Would a perfected Christian society include police officers?
The short answer is: “no.”
Justin Martyr, in his letter of appeal to Caesar, describes Christians as the ideal citizens of the Roman Empire:
More than all other men are we your helpers and allies in promoting peace, seeing that we hold this view, that it is alike impossible for the wicked, the covetous, the conspirator, and for the virtuous, to escape the notice of God, and that each man goes to everlasting punishment or salvation according to the value of his actions. For if all men knew this, no one would choose wickedness even for a little, knowing that he goes to the everlasting punishment of fire; but would by all means restrain himself, and adorn himself with virtue, that he might obtain the good gifts of God, and escape the punishments.
If a people truly believed in God, that He rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked, then they would “police” themselves.
It may be tempting to argue that, on account of the Fall and the real existence of the wicked, such a society is impossible; that men will never police themselves; that police officers are necessary to a mankind estranged from Eden. But this is a pagan despair masquerading as Christian realism. It argues that the grace that Christ brings to restore us to love of God and love of neighbor cannot really be efficacious. It argues that virtue can never really happen. It argues that we must erect an official, permanent check against a permanent state of violence and vice.
It would be utopian to argue that real social virtue has already happened, or that it could happen easily. But if it is utopian to argue that social virtue can happen at all — then Christianity is unapologetically utopian. A virtuous society is possible through the grace made readily available by Christ, through his Church. To disbelieve this is simply to disbelieve in Christianity.
If a Christian polity is a polity of those who can police themselves in virtue, then a Christian polity is precisely the kind of polity that “abolishes the police.” But this orientation towards abolition cannot be put off for some future day in which there is “enough virtue” to make official police work unnecessary, and until then, let the status quo reign. The office of policing is redeemed by being orientated to its own dissolution in the just and blessed order made possible by grace. Any good policing must bear a “mark” of this dissolution within it — and this would involve a fundamental transformation of our current structures of policing. What follows is a list of principles for this transformation (things to think), and a list of policy proposals to enact and accelerate this transformation (things to do).
Responsive policing
Because sin, vice, and violence really can be replaced with virtue, it follows that the act of policing, which restrains violence, should not be made permanent, but should only arise in response to those times in which people, forsaking Christ, act evilly.
Obviously, this is rendered difficult by the opposite, despairing assumption — that violence will not and cannot fade away, that it will always remain as a constant presence in the world. If Christianity is not true, or (what amounts to the same thing) inefficacious, and we are not capable of creating a virtuous society, then a police force is necessary as long as there is a fundamentally depraved human race.
De-ontologized policing
Another way to understand this is to be rid of the idea of a police officer as a fixed office, a particular type of person, or a concrete career — and to instead understand that every Christian contains the office or faculty of “policing” within themselves.
What is fundamental to “policing” is not a badge, or a union, or even technical training, but the demand of justice that we coerce and restrain the violent so as to minimize the evil effects of their violence on our neighbors. This is not a “job” any more than there could be a “job” devoted to “loving one’s neighbor.” It is a height of injustice to argue that only some men, licensed by the State, are allowed to perform this act of justice.
In fact, it is not actually the case that only the “official” police coerce the violent in order to protect the peace. Every mother does this with her child. Every child who has played “peacemaker” in a playground fist-fight has “policed,” and policed licitly. Anyone who has, by necessity, restrained or contained a violent situation “while they wait for the police to come” has acknowledged that the police do not have some monopoly on the legitimate use of force — that the office resides, by right, in every person who is obliged to minimize the effects of evil wherever it arises. To think in this manner restores the etymological sense of the word: in policing, one keeps the polity (or the polis) together.
There are those who would consider this an argument for vigilantism. They miss the point. To be a vigilante is to take on the role of a police officer as construed by a liberal presumption of a permanent state of violence that has rolled the roles of police, judge, and executioner into one. If Americans tend to indulge in dark fantasies of vigilantism, it is because the execution of justice has already been misconstrued into a permanent, militarized, campaign against an evil that is always presumed to be real and operative — the vigilante simply joins this misconstrued campaign without authority.
