Prefatory note: In speaking of “violence” throughout I am not speaking solely or even primarily of what we think of as violent criminal activity. That is one type of violence, certainly, but neither the only nor the most common form. Rather, by “violence” I mean any and all use of force, whether physical, psychological, emotional or spiritual, to violate another’s dignity as a being made in the image of God. For a host of ontological reasons as well as practical considerations (the latter best articulated in the books of Rory Miller and Marc MacYoung), I begin from the assumption that all violence, that is, all sin against the neighbor, exists on a continuum, from the most casual insult to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and encompasses everything in between.
Introduction
I have read, and re-read, and re-re-read with great interest the June 13th article by Mr. Marc Barnes entitled “The Christian Abolition of the Police.” Please do read that essay before reading this one. However, for those who may not have read it closely or not in a while, I will summarize the main points as I understand them here.
A perfected Christian society would not include police because the citizens would police themselves.
A perfected Christian society is possible, or the grace of Christ is not efficacious.
Society is not yet perfected (one might argue whether it is at all Christian) so therefore policing as a function (i.e. the restraint and coercion of the violent to lessen the impact of their violence on our neighbors) is currently necessary, however,
Institutional police are not the only or primary option.
Policing as a function is an inherent part of being a Christian, and therefore…
Policing should not be a job or career, “any more than there could be a ‘job’ devoted to ‘loving one’s neighbor.’”
The Christian reform of policing ought to de-ontologize and replace the institutional police.
The standing-up of police should be organized by the appropriate level of community in response to the particular level of violence that they need to face. His phrase is “particular and responsive.”
In the liberal worldview the understanding of police as the only alternative to vigilantism flows from the view of the State as the only legitimate author and user of violence, in which…
Coercion and reward are the only viable mechanism to encourage virtue and discourage vice, both in the population at large and among the enforcers of that system, i.e. the police.
Mr. Barnes also provides a series of 16 “practical proposals” which I will not bother to copy out, as analyzing and opining on each would be time consuming and of no interest to the reader. Instead, I will simply say that these ideas have the feel of a brainstorming session about them, and while they make sense in theory, need fleshing out in reality.
My Background
Allow me to introduce myself and my background briefly before going on further to build upon this excellent essay. I am a nearly twenty-year veteran of the U. S. Army. I spent ten years on active duty, three of those in Special Forces, with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and multiple non-combat missions all over southeast Asia, during which I provided training and assistance both to foreign militaries and police. In the last seven years since leaving active duty I have been training and more recently working as a civilian Physician Assistant, in family practice, addiction and corrections setting, while continuing military work several months out of each year with the National Guard.
This background is provided to explain where my approach differs from that of Mr. Barnes, and why I believe I am qualified to make any contribution at all. The approach of Mr. Barnes is that of an academic. Perhaps, as that term has come to be something of a disparagement, I should say, a thinker. He approaches a problem as a philosopher does, from the foundation of first principles. Having established his principles, he reasons to the particular application of those principles.
I approach questions from the point of view of the practitioner, and while respecting first principles, I have a skepticism of solutions based upon them. A chain of reasoning is only as strong as the weakest link, and reality has a way of putting the stress precisely on that weak link. As a medical provider I am reminded of the “treatments” practiced throughout the Middle Ages based upon the principles put forward by Aristotle, illustrating the need to test theories in practice and to be guided by the results of those tests.
The Problem of Violence
In the question of policing, I approach the problem as someone who has spent the last twenty years of my life “meditating on violence” to borrow the phrase of Rory Miller. Mr. Barnes speaks of the principle that all Christians, by virtue of their calling as Christians and their dignity as humans, are called and equipped to “police” within their spheres of authority. I agree with these principles, but then I visualize what happens when a well-meaning but untrained Christian invokes his right to police his neighbor. He becomes an enabler of a drug habit. He gets drawn into situations that then can be used as blackmail against him. He gets embroiled in an unending argument with his neighbor. He gets scammed, mugged, or killed.
The truth is that the average person in America today is not equipped to deal with violence beyond the ordinary daily variety, without making it worse.
The Role of a Police Force
This brings me to my two critiques of Mr. Barnes’ essay. The first is that Mr. Barnes fundamentally misses the point of a police force in society, or, at least, sees only half of it. He views a police force as an instrument of state control. It might just as truly be said that it is an institution for the training of a warrior class. Specialization of roles is one of the most fundamental attributes of a complex society. As Plato pointed out in virtually every dialogue he ever wrote, when one seeks the good of “health” he does not go to the shoemaker but to the doctor. When one seeks the good of “victory” he does not go to the farmer but to the warrior. Or, to quote a more modern source, quality soldiers cannot be manufactured in a crisis.[1]
For this reason I would like to imagine in more detail what a “responsive and particular” police would look like. From his description of a community deciding what level of response is required to specific threats, I rather imagine a committee of soccer moms and school teachers trying to figure out what to do with the crack-house that just opened up on Elm Street. I don’t see that going well.
