organizational cultures in both the military and the
police, but at the same time we must respect the women and men who do the difficult and
dangerous jobs that keep the rest of us safe.
One message with the potential to enlist white working-class support to end police
violence against unarmed civilians is this: Police work is hard and dangerous work most
of us aren’t qualified to do. Having the courage, the composure, and the self-discipline to
defuse potentially violent situations rather than escalating them—that’s rare. Most people
don’t have what it takes. This argument also may help avoid situations where white juries
side with the police even when the evidence suggests police have violated their own rules
of engagement and constitutional norms.^271
The bottom line is this. Business-as-usual in American politics means that class conflict is
- Can Liberals Embrace the White Working Class without Abandoning Important Values and Allies?