If one wants to construe every father and mother as executors of vigilante justice against their children, that would be stupid, but not uniquely so. Neo-liberals have argued as much, considering the family as a kind of ungoverned regime requiring as much state intervention as possible. But thinking in this manner is self-evidently silly and the result of an ideological shackle. A common sense look at the world reveals policing as a fundamentally human activity — we police ourselves and each other to the degree that we naturally seek peace.
To restore the office of policing to the human person is not necessarily to end institutional policing, just as the universal duty to “feed the hungry” does not necessitate closing our food banks. The institutional is justified insofar as it springs up from the desires and demands of the personal, or, to say the same thing, insofar as it serves the common good. But the universal duty to police does mean that every Christian community must justify the degree to which they institutionalize, concretize, arm, and otherwise specialize this universal faculty by reference to the real violence with which they are confronted. The “use of force” is only justified in opposition to a real evil that must be policed in order to heal a real rupture in the peace. It follows that it is an injustice to keep a “militarized” police force without a real threat of militarized violence.
Subsidiaritized policing
A responsive and de-ontologized police force is only possible if society in general, and “the police” in particular, adopt the Christian principle of subsidiarity, which argues that the “use of force” is justified, not by State sanction, but by a person's office of care for particular souls.
A mother has the care of her children’s souls and a direct responsibility to lead them, through grace, into virtue. It is by no accident, then, that she also has the capacity to discipline, punish, and “police” her children into behavior which, ultimately, tends them towards that virtue. It would be a grave injustice for another authority, who did not have this knowledge and care of souls to police a mother’s children. Her use of force is officially justified by her care of souls (her office) and actually justified by a real evil, vice, or violence enacted by her child, which must be redirected, repressed, and minimized in its effects for the good of the child, the mother, and the peace of their community.
We generally recognize this order of love. Those grotesque stories of children calling the police on their parents or parents suing their children are recognized as signs of the failure of the family and the overreach of the judicial system. Stories of neighbors turning to the police to resolve issues of judgment and policing that they are capable of performing themselves are absurd. Our sense of something being “off” about such a world is a great sign of hope. We recognize the order of subsidiarity. We can feel when it is being violated.
What is difficult is extending this moral sense beyond the family, so that the family is truly taken as the principle of the rest of society. There are communities which do not have, and certainly do not need any official, “career” police officers — or even a police officer. Likewise, there are real events, such as organized crime, that require a more structured, and more heavily armed response. Communities should be able to determine, via the nature and degree of the real threat of violence that faces them, the nature and degree of their police force, if they need any at all. There should be no national, state, or city determination of the nature of, say, a small town’s police funding, armament, and vehicles. The visual absurdity of the military occupation of rural America should be sufficient to show this.
Policing beyond the State
After explaining how Christians are, in effect, their own police, Justin Martyr accuses Caesar: “But you seem to fear lest all men become righteous, and you no longer have any to punish.”
The problem with making the police a permanent response to a permanent threat of violence is that the police become a permanent expression of the State, which is understood to be that entity which exercises “a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.” The police, rather than being a particular instance of the human need to restrain violence and keep peace, become sacramental signs of the legitimacy of the political power.
This follows from liberalism’s theoretical origins of the State: If true political power is the ability to stay “the war of all against all” by decisively winning it (and it is of no importance whether the political power continues to win by outright force or by various non-aggressive tactics for maintaining power, i.e., kneeling before protestors, letting the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone burn out on its own, etc.) then true political power requires police; it requires the restraining of violence and so, perversely, violence itself; it requires a constant victory of the one whose violence constrains all other would-be violence. One could put this in another way: Within the doctrines of political liberalism, political rule already is police rule — the ability to restrain the violent by the threat of one’s own violence which is accepted, as a result, as the only “legitimate” violence.
