Blue Lives Matter?

Do you ever get a call soliciting money for some kind of police benevolent association? I do-- frequently. I always hang up. It's different from the way I treat other phone solicitors who slip through my security net. For the others I either speak in a really low voice so they have to press their ear against the phone to hear me-- and then blow a high-decibel coast guard whistle into the phone-- or I let loose with the most incredibly ugly stream of curses imaginable, so ugly that I unsalted and frighten myself. But when it's an operator-- inevitably an authoritative-sounding male-- identifying himself as from a police organization, I hold off on the whistle and curses. I just hang up. That's because I fear retribution.

No one from my high school academic classes became a cop. That's because in my high school, they divided kids up into "honor" classes, regular classes and "modified" classes. I was in the honor classes. The future cops weren't. And there were future cops at the school. They were in my gym classes and my home room classes and in my shop class. I didn't know for sure they would be cops then; there was always the chance they could be criminals. The future cops and the future mobsters were the same group of guys. At some point, they would go one way or the other-- although a congressman who eventually represented my neighborhood (decades after I had left) never made the choice... He was both a federal law enforcement agent and a mobster at the same time. That would be Michael Grimm (R-NY), who severed a tap on the wrist sentence for cheating on his taxes as part of a deal that didn't get into a long list of criminal activities, including at least one murder, in return for strict silence on his part. Omertà.

As the president of a large company in a small city, I was tight with the local police-- more than cordial relations. When my house was robbed once, I went to these cops from the city where I worked, not the city where my house was. They solved it-- fast-- and had all my stolen stuff back to me and the perps behind bars. More than cordial. Decades apart, I had affairs with two cops. What they had in common was chilling. I'm sure there are good cops like... Harry Bosch.





But not too many. More of them, I suspect, are like the cops/robbers kids in the modified classes, getting off on the power of fear, dominance and terror. This week New York Magazine published a piece by Zak Cheney-Rice worth reading, In L.A. County, Gangs Wear Badges that might help you to grok what the Black Lives Matter movement is fighting. "Much of the recent debate," wrote Cheney-Rice, "about policing’s excesses involves a clash of two viewpoints: one claiming that there is something structurally and culturally wrong with American law enforcement that encourages immoral behavior, and another that attributes their worst conduct to 'bad apples,' rogue individuals whose actions speak for them alone and do not indict their fellow officers or their profession as a whole. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department provides a helpful literalization of the former point: an entire law-enforcement entity whose members regularly join criminal gangs, earn clout by harassing, assaulting, and killing county residents, and retaliate against their colleagues who dare to oppose them." Oh great!

Sworn testimony made in June by a whistleblower, Deputy Art Gonzalez, details a pattern of such behavior inside the Compton sheriff’s station, which exists as part of the Southern California city’s partnership with the county sheriff to provide local law enforcement. Gonzalez claimed that Deputy Miguel Vega, who shot 18-year-old Andres Guardado during a June incident that sparked protests, was a prospective member of the Executioners, a dozen or so deputies who allegedly operate as a gang-- setting illegal arrest quotas, threatening work slowdowns if they don’t get their desired shift assignments, assaulting their fellow deputies, and holding parties to celebrate when their members shoot or kill someone in the line of duty, the Los Angeles Times reports. The existence of the Executioners is “common knowledge” within the department, Gonzalez said, according to Spectrum News 1, which obtained a transcript of his testimony this week. Decades of harassment and violence at the hands of the Compton office-- including one 2019 incident where the city’s mayor, Aja Brown, claims to have been ordered out of her car by more than half a dozen deputies and searched for drugs that she did not possess-- have led the city to propose severing ties with the department altogether, a proposal that the Executioners revelations stand to accelerate. According to the whistleblower complaint, Deputy Vega, who shot Guardado six times in the back, was “chasing ink”-- a term used to describe efforts to impress the Executioners in order to be drafted into their ranks and obtain their signature tattoo: a skeleton backed by flames, brandishing a rifle and wearing a Nazi-style helmet.

Part of what makes this dynamic notable is how ordinary it is. Though the central allegation is that the Executioners “dominate” the Compton sheriff’s office, at least nine other such gangs are known to operate across the department, and have done so for decades. “Vikings, Reapers, Regulators, Little Devils, Cowboys, 2000 Boys and 3000 Boys, Jump Out Boys, and most recently the Banditos and the Executioners,” Matthew Burson, chief of the department’s professional standard division, told KABC last month of the LASD’s gang problem. “I am absolutely sickened by the mere allegation of any deputy hiding behind their badges to hurt anyone.” Sheriff Alex Villanueva has said he intends to fire or suspend more than two dozen deputies involved in a widely covered assault on four non-gang members at an off-duty party in 2018. Villanueva was elected under immense pressure to clean up the department, whose former heads-- Lee Baca and his undersheriff, Paul Tanaka-- were convicted of obstructing a federal probe of abuses in the county’s jail. Tanaka was an alleged member of the Lynwood Vikings, a white supremacist sheriff’s gang. Villanueva has also said that he will implement measures to discourage deputies from joining these cliques at all, but county Inspector General Max Huntsman said last month that he’d seen no evidence of this actually happening. The fallout has been costly on several fronts. Since 2010, misconduct claims linked to these sheriff’s gangs have cost the county $21 million in settlements and associated legal costs, according to the Los Angeles Times.

It’s hard to make sense of this phenomenon without acknowledging that discrete individual malfeasance is insufficient for explaining its scope and longevity. The existence of ten or more gangs operating within the law-enforcement agency that patrols America’s most populous county, and whose members have occupied its highest ranks, indicates a level of tolerance and normalization that cannot be isolated to any one person, and a scale of public danger that cannot be calculated in mere dollar amounts or police shooting statistics. These gangs have been implicated in sustaining an environment of terror, and are regularly celebrated and rewarded for it. Their existence, and seeming intractability, are stark manifestations of the ways that American law-enforcement agencies operate as fraternities the nation over, with less regard for public partnership than for capitalizing upon their own impunity. This is perhaps most evident in the conduct of police unions. But survey any heavily patrolled community and it becomes clear that the existence of police gangs are not necessary to promote illegal arrest quotas, work slowdowns, or internal plaudits for acts of brutality-- though gangs are an especially brazen way of formalizing them. This is simply the reality of policing.

A full year ago-- so long before the Democrats chose a candidate-- the International Union of Police Associations endorsed Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. In doing so, union chief Sam Cabral said "Every top Democrat currently running for this office has vilified the police and made criminals out to be victims. They seem to take any union’s support for granted. Many of them still refer to the tragedy in Ferguson as a murder, despite the conclusions of every investigative inquiry to the contrary. While his candor ruffles the feathers of the left, I find it honest and refreshing. He stands with America’s law enforcement officer and we will continue to stand with him." Last month the union representing most NYC cops also endorsed Trump. Union president Patrick Lynch, said "Across this country, police officers are under attack. Our neighborhoods are being ripped apart by violence and lawlessness. Most politicians have abandoned us, but we still have one strong voice speaking up in our defense."