The Big Lie: Criminals Are Anti-Police

The public perception that criminals and cops are necessarily opposed is an inaccurate portrayal of the complex social dynamics between individuals and the police state.

(pictured above, Scott Michael Greene who killed two Des Moines, Iowa police officers, not because he was anti-police, but because they failed to live up to his expectations of them)

“Ya’all just hate cops because you are a bunch of criminals! guh guh chuckle guzzle”

Ah, that old moldy chestnut. It is the go-to reasoning for the most adamant police supporters as to why anyone would dare to question policing. Must be a criminal.

This colossal mischaracterization completely ignores the fact that many reformed criminals are themselves adamant police supporters.

On top of this, the endless laws we are subjected to mean that even the average person who has not yet been criminalized breaks about three laws a day. So we are all criminals. Therefore not all criminals are anti-police, but the anti-police are all criminals.

And in this we find the true distinction between the kinds of individual criminals who do or do not support the police – those who were guilty of actual crimes vs. those who were criminalized unnecessarily by our laws and their enforcement.

For instance, most people whose crimes have an actual victim come to feel remorse for what they have done. Along with this remorse often comes a reversal of values, which makes the remorseful criminal side with police. On top of this, jails and prisons often institutionalize criminals and condition them towards acceptance of authoritarians. Just as many inmates turn to the old prison religion, so do they often turn to the religion of statism. As though penance is solid reasoning to support the oppressors.

Of course there are those criminals who had actual victims that do not experience remorse, nor come to support authority or police. These are the people whose situation in life, whether due to their own traumatic abuse, or to the conditions foisted on the lower classes, criminalized them circumstantially from early on. The poorest of people who turned to crime because their communities had been decimated by government decrees like the War on Drugs are less likely to feel remorse because they had fewer chances to escape their outcomes thanks to the very same system now punishing them.

Among anomalistically deviant individual criminals you will invariably find sociopaths. These sociopaths will make great gestures of support for police simply as a way of creating illusions to protect themselves. By aligning themselves with police they hope to create a perception of themselves that throws people and police off the scent of their own criminal tendencies. They might be the loudest of all police supporters, simply because they have the most to benefit from such rhetoric.

Some of the most deviant criminals of all seem to really be into the cops. Serial killers often play games in order to keep the police’s attention, and most confessions of the ghastliest of crimes come from those who are telling police because they want to be accepted and liked by them. Since most of them were themselves victims of violent abuses in their youth, police represent a strength that was never there to protect them when they needed it. A strength they long for, and have had to commit their own atrocities to try to possess for themselves.

The criminals who are anti-police are those whose lives were negatively impacted over petty laws enforced by petty authoritarians. The individuals criminalized by the system for victimless crimes are very likely to become disillusioned of the system and its players, and rightly so. When the system and its enforcers create victims of peaceful people by criminalizing them, it is perfectly reasonable for those victims to reject their abusers. And this is where anti-police sentiment is actually born. Not by violent criminals who are mad they got caught, but peaceful people who are mad that their lives were turned inside out for no reason but to appease the laws and to profit those laws benefactors – police and the ruling class.

I fit squarely into this category. I have a small record of petty crimes in which I never actually victimized anyone. But nonetheless I have spent a few weeks of my life in an unbearable cage, and then had even more time, resources and opportunities taken from me as a result of being criminalized by law and order zealots. I am not anti-police because they caught me doing something legitimately wrong, I am anti-police because they criminalized me for doing things no human should be able to restrict another human from doing.

I am anti-police not because I am immoral, but because they are.

And so it is in this topsy turvy world that the immoral are prone to support the police and the laws they enforce, while the moral are prone to be abused by police and their immoral supporters alike.

As a final note I would like to add that the term ‘anti-police’ as used throughout this article does not refer to support for hatred or violence against police, but as being against the institution itself, as well as the foundations and premises it is built upon.

The Big Lie: Criminals Are Anti-Police is a post from Cop Block – Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights