Police are bureaucrats with weapons

Page 72-74: Police are bureaucrats with weapons

At this point I can return to the question of bureaucracy.

In contemporary industrialized democracies, the legitimate administration of violence is turned to what is euphemistically referred to as "criminal law enforcement"—particularly, to police officers. I say "euphemistically" because generations of police sociologists have pointed out that only a very small proportion of what police do has anything to do with enforcing criminal law—or with criminal matters of any kind. Most of it has to do with regulations, or, to put it slightly more technically, with the scientific application of physical force, or the threat of physical force, to aid in the resolution of administrative problems. In other words they spend the most of their time enforcing all those endless rules and regulations about who can buy or smoke or eat or drink what where that don't exist in places like a small-town or rural Madagascar.

So: Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

If you think about it, this is an ingenious trick. Because when most of us think about police, we do not think of them as enforcing regulations. We think of them as fighting crime, and when we think of "crime", the kind of crime we have in our mind is violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it. I find this all the time in public discussions. When trying to come up with a hypothetical example of a situation in which police are likely to be involved, people will almost invariably think of some act of interpersonal violence: a mugging or assault. But even at a moment's reflection should make it clear that, when most real acts of physical assault do occur, even in major cities like Marseiile or Montevideo or Minneapolis—domestic violence, gang fights, drunken brawls—the police do not get involved. Police are only likely to be called in if someone dies, or is so seriously hurt they end up in the hospital. But this is because the moment an ambulance is involved, there is also paperwork; if someone is treated in hospital, there has to be a cause of injury, the circumstances become relevant, police reports have to be filed. And if someone dies there are all sorts of forms, up to and including municipal statistics. So the only fights which police are sure to get involved in are those that generate some kind of paperwork. The vast majority of muggings or burglaries aren't reported either, unless there are insurance forms to be filled out, or lost documents that need to be replaced, and which can only be replaced if one files a proper police report. So most violent crime does not end up involving the police.

On the other hand, try driving down the street of any one of those cities in a car without license plates. We all know what's happen. Uniformed officers armed with sticks, guns or tasers will appearon the scene almost immediately, and if you simply refuse to comply with their instructions, violent force will, most definitely, be applied.

Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it's not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to sped several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look atthe world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spending most of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.