“To Protect and Serve” is the slogan of police forces across the country, but it is merely a slogan, a tagline put on cars to identify the brand. It’s ultimately hollow and in few ways reflects the actual role police play in society. A better slogan, in my opinion, is the one seen on patrol cars in the town of Reidsville, North Carolina: “Making A Difference“. It makes no promises and offers nothing more substantive than stating the police’s presence will make something happen — it might be positive or it might be negative. Reading Alex Vitale’s treatise The End of Policing underscores the lie (or at least the willful misrepresentation) behind “To Protect and Serve” — they do protect, but it tends to be the wealth and comfort of the ruling class; they do serve, but it’s usually the interests of power and neoliberal economics.

Vitale’s thesis, repeated throughout the book, is that it is impossible to reform a system that is inherently repressive and that the only way to wrest control back from the police state is to completely rebuild the socioeconomic ideology upon which police and policing are founded. This ideology is deeply rooted in the so-called “broken window” theory of policing that puts great emphasis on policing minor misdeeds and crimes of appearance (e.g. loitering or vagrancy) and relatively little resources in the underlying causes of those misdeeds. The assumption, it seems, is that any sign of societal weakness is an invitation for unsavory and criminal elements to ply their trade and pollute a neighborhood: a broken window means no one is going to stop you from breaking more windows.

Of course, in this paradigm, the questions A) why was the window broken to start, and B) why would someone choose breaking windows over some other activity are rarely asked. There might be some truth to the idea that a broken window is, to some, an opportunity for further criminality, but if this were the case there are hundreds of thousands of window breakers in the criminal justice system and there always seems to be a demand for more cops because windows somehow keep getting broken. Some of these individuals aren’t even window breakers: they might have thought about breaking the window or been duped into breaking one or might not even know what a window is. Tortured metaphors aside, the fact remains that the neighborhoods that have historically been seen as crime-ridden remain so, not because of some moral failure on the part of their residents, but because of intentional actions and decisions made by local, state and government officials for decades. In Vitale’s own words, “[a]fter decades of neoliberal austerity, local governments have no will or ability to pursue. . . ameliorative social policies” (53).

What, then, is the result of that “neoliberal austerity”? Evaporating social welfare programs that might help keep recidivism down. Divestment from NGOs that might help with community pride and cohesion with that money being reinvested in gentrification projects that price people out of their own homes. Schools that operate like farm teams for the prison industry and who let armed school resource officers (SROs) roam the halls and act as enforcers for policy and behavior. No money for food stamps but all the money in the world for Wall Street. And at the edge of this, the thin blue line between Wall Street and Main Street, is the police. This line was never clearer than in the second half of 2011 during the so-called “Occupy Wall Street” movement when large numbers of people took to the streets of New York City to protest against corporate greed and government abetting. The NYPD (supported in no small part by the Department of Homeland Security) worked diligently to protect the city by arresting thousands of protesters, mostly for crimes of appearance like disorderly conduct and failing to comply with law enforcement demands to disperse. The perpetrators of the 2008 ‘Great Recession’, the crime for which Occupy Wall Street wanted justice, bailed out with golden parachutes from their top floor board rooms.

We have been told over and over that the police are there to help the citizens, to catch the bad guys, to protect Us from Them. This legend, however, is difficult to believe when you see the long list of citizens killed, maimed, terrorized and dispossessed by the police. How can you pretend to be defending the innocent when you smash through their doors and haul them off in the dead of night? Compliance is crucial in any growing authoritarian regime, and that compliance is demanded by police and, by extension, the police state. The state has nothing but animus for demonstrations contrary to its authority and the powerful are disinclined to put a stop to violence that expands that power. This is why legions of police were deployed against university students protesting Israel and the storming of the U.S. Capitol met with such little police response. This is why Luigi Mangione was escorted to jail by a phalanx of LEOs (plus the mayor of New York City) and Jeffrey Epstein magically offed himself in a jail cell while video cameras happened to be offline and the guards were looking the other way. The cops are in the service of the state which means they are in the service of the elite and the best you can hope for, as an average American, is to fly under their radar and try to avoid the flashing blue lights in the rear-view mirror.