As Justin Martyr makes clear, this pagan view of political rule necessitates that men do not become righteous. Polities free from violence in Christ Jesus, where “rule” is synonymous with “service,” do not need a sovereign who rules by wielding “legitimate violence,” for whom “rule” is synonymous with “victory.” Such a thing would be nonsensical, like a mobster offering “protection” to monks inside of a holy monastery. Conversely, polities founded on violence need continuous violence, rebellion, and enmity (foreign or domestic) to justify the continuation and the expansion of their regime.
A “standing” police force results from this need to symbolize an order and a rule constituted by a constant victory against all other rival, would-be sovereigns. One needs static police officers on display precisely to the degree that one’s leadership is equivalent to one’s continued capacity to enforce “law and order.” But if the Christian perception of just and holy rule were to prevail, people engaged in the act of policing would be freed from the weight of representing sovereign power while doing so. Instead, they are freed to sacramentally instantiate, not this or that powerful person or group, but universal ideals of justice. One “polices,” not to effect the will of a changeable political power, but to effect the will of the unchanging God, as known in the precepts of practical reason that participate in His wisdom — to protect the innocent, to admonish the sinner, and to protect that peace in which a Christian people are most able to flourish. A police force orientated towards its own dissolution in virtue cannot be the “arm” of a sovereign power orientated towards the maintenance of its power in and through violence. Their action cannot be confused with the action of “the regime” and they can in no sense “represent” State power and rule in their person.
Again, this is not to argue that a community could not establish a police force in which there is a “chain of command,” an extended duration of service, or in which political leadership does not play a directive role mediating universal ideals of justice “down the line.” But these structures are relative to each particular community and the particular violence, if any, that they are required to restrain. They do not form some sort of essential structure to policing itself. Such top-down and permanent structures only appear essential to policing when all acts of policing are justified by being traced back to the “legitimate violence” of the sovereign; that is, when police officers bear the burden of representing human political power rather than justice.
Again, it is actually the case that most acts of policing do not pretend to sacramentally instantiate the power of the political sovereign. Only the hopelessly liberal could pretend that every act of coercion and restraint is only justified by being theoretically permitted by whatever political power rules a particular people. A father’s grabbing and restraining of his son is justified by the demand that he reduce the evil effects of his son’s violent action of attempting to stab his sister with a fork. One needs no reference to the President, nor the Supreme Court, nor the Sheriff, here. We know this, and we know it precisely because the illusion of liberalism has not actually penetrated the souls of the baptized beyond the hope of salvation.
Orthodox policing
Once policing is de-ontologized, made responsive and particular, and freed from the sacramental representation of the political regime, it loses the “moral relativism” that is the true object of our horror over police brutality. It cannot justify a brutal act by its technical legality; it cannot point to “political sanction” to justify a chokehold; it cannot amount to a slavish enforcement of law, without questioning whether the law is just. Such things are only possible insofar as policing is understood as the mediation and instantiation of human, political will (which may or may not be unjust) rather than the mediation and instantiation of justice (which is never unjust).
Personal policing
If it is the case that, within a society of baptismal hope, policing contains the seeds of its own dissolution, then it follows that policing cannot be mechanized.
Here, Christianity can be a palliative to the demonic structure of liberalism, which would attempt to attain virtue by mechanization, system, and material necessity, rather than by the conversion of hearts. To put it bluntly, liberalism argues that people only become good if it is in their natural interest to be good, and so structures society into a mechanism of punishment and reward according to people’s natural self-interest. Within liberalism, we are good because we will be punished if we are bad and rewarded if we are good. I am not violent towards my neighbor because I fear greater, retributive violence from the police on the one hand, and I desire the benefits that a friendly neighbor can provide to my individual self on the other.
Because such a view simply is liberalism, with all its teeth, a full critique would necessarily be an argument for the truth of Christianity — the truth from which liberalism departs. For our purposes, it suffices to point out that the mechanical production of virtue always fails. It fails by necessity, because virtue, to be virtue, must be performed for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of fear. It has also failed historically.