The capacity for dealing with violence is a skill. Like any other skill, while some have more aptitude for it than others, no one does it well the first time. It must be developed either through training or through experience. The more specialized the level of violence being dealt with, the more specialized the experience or training needed to deal with it effectively. This is why virtually all societies have developed a dedicated warrior class, because it takes time to develop this skill, and because there really are bad-guys out there who have been practicing violence their entire lives. They are not going to be defeated by someone who took a six hour “de-escalation” or self-defense seminar a few years ago.
I routinely treat patients in my corrections setting who have been in dozens, if not hundreds of violent encounters in their lives. I treat patients who have decades of experience manipulating, lying, scamming, stealing. Some have experience bullying, threatening, fighting, or murdering. My experience and training equip me to deal with them better than the average Joe. However, I could not have had the experience of the last twenty years if the state had not been willing to pay my meals, board, training expenses, etc. Quite simply, it costs money to train, and people need to eat, have a place to live, and care for their families while they are training.
Criticisms about state-monopolized violence notwithstanding, from the point of view of the individual warrior, the institutional police, as well as the standing armies of modern nation-states, serve a similar purpose to that of the warrior classes of pre-modern societies. They enable a relatively small portion of the population to dedicate their lives to meditating on violence, so that when (not if) violence arises, there will be a person skilled in those arts prepared to deal with it.
The abuses of this system are manifold. At a local village level, our committee of soccer moms and school teachers may well question whether it is worthwhile to pay a neighbor, say old ex-Jarhead gun-nut Uncle Charlie, enough of a retainer to enable him to take his guns to the range and attend seminars every month, but when it comes time to deal with the new crack-house, they might welcome input from someone who has dealt with drug dealers before, preferably successfully. (For the record, Uncle Charlie is probably not the best one for the job.)
The Motivation of Police
The second critique is that I think he rather overestimates the percent to which careerism plays a role in the decision of individuals to join the police force or to remain with the police. He focuses exclusively on the role of punishment and reward in motivating police behavior, good and bad, and ignores the intrinsic motivations. As most of my military and police friends say, “You couldn’t pay me enough to do this job.” And yet, they do it. This is because the motivation comes from the desire to do the job for its own sake, and the pay and career are secondary considerations added on after the fact. At least in my experience, the most common motivations are the desire for challenge and adventure, and the desire to fight bad guys and save good guys. That is, the motivation for becoming a police officer is often far more in line with the main purpose of Christian policing, i.e. to restrain the violent and protect the neighbor, than Mr. Barnes seems to give credit for. This may represent a mere omission on his part, or a different set of experiences in dealing with police than I have been fortunate enough to have.
It also represents a missed opportunity if overlooked. Certainly police are often poorly formed in conscience and creed, often poorly trained and mentored, and often they do become cynical, for a myriad of reasons, of which the pay/punishment/promotion/retention system is only one. However, at least at the outset, idealism is often a strong component of their reasons for joining. These are your allies, if you can reach them. How to reach them would be a topic for another discussion. I will merely point out that most cops don’t read “New Polity,” yet.
This is relevant to Mr. Barnes’ proposal #9, to encourage “virtuous” community members to apply for positions within the police force. This, I think, is far more common-sensical than talking about abolishing the police force altogether, but it does not go far enough. Within those forces, the “good” police officers often complain that the good ones stay on the street and the ones who are useless on the street get promoted. It is useless to recruit virtuous members to the police force if they are just going to get chewed up and spit out in a few years, or worse, jaded and corrupted.
An Age-Old Problem
No society in history has ever gotten it right. There has never been a warrior class, a standing army, or a police force, that has not been open to the charge of corruption or seizing power over their neighbors. We cannot have the entire population training in violence (or maybe we can, that is a topic for another day) nor can we be unprotected. We must train some people, and we must provide for their needs while they are training. Therefore, (it seems) we must have a small group of people who are better at using force than their neighbors. They are human, and therefore tempted to use their relative power difference to their own advantage and their neighbor’s disadvantage. We must have a check, but then who checks the checkers?
I think there is another way, two other ways, actually. The first is harder, more rarified and rarer and therefore I will discuss it first.
The Way of Non-Violence
When I was on the Special Forces team on active duty, our team room entertainment was the show “Doomsday Preppers” on NatGeo. It played on a loop in the office, and we unmercifully heckled the amateurish plans of the people who advertised their fortifications and stockpiles of food and ammo on national television. We joked that our plan, if everything fell apart, would be to locate these preppers and go and take their stuff.
There was one set of preppers that I remember rather admiring, however. This was a town in New England that came together to build a doomsday plan. They set aside common ground for pasture, planted gardens, raised livestock, preserved food, had celebrations and holidays and town meetings together. At their town meetings they carried on real business and really took control of the local polis. They also voted to get rid of all of their guns, other than what was needed for hunting/slaughtering animals, if I remember correctly. Rather than fight anyone who came to steal their stuff, they would share and try to make him a neighbor, and if they failed they would suffer the consequences.
