The Cult and Police

I don’t want to write about this, but divine justice demands it of me.

During my time in the US Army Military Police Corps, some of my superiors kept track of civilian professional law enforcement training along with the underlying philosophical issues. One man in particular was all gung-ho about this stuff. His level of enthusiasm blinded him to the broader social moral reactions he should have seen coming.

This was in the mid to late 1980s. There was a seismic shift in thinking about police work, though I suspect it had been underway for some time, the shape of things to come became more obvious to us near the bottom of the chain. On the one hand, I was ostensibly on board with all of this because it was part of my job already. At the same time, some part of me was deeply disturbed by something that just did not come up into the light of my conscious awareness. It took awhile to claw its way into the daylight.

In essence, the Cult was pushing for US police training to shift away from something that was still rather humane. The agents of the Cult were advocating for American policemen to absorb the training of Israeli police and military. I noted that the Cult arose from a very elitist, almost racist spite for lesser folks. This pervades Israeli security training, in the sense that anyone who comes to their attention as a possible problem is immediately forbidden to be human at that point. In essence, the security forces enter a contextual state of psychopathy.

We’ve all seen how people act when they are under physical threat. Adrenalin drives you into a state of agitation that confuses fear, anger and all sorts of destructive emotions. There was a time when it was a major element in police training to make note of this and strive to deescalate the situation by speaking and acting to soothe and calm the person. Without openly saying so, police training theory in the US erased that kind of humanizing consideration. So while you won’t see it written in police policy documents, what you do see written is a legalistic gobbledygook that builds on the utter necessity of dehumanizing everyone who isn’t wearing a badge.

Instead, the officers are trained and required to demand that anyone they detain must not be permitted any humanity. Officers are trained to react with arrogant hostility, with uncontrollable rage, the moment anyone dares to assert their human dignity. At the moment of encounter, you must cease pretending to be human in any way. You are not permitted to feel agitated, even. Given that the demands are utterly impossible, this is the setup for unconscionable violence that we read about so often.

It’s not universal, but it’s pervasive across the entire US. There are plenty of officers who still have a conscience, and plenty of departments that don’t require that induced situational psychopathy. However, it is pervasive enough to create an intractable spiral of violence. Insofar as it can be used to promote race war, so much the better, says The Cult.

This is what I saw coming back then, but my daily context hindered me from recognizing it. I was actually censured by one superior for daring to discuss psychology while in uniform. He knew. He was a conscious supporter of this shift. This genie is not going back into the bottle. Rest assured there are enough people behind this that the political pressure will only rise. You’ll get a lot of propaganda whining about how the police are so persecuted because people object to officers acting like psychopaths. Does it sound familiar when someone complains that they aren’t allowed the privilege of getting away with murder?

Meanwhile, there is not a lawful thing we can do about it. Police operate from completely internal reference points and sometimes they are secret. While it’s possible you’ll hear the word “accountable” in a speech somewhere, it means only that they are accountable to their “professional standards” and their political supporters. You cannot vote out the people who make sure this continues. You sure as hell cannot raise up any other means of keeping order, because the police won’t allow competition.

Pray that the Lord protect you from these encounters, and give you peace when you cannot avoid them. This problem is pervasive enough that you should assume the worst in every case. Trust in God.