America’s police system is a technology for producing “good” police officers. Within this system, police officers have a natural, material, self-interest at stake: their career. Good behavior is supposed to be produced in police officers in reference to this fundamental self-interest. Those who do good are promoted, those who do evil are demoted, fired, and shamed. Those who break with protocol, law, norms, and “best practices” are threatened in their material self-interest; those who follow the system are rewarded in their material self-interest with promotions, pay raises, and honors. At base, this mechanism of punishment and reward can be reduced to a technology governed by fear: police behavior is controlled into a kind of conformity by a fear of losing the material goods that we call a “career” and a fear of not gaining, or maximizing these goods.
Most practical proposals for police reform amount to an improvement of the technology; an adequate enforcement of existing incentives and disincentives, or an addition of new incentives and disincentives (usually by some larger, national body) in order to coerce and convince free people to obey their material self-interest.
But mechanism is simply not what produces good people — much less good police. Social mechanisms, which are predicated on treating the spiritual being like a beast, create the habit of operating according to “the system” in and through creating an overarching habit of operating according to one’s self-interest. A mechanically “perfected” police force would produce a maximally submissive and a maximally selfish group of human beings.
Corruption within the police force is not some strange aberration, but a consequence of its structure. If we produce “normal” police officers through the carrot-and-stick of their careers, then the fact that police officers act badly whenever they believe, rightly or wrongly, that it will not affect their career is not to point out a failure of the system — it is to describe the system. Police unions “protecting their own” is the obvious result of a system which produces good behavior by utilizing our material need for protection. As in almost all liberal institutions, whistleblowers who remind their colleagues of their institutional purpose beyond self-interest (say, the protection of the innocent) are castigated or laughed at for missing the point — self-interest is the ordering principle of the institution. Again, it is not that cops become cynical. Cynicism is the method by which we guarantee good behavior. Knowing that no one really acts to create a just society, we take comfort in the knowledge that they all act for more money, and not less; for more security, and not less; for more honor, and not for more shame, etc.
When we see police acting violently, strangely, or outside of their normal submission to the system, this is a moment of revelation that police officers are human beings, like us, with the same tendencies towards violence and vice. Far from creating a kind of people who can resist the temptations to wrath, impatience, or lust, liberal social systems create people trained to evaluate whether indulging their passions is worth some other material loss. Have we not all experienced that moment in which the indulgence of a passion actually seems worth whatever extrinsic punishment, reprimand, firing, or wage-cut we know “the system” will dish out? The attempt to create virtue through mechanism produces nothing more than normalized behavior, rife with moments of extremely abnormal (and usually vicious) behavior.
Now, within liberalism, a healthy institution maximizes desirable behavior and minimizes those moments in which neither incentive nor disincentive is sufficient to keep undesirable behavior in check. Within liberalism, in which true virtue is assumed to be impossible, the only answer to the problem of corruption is the acceleration and perfection of mechanism. As many have called for a defunding, or even an abolition of their police forces, cities have already begun to look for private security forces to take up their job, taking the logic of the “career-motivated police officer” to its logical conclusion — policing is just a job motivated by money. No virtue is required, only technical know-how and the desire for material goods. The desire to privatize the police is, in fact, the maximization of mechanism and the shuffling off of the last vestiges, however symbolic, of the “service” that the public nature of police work preserved.
Against this, Christianity should rhetorically dissolve and deconstruct the mechanistic approach by encouraging precisely what is taken as a kind of moralizing fluff layered over the “real” self-interest of career police work; they should emphasize the disinterested goods that make the desire to police rise up in the human heart — the protection of the innocent, the enactment of justice, the keeping of peace, the coercion of the wicked into impotence, the love of fellow-peacekeepers, and so on. Within a community that really is pursuing the adornment of virtue, external goods can find their proper place as crutches for the weak, or as milk for those “spiritual children” who do not yet desire goodness for its own sake, but need external motivation — but the milk cannot replace the meat, and money cannot replace the powerful, sacrifice-inspiring motivation to build a peaceful Zion and protect it from sin.
