re: #115 John Hughes

Uh.

“The police are the public and the public are the police.”

— Sir Robert Peel.

Peelian principles existed alongside militarized colonialist policing, and I’d argue that the latter explains more about modern cops than the former.

Consider how often societies have whole categories of people to whom they assign stigma and otherness, and are thus not “the public” and thus are policed differently? If you’re a subject from the imperial periphery, you’re not the public; if you’ve been stuffed into a demimonde, you’re not the public…you’re a social hazard to the public, a lesser kind of person that needs to be disciplined, and watched, and controlled.

The reactionary argument for modern policing is nakedly that most people do not count as “real” people, and thus should be handled with the aggression and callousness they receive. The same people become incandescently angry when they experience inconvenience at the hands of LEOs.

Hence why I keep talking about these issues as a function of caste; different outcomes for different kinds of people, presented as the correct and virtuous order of society.