Yes.
The police are also the enforcers of capitalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism in the contemporary world, but they are fundamentally an institution of Patriarchal Misogyny (PM), even when the cops are women or trying to march in pride or think that they are participating in community oversight or standing against racism. The very concept of creating a class of people whom rich people believe are their to protect everyone (because they believe the police will protect them and their property even when they are breaking the law)…and everyone else who sees law enforcement at worst as a direct threat and at best as useless institution that will never help anyone, is an essential component to most authoritarian hierarchies, but especially one like patriarchy that is dependent on convincing women that they all, universally need protection, and that only the police can safely provide that protection outside of maybe the immediate family structure.
This is why almost all threats of the “dangers of lawlessness” work back into concerns about sexual violence and “who will save the women and children?” even though the police are almost never responsible for stopping acts of sexual or domestic violence in progress and that law enforcement families experience domestic violence at a rate of 40% instead of the national average of 10%. The rise of authoritarians trying to target trans folks as sex traffickers and groomers is always about the fear of young men being convinced to surrender their masculinity or about “deviant men” trying to sexually assault or prey upon women or girls, and the solution is always to expect police enforcement to intimidate trans folks from existing in public spaces and be the shield between their imagined righteous/pure society and the degenerate masses. There are papers about the role of militarizing masculinity as being foundational to purpose of law enforcers, so I am not going to try to go into it too much here, we all new the title of this blog post was just click bait with an assumed answer.
Instead, in this post, I want to draw people’s attention to this wild statement put out by the Seattle Police Union that sounds exactly like the kind of red-faced stomping and pouting that we see coming out of the Manosphere about how “nobody respects how hard it is to be a man these days” and to just squarely scape goat a (unfortunately) marginal group in terms of state or city political power that is being imagined as waving around far more authority than is actually the case…a pretty obvious parallel to what PM media sources have been trying to say about how the reason men are struggling to be men is because women just have too much power over them.
Seriously, if you get a chance to read that Seattle Police Officer’s Guild (SPOG)’s press release, it manages to be pathetic and infuriating and comically bad all at the same time. Like, of course one of the reasons I love living in Seattle is because the ANTIFA presence here is real and strong and makes me feel infinitely safer (yes, even me, a white, cis man) than the police ever have, but it is such a weirdly self-shaming flex for the union representing the police to claim that ANTIFA are the ones in Seattle dictating the political terms of public safety. If only this concession were actually true and not just a sadly flat lie to attempt to play the victim card. I have talked previously about how weird it is that the current example of “alpha” masculinity is so adverse to accepting any kind of responsibility for anything and has so fully rejected accountability as a value, so I won’t repeat all of that here, but there is something strangely surreal about essentially seeing the entire police force of Seattle parrot the same sad-boy-loser defense for why they just can’t exert the authority that everyone knows that real leaders and protectors are supposed to be allowed to use. I guess they are just parroting their leader, and trying to sound as much like Donald Trump as possible. But the document really gets weirder. The Press Release seriously claims that the SPD was standing with Seattle in morning the loss of George Floyd to police violence? This is just such bizzaro stuff to claim, at least to someone like me, from a very different part of the the US than one where the police would surrender so much of their image of authority so easily. And then to end on a note of “oh yeah, this poor pathetic, beat down institution of justice is hiring. Come join a collapsing train wreck!” It is all just so weird to me.
Keep in mind too, as I talked about wanting to talk about in post 44 of 100, the event that inspired this press release was the city allowing a trans-hating organization of very suspect intentions plan a Trans-hating event in a park that the SPOG calls “the heart of ANTIFA land,” but is really just the most blatantly queer and trans friendly park in the city, and then the SPD super over-reacting to some kids allegedly throwing water bottles at the police that were protecting the transphobes. Yes, the out of control ANTIFA that is going to bring forth a new 2020-style “summer of violence” in Seattle, and is forcing hundreds of police officers to retire is apparently armed with water bottles and hurtful words.
To get serious though, SPOG is calling for the city courts and prosecutors to throw the book at 23 protestors who got arrested, very many of them trans, for throwing water bottles, while the SPD sprayed pepper spray all over a busy city park, hitting themselves and many bystanders in the process, and shooting pepper balls into protesters at close range. This is where I think it is really important to see the parallels that are spreading out from Trump’s outrageous, self-victimizing rhetoric about “everyone being out to get me,” into every authoritarian institution and feels like it is seriously gearing up to scream the common patriarchal misogynist refrain when it really dials up the retaliatory violence:
“LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!”
I sincerely hope that with the SPD and with Trump and all the rest, that we do just see them give up, because no one will play nice with them, but I think we all need to think through and be prepared for who we really know has the power to set off 2025 as a serious summer of violence.