What is done rhetorically, Christians should do actually: dissolve the career-based police office. This has already been said: a de-ontologized police force is a de-careered police force. Similarly, a police force that is fundamentally responsive does not, in itself, need the stability and constancy that “career policing” provides except in relation to a stable, constant, actual evil and violence that peacekeepers must oppose. Likewise, a subsidiaritized police force already denies that all communities can be treated as univocally, homogeneously beset by the same powers of darkness, and this renders the univocal career choice of “being a policeman” into a relative possibility of performing a temporary obligation.
By grace and pious action, Christians can rhetorically and actually replace career policing with more or less institutional instantiations of the universal human obligation to keep the peace, motivated by goods like justice and innocence perceived in themselves, rather than material self-interest. In fact, it would be more to the point to say that this redeemed “policing” already exists, and is even more common and broader in scope than the mechanized policing enacted by the State.
A “neighborhood watch,” for instance, is an American institution that operates on the principles that I have described: unpaid, unrewarded, and unpunished people, motivated by the natural desire for peace, agreeing to “police” a given community over which they have care. (Granted, the “watch” is encouraged by the State to “call the police” rather than to exercise their human faculty of policing, but this isn’t necessary to the practice, and rather represents the fear of rival sovereignty that is intrinsic to contemporary policing).
The term “volunteer” is misconstrued by careerists to mean a kind of outside participation in a materially self-interested career — filling in the gaps, as it were, of the real work, which is done by those who hold the thing as a job. Still, it is powerful for this very reason: while it can be accepted by the City of Man, it has the explosive potential of the City of God. A volunteer, properly speaking, is the one who does something willingly, freely, as a gift, and a sacrifice; who is motivated by perceived goods beyond the narrow scope of material self-interest. The “volunteer” is a powerful concept, one which we proudly apply to our emergency services, especially our firemen and ambulance services. There is no reason that a volunteer police station could not exist, and that “policing” could not come to be viewed as another kind of volunteer, medicinal service — putting out the fire and healing the disease of violence that emerges from whatever vice is left within a Christian society moving towards virtue.
This is not to say that corruption among volunteers is impossible. Quite the opposite. Once we abandon the attempt to operate within the liberal ideology that would produce virtue by mechanism, we do not thereby have virtue — we accelerate and compound the necessity for actual virtue, or rather, we reveal that actually good men were what we needed all along.
Holy policing
Within a Christian social order, we can no longer hope to take a violent man with wrathful or racist habits and, by pushing him through a system of training and self-interested incentive, “make” him into a virtuous police officer willing to sacrifice himself for the common good. Communities that would confer any kind of stable, institutional, or official status on a “police officer” must already have evidence of his virtue, his selflessness — in short, his worthiness — prior to his election.
This would involve a massive increase in responsibility on the part of the actual community. Once subsidiarity is enacted, and police come from their polity, then communities must nourish and give birth to good police officers themselves rather than expecting to receive them as products from an extrinsic source, usually construed as the State. There is no guarantee of a lack of corruption with Christianity, no guarantee of virtuous peace-keeping. Rather, the lack of any guarantee, the acknowledgment of the fundamental precariousness of human freedom which can choose good or evil, and the destruction of the illusion of a mechanistically achieved “safety” serve as a better encouragement to create and maintain a peaceful community than a passive reliance on the State to simply give us good police.
This means that the office of policing cannot be properly enacted without grace. This should already be clear by the universalizing deconstruction that Christianity applies to the “police force.” If “all men are fallen and stand in need of redemption,” and policing is a capacity demanded by justice of “all men,” then all police stand in need of redemption. By distrusting the promises of a mechanical production of virtue and trusting, instead, in the personal creation of real virtue, we are simultaneously made aware of our inability to become virtuous on our own. We come face to face with our tendency towards pride, vanity, violence, and greed which turns our eyes away from peace and justice and towards our own material benefit. In short, we come to know that we need Jesus Christ to save us.
