We are sliding down the slope of brutality here in the US. It was always bad, but now it’s worse.
After making such a mess of my first enlistment, I decided to go back and heal the wounds on my soul by doing it right. When I went for the counseling interview, the only Army school willing to accept “re-treads” was Military Police. So I became a military cop and learned to understand it. At some point, I caught a glimpse of the latest training doctrine proposals. At the time, I didn’t understand all I read, but I knew I didn’t like it. So when I got hurt, and the military nearly begged me to stay, even with a high physical exemption rating, I went home.
Shortly thereafter, I observed the Waco Massacre on TV. At the time, I was inclined to support the government because I had been on the happy side of law enforcement. I drank the koolaid. A few years later I moved to Texas for a time. I was immediately introduced to the wrong end of federal law enforcement (see Part 2). The experience made me an ally of the victims of illegitimate police activity. The Feds have always been questionable at best, and more than once I have heard local police warn folks never, ever trust the Feds.
Lately, it seems more and more local police are becoming worse than the Feds. This rapid decline into casual brutality is making more and more of the US population into scarred victims. Those scars tend to mark both body and soul, and whatever sympathies the victims might have held before, as with me, their answer to the Tom Jode Test changes.
So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the “Tom Joad Test”:
When you see a cop — or, more likely, several of them — beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?
If it’s the former, you’re an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.
If it’s the latter, you’re an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.
It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn’t invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject’s default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.
Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual — any individual — is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?
Having been subjected to state-sponsored abuse, albeit not directly physical, I now assume the cops are wrong. I can’t forget how it was drummed into my head: The suspect is a human being. I can’t forget the overpowering sense I was responsible for making my handling of suspects the very picture of kindness and respect. God would not let me be so much as rude. I would smile, joke, and make them relax as much as possible. It would have been reason enough this was, on sheer mechanics, the easiest way to get things done, but my conscience demanded it. When people hurt, I weep. I made enough serious mistakes in other ways, but I don’t recall ever being too rough. I won awards, promotions, a high reputation in the community, and the Army begged me to reenlist.
Part of me now regrets ever having been involved in Law Enforcement, because it now has a dirty name. It’s getting dirtier by the day. When cops beef about the need for more roughness, the justification is always how rough suspects are getting. It never occurs to them they have set the tone for the decline in civility, or could fix it if they tried to make it better. Instead, it is they who lead the way in making every citizen understand you cannot ever be friends with a policeman, because there is no such thing as a policeman who is your friend.
