Draw pistol, aim at foot.

I grew up in a police-friendly household. My father was a lawyer, an assistant attorney general, and then a judge. He was the only judge in the area who would sign search warrants after hours, so we would have state and local cops in our house in the middle of the night. My dad knew them all. Cops were just part of the landscape. I write this to give you perspective on where my attitude towards law enforcement started out.
I’ve been watching the police my entire life. I have experienced a slow evolution from support to suspicion. Over the past couple of decades I have come to the conclusion that they aren’t paying attention to their own best interests.
It’s counterintuitive. They seem like the most self-interested profession in the country. They have powerful unions and the blue wall of silence. They pressure politicians for more funding and less oversight. It’s gotten to the point where they can outright murder people on camera and walk away free.
Lately it has gotten bolder, if that’s possible. People of color, religious minorities, and LGBT folks have always known that they are vulnerable, but police are taking it to the privileged. Recently a riot cop in LA, knowing he was on camera, casually shot an Australian journalist in the back with a non-lethal round as she was speaking to the camera. ICE agents, without provocation, manhandled and handcuffed a New York City mayoral candidate, again, on camera. Members of Congress aren’t safe from pointless arrest.
The problem for police concerns their sources of power. They have one tiny power and one giant power. Their tiny power is on their belt. The gun, the nightstick, the taser, the pepper spray, may seem like their big power because their effect is immediate and dramatic. Likewise their power of arrest and legal monopoly on violence. Not so.
Their giant power is the idea in the minds of the people that they are a source of justice and safety. That they are the good guys. That they are definitely a better option than their absence. With that power they walk among people who support them, who will obey their orders without reluctance, and who will warn them of danger and assist them. Also a population that will pay their salaries and maintain their numbers. Without that power they are just another bunch of guys with guns. In America that doesn’t make them special.
The police have been hacking away at the base of that giant power forever, but lately with more fervor. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, confidence in the police is around 51%. It hasn’t gone over 64% in the past 30 years. Broken down by demographics, the police are only above 50% with people over 55, white adults, and Republicans. Even Republicans only go as high as 62% approval. That’s a miserable rating for an institution that is supposedly the instrument of the law and order that Republicans tout. My guess is that even conservatives don’t really trust the police as a force of justice. They just believe that the police are brutal and lawless towards the types of people they fear and hate.
In this disapproving environment it makes no sense in terms of self interest for ICE agents to show up everywhere in face masks with their badges covered. Wearing street clothes and driving unmarked vans, for that matter. It broadcasts a message of “We are doing something illegal and shameful.” Which, or course, they are. They are openly violating federal immigration laws and the Constitution every day. There is some evidence that ICE is hiring professional bounty hunters at $1,000 per arrest and deputizing unemployed prison guards. It’s red meat for a racist voting base, but not for the majority of Americans.
That’s bad enough, but videos are now surfacing of random groups of white men in eBay tactical gear impersonating ICE and harassing Hispanic people. Every self-interested law enforcement officer in the U.S. should be alarmed and outraged by this. It’s a direct threat to their safety. In mid-June a man dressed as a police officer murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband and shot another lawmaker and his wife, critically injuring them. This was a political assassination and an act of terrorism. It was also a blow to the legitimacy of law enforcement. The Minnesota police had to tell people that they would be searching for the suspect in pairs, and not to open their doors to a single police officer.
There is rising resistance to the unidentified gangs snatching people, ICE or not. Unarmed groups of people are facing down the masked pseudo-cops. There is an ongoing resistance to police brutality and overreach. Every week there is another video online of some out of control cop either shooting, beating, intimidating, or humiliating somebody. For every cop that does this there are ten cops knowing that it happened and at best doing nothing, at worst obstructing justice. If police keep acting like criminals and can’t be visually distinguished from criminals, then what?
At some point a sufficient mass of people will decide to act. The question is what form that action will take. With luck this will be a reform movement. ICE will be disbanded. After all, we made it from 1776 to 2003 without it, and it has become completely lawless. Police departments will get citizen oversight with real teeth. Qualified immunity will be weakened. Federal, state, and local law enforcement will raise recruitment standards and improve training. And so on. Police will hate this and fight it. They will cling to their obvious, yet feeble version of power.
Without luck, well, I don’t want to think about what will happen without luck.
Law enforcement officers of every kind need to stop and think about their relationship with the people they supposedly serve. All of the people; not just the wealthy and the white and the likeminded. It’s on them to change that relationship from adversarial to cooperative. They need to think about their tiny power and their giant power. It’s not just the moral thing to do, it’s the self-interested thing to do.