Again, it would be more proper to say that there already exists a real, active, sacramental economy and flow of grace within the American police force, just as there already exists a universal faculty of police-work, a recognition of personal virtue and selflessness, and a tradition of volunteer activity within the police force (all of which liberalism must pretend receives its legitimacy from some kind of esoteric participation in the merely “official” police force). This is obvious in municipalities’ requests that we pray for our police officers as in the fact that many Bishops hold an annual Mass for their diocese’s emergency responders. And while it is easy to dismiss these appeals for and conferrals of divine aid as a kind of self-justifying, religious gloss, they also amount to a faltering recognition that police officers are not guaranteed to be virtuous any more than they are guaranteed to be safe. They need Christ to infuse them with the faith, hope and charity that they cannot attain on their own, so that, through these supernatural virtues, they may attain to those virtues that they obviously need — patience, temperance, goodwill, courage, humility, longsuffering, and so on.
Moving the ball forward
Liberalism is static. All practical proposals for “police reform” must amount to the continued, repetitive attempt to perfect a mechanism for producing the appearance of virtue without producing virtue itself. Calls to create some kind of national oversight of all local police forces are predictable, adding another layer of self-interested adversarial mechanism which, while it may further normalize behavior, avoids the radical steps necessary for true reformation, which is a transformation.
Christianity is dynamic. It is the story of the City of Man being conquered by the City of God. It moves towards an articulable goal. By pressing towards that society of saints in which all policing is unnecessary, Christianity also opens the door to practical proposals of policy that, while not attaining the ultimate goal in themselves, attain it sacramentally, and move the ball forward towards that just social order.
What follows are a series of practical proposals for the reorientation of the American police force towards its own dissolution in virtue. While it would belabor the reader to explain how, precisely, each practical proposal is derived from the principles described above, we hope that they are evident. Needless to say, the idea that these proposals could be enacted top-down, by the State, to smaller points of political power and community, would be counterproductive. Likewise silly: the idea that these proposals could be enacted without the conversion of those who would take responsibility for them. Finally silly: the idea that the conversion of the police in the Christian polity can somehow happen as an institutional reality apart from the conversion of our entire society to the Church of Christ. A social conversion necessarily involves everyone. Insofar as we demand an anonymous, consumerist, vicious, and pampered existence, in which we do not own anything (least of all our spiritual capacity of policing) we are the demand and the fuel for a ubiquitous, statist, militarized, static, and mechanical police force.
Practical Proposals
An immediate expansion of the “neighborhood watch” system by neighborhoods, to all neighborhoods.
Neighborhood training for adults in “de-escalating” tactics.
Neighborhood organizations, the members of which expressly vow and commit not to rely on official law enforcement to police crimes and misdemeanors deemed manageable by the neighborhood itself — say vandalism, parking violations, pet infractions, minor injuries, and public drunkenness, to start.
An end to suing each other among Christians.
An end to watching police dramas among Christians.
An end to the game “cops and robbers” between Christian children.
An end to the policy of moving police officers from their hometowns and places of residence to work in other communities, and a positive policy of assigning police officers to their neighborhood of residence.
The creation of civic groups, or the use of existing civic groups (city councils, neighborhood associations, etc.) to determine the real, actual threat of violence to the peace of the community in order to determine a just and proportionate institutionalization of the universal duty to police the wicked.
The creation of civic groups, or the use of existing civic groups to encourage and persuade community members deemed virtuous to apply for positions within that same community’s existing, institutional police force.
Restoration of the pedestrian “beat cop” and subsequent scaling back of the use of automobiles in policing.
Reduction in the use of sunglasses and tinted windows by existing police forces.
Regular attendance of community events by police officers.
Media campaigns to promote and honor acts of good and holy policing that occur within a community, deliberately designed to confuse the distinction between institutional and personal policing.
Regular novenas, holy hours, and liturgies for the conversion of all those involved in police work, and for the perfection and purification of the faculty of policing in every community member.
An aesthetic minimization of references to the State in the clothing and insignia of all police officers.
A regular effort to shame and discourage the ontologizing and concretizing of “cops” that is mimetically present in most “anti-police” and “pro-police” rhetoric and symbol.