The Cop

In my experience, the cop does not conform to the uniform, so much as the uniform covers a range of types. The cop does not become a cop by virtue of the uniform. The cop preexists first as a type drawn to the power of the uniform, and the gun. Training completes the masking of the type, in so much as it encourages the conformity to power - but it does not erase the type. The uniform provides cover for the urges and needs of the person wearing it - cover as a sanction, but concealment also by sanctification.

So, some of those types which I have found across diverse communities:

1. Jagermeisters. People who, by temperament and the vagaries of conditioning, prefer to hunt others. They don the uniform because it gives them sanction to hunt, to pursue, to capture. The law does not matter as an end. It provides the means, the vehicle through which the drive to pursue, to solve, to master the puzzle of an opponent can, at least for the duration of the chase, find expression.

2. Goons. Armed staffers for the prevailing order, especially men who define themselves by who or what they serve. They obey because they cannot self-direct, not in those areas of experience which, in retrospect, reveal themselves as important. The example of this type must find a boss for whom he can act the instrument. He lacks the capacity for autonomy. Commonly enough, found following the other types and assuming their habits and traits while under direct influence.

3. Paladins, true believers and savior types who demand obedience of others in the pursuit of order, perfection, moral sanitation or some other cause which they must serve, the failure of which unbinds their own moral strait jackets, and their possession of an imposed self-control. Unlike a goon, a paladin can self direct. And while a goon will bend or break custom and law, in the service of his masters, the paladin will do so because nothing trumps the cause.

4. Sadists. Those who enjoy wronging others, but who know that they do wrong. Clever sadists will wear the glamor, if you will, of law enforcement, in order to maintain access to the power which gives them the means by which they fulfill their desires. A creature of desire, foremost. But, of a particularly durable sort, since the successful wearing of the uniform suggests an ability to delay satisfaction, as well as provide continuing service to the hierarchy, the better to keep access to victims.  As much a junkie as a smack addict, but with the sanction of the law and power.

5. Sociopaths. Actual ones, not the bogeymen of Diggles' nightmare future of Republican ascendancy. Distinct from sadists, in that they do not have the moral capacity to understand that they wrong others.

6. Timeservers. Clock watchers. Bureaucrats. Guys who couldn't get on the Fire Department's lists, or who moved from the armed services to police work because the transition between services itself has institutional support. Dangerous, in that this type will do what it takes to keep his position, and his ease or comfort, so long as the action itself cannot foreseeably threaten the same.

Again, in my experience, the embodiment of a type does not exclude the traits of another. And while I think it rare to find a clock watching sociopath, and downright unlikely to encounter a goon paladin, I've often encountered paladin sadists, or sociopath jagermeisters.

Understanding these types - not as absolutes, but as suggestions of enduring traits - perhaps might allow one to understand how police power functions, at the level of its impact, where the police interact with the population. It could also provide a lens through which those so inclined might see and develop the methods that best counter or negate police power, by allowing them to tailor their actions to the persons and types concealed by the uniform.

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On a related note - thinking of cops as persons with certain common characteristics, modeled by type, opens up for me at least a way to differentiate the function of police power from the person enforcing it. Imagining a prospective future without law or governments, for a moment, I find it inconceivable that people will magically stop murdering, pilfering, raping and otherwise doing their worst to each other.

I cannot separate temperament and conduct. It seems premature, at best, to suggest that equity will erase offenses against persons. I see no evidence for any belief or set of beliefs which assumes that human cruelty operates only as a function of human inequity. Or that human cruelty does not manifest as human social structure. In other words, I think that human cruelty precedes human society. Inequity develops from cruelty. Cruel beliefs and harmful social arrangements may encourage the success of those types suited to the conditions of a violent or cruel society, but cruelty itself can exist without any complex or hierarchical social arrangements.

Assuming the validity of this assertion, provisionally, I can speculate on the retention of police functions even in a society without the sanction of law. If persons have an intrinsic capacity for cruelty, simply as persons, then people will harm each other, regardless of the justice, fairness or equity of social arrangements.* In this case, I accept as credible the organized or competitive provision of those services which purport to remedy harm done, to enact vengeance, to restore property and to incapacitate those inclined to harm others, however temporarily. Which means, I think, that the same types enumerated above will still have the outlet for their needs, urges and desires - drawn as predictably then to those roles which allow them to fulfill their desires, as now.


* - A society where ostracism or expulsion of the willfully violent or cruel might also encourage agonistic sport and contest as a means of mitigating or sublimating the human tendency to harm others.