This was their plan for dealing with violence, and it marred their otherwise perfect “prepper score.” They had full marks in every realm, but in the security department, they got a zero. Their spokesman addressed the criticism openly and forthrightly. They had chosen the path of non-violence, and were quite aware that it would leave them vulnerable to looters and other violent men in a real doomsday scenario. They had decided that rather than become violent themselves, they would willingly share what they had, and if that was not enough to keep them alive, then they would die.
This is always an option open to Christians, as long as it is not understood as a disguised attempt to avoid engaging with the reality of evil. It is certainly licit for individuals and communities to choose to engage evil with nothing but charity and their unprotected flesh, and this seems to be the option most closely espoused by the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the testimony of the early Christians. Martyrdom is not necessarily a problem in the Christian worldview.
The Way of Chivalry
If we balk at that notion, we have good authority within Christian tradition to do so. Once the Church attained to a level of autonomy and some political influence, the role of violence and violent men in an ostensibly Christian society became a matter of some debate, and has remained so to this day. If we reject the pacifist option, we are then left with the age-old problem of how to build a society that has teeth, yet knows how to keep them covered.
The second solution was suggested to me by C. S. Lewis in his essay on “The Necessity of Chivalry.” In it he describes the ideal of the Christian knight as “A man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.”[2]
He argues with his usual eloquence that this ideal is not practicable, but eminently practical, in that without it society is doomed, for it will have a divide between effeminate weakness on the one hand and brutish savagery on the other. Or, in the words often misattributed to Thucydides, "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."[3]
Lewis is also at pains to point out that this man of chivalry is a man of art, not a man of nature. It is something built, not given; that is, the result of a long process of formation of the inner and outer man. It is certainly not a degree, or a job, or a certification. It is a calling, a vocation, in the truest sense of the word. Incidentally, this is another phrase I often hear from the older soldiers: “It’s not a job. It’s not a career. It’s a calling.”
Finally, Lewis comments that “In previous centuries the vestiges of chivalry were kept alive by a specialized class, from whom they spread to other classes partly by imitation and partly by coercion. Now, it seems, the people must either be chivalrous on its own resources, or else choose between the two remaining alternatives of brutality and softness.”
Just Warriors
To misquote President George W. Bush, “Just war theory is useless without just men and women to operate it.” This seems to me the real crux of our current problem with the police. We are taking men and women, well-meaning, perhaps even idealistic, but largely ill-formed, and charging them with dealing with the most toxic interactions in all of human society. We charge them to restrain violence, and condemn them when they are violent. Just war is an external set of rules and regulations imposed from the outside in a 120 minute power point presentation with cheap coffee and stale donuts sandwiched between the offensive driving course and the shooting range. This is not how just warriors are forged. To take an unformed soul and saddle it with a responsibility for dealing with violence is like mounting an Abrams turret on a Prius. The chassis is not adequate to the payload.
Formation of warriors begins at infancy with the formation of human souls capable of forming deep attachments to family, to neighbor, to community. It is formed in child’s play, not by forbidding “cops and robbers” as Mr. Barnes suggests, but in the insistence on fair play. Children will play at violence in whatever terms they have seen it. Let them at least play at righteous violence, and we will worry about the fine details later.
It is on the basis of the well-formed human person that you can begin to develop something like a modern chivalry. Here, I think, I am on ground that Mr. Barnes would certainly not disagree with. A well-formed man or woman, formed with the virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, not as catch phrases or departmental checklists to keep you from getting sued, but really shaping the character in blood and bone, such a man or woman is the only safe foundation upon which to begin the work of building the just warrior.
But a warrior is not formed by reading books, though he certainly should read books. He is not formed by subscribing to academic publications, although if he does subscribe to them it might not be a bad thing. Warriors are formed by older warriors. I have seen good warriors made from far less than promising material, just because there was a good and experienced mentor. This is true whether you are talking about redeeming the existing institutions of the police or building a parallel Christian social structure within the larger pagan society. If you want a Christian society capable of responding at an appropriate level to a particular threat, without relying on an increasingly pagan and potentially hostile governmental force, then you must mentor your young people on how to deal with violence, and this must be done by men and women who have dealt with violence. All the books in the world will not shape the proper instincts, and like it or not, right action in a crisis is a matter of instinct more than anything else.
In conclusion, I like where Mr. Barnes’ head is at, and for what it is worth, I think his heart is in the right place too. I hope he takes this less as a criticism of his work, and more of an attempt to move the ball a few yards further down the field.
Footnotes
US Army Special Forces Command, “SOF Truths.”
C.S. Lewis, Present Concerns, (1945), “The Necessity of Chivalry.”
Sir William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon, (1889).