In the 1920s, German fascists on the right and German communists on the left fought against each other with roughly the same ugly tactics—propaganda and violence. What distinguished the fascists was their focus on minority groups. They attacked Jews (by blaming them for Germany’s defeat in the First World War), lesbians and homosexuals, gypsies (so-called at the time; rightly, Roma), the mentally and physically handicapped. They attacked individuals—artists, writers, intellectuals—and institutions—newspapers, theaters, and museums—because they were cosmopolitan, modern, or un-German. In part, these attacks reflected culture wars typical of rural-urban divides. Once in power, the Nazis used police to imprison opponents on false charges and packed courts with Nazi or politically sympathetic judges. They reorganized or reconstituted cultural institutions, seized and controlled the media, purged university faculties, and redesigned educational curriculums along politically acceptable ideological lines. After a rigged election to confirm Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship, the Nazis held no further elections. Obedient to Der Fuhrer, who ignored the restraints of norms, laws, and treaties, Germany under the Nazis embarked on wars which brought it to defeat and ruin.
That was then; this is now. The Republican Party, its members, and far-right groups are repeating the conduct of the Nazi Party under the leadership of a would-be dictator like Hitler. Parallels include verbal and physical attacks on minorities—Blacks, Muslims, Asian-Americans, Jews (consider American Blacks as a scapegoat structurally comparable to German Jews)—immigrants, LGBTQs, and women; judges and courts; professors and universities; the media; truth, science, and expertise; and, of course, government, the election systems, and democracy.
One difference between Hitler and Trump is that the former had policy purposes—elimination of the Jews and expansion to the East—and the latter has only the personal purposes of self-promotion and power. In line with its leader, the Republican Party has abandoned all pretense of policy or principle; its 2020 campaign lacked even an anodyne platform statement. Party officials at federal and state levels adopt any positions taken and adapt to any changes, including reversals, made by Trump. They pledge their loyalty to an autocratic leader, accepting his wishes as their commands and his lies as their truth. Republican legislators are rigging elections by gerrymandering, suppressing voting, and authorizing legislature overrides of election results. More than ever, a majority of Democratic votes will not ensure the election of Democrats. The record of the Supreme Court, which rigged the 2000 election of George Bush, signals that anti-democratic means ensuring Republican ends will withstand court challenge and receive court sanction. In short, Republicans are replicating the same tactics to achieve and maintain power as the Nazis used.
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In this context, the role and conduct of the police is critical. In Germany, before Hitler’s rise to power, the police supported fascist rather than communist gangs. During his rise to power, the Nazis had their own “police” force, the Brown Shirts, organized thugs who attacked opponents, damaged or destroyed their homes or stores, or beat or murdered them in the streets. As the Nazi Party became more powerful, local police, sympathetic to its views about those accused of betraying or weakening Germany, increasingly supported the Nazi Party. They progressed from standing by and doing nothing to deter Nazi violence or to arrest those who committed it, to abetting it.
In America, politicians of both parties have used the police to serve political purposes as well as public services. Which means that politicians have used the police to serve partisan policies; which means that the police abuse people. The history of police abuses is, of course, a long one. As more episodes of police misconduct become publicized as they never were in the past, that history makes it clear that modern police misconduct is an extension of past police misconduct. Recent episodes of police misconduct, especially racist killings of Black men and women, have attracted attention and prompted demands for police reform. In the larger scheme of things, these disturbing individual episodes are symptomatic of bigger problems with police departments.
The police have always been used to obtain, increase, or maintain political power and protect political policies. In rural areas and small towns, police departments have acted as the muscle, “the long arm of the law,” extending government power. There were close ties between Democratic, racist city councils, racist police departments, and racist groups like the KKK in southern, south-central, and other “red” states, or in racist areas in states like Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where emigrants from the South and immigrants from third-world countries have settled. There are close ties between Democratic city councils in major metropolitan cities and their police forces. Many know of the “police riot” unleashed by Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley against anti-Vietnam War demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Over time, many cities and states have relinquished power to the police by state or local law, or union contract. Governments have thereby reduced or relinquished their responsibility for oversight and control, and police departments, largely controlled by police unions, have become semi-independent agencies answerable mostly to themselves, beyond transparency and accountability. Police misconduct protected from government oversight and control ranges from false charges, false accounts of their conduct, and perjury (“testilying”), to extortion, larceny, and murder. The myth of the “few bad apples”—the rest of the adage is: “spoil the barrel”—is evident in the fact that the so-assumed “good apples” know who the “bad apples” are, know what they do to be bad, yet, out of greater loyalty to their colleagues than to their oaths to uphold the law, say nothing and thereby give them tacit consent.
All of this police behavior which violates their obligation to safety, security, and safety is old hat. Nothing new about it. What is new is the increasing tendency of police leadership and police officers to accept and act according to current political issues in disregard of the law and the courts. Maricopa County, AZ, Sheriff Joe Arpaio ordered harassment, profiling, and arrests of anyone resembling Hispanics, and refused to obey court orders to desist. Notably, Trump pardoned this outspoken political supporter; Republicans said and did nothing. Several New Mexico sheriffs declared that they would not enforce the governor’s legitimate restrictions to deal with the spread of covid-19. Some LCPD officers publicly refused to enforce violations of those restrictions, even when called to do so. Kenosha, WI, police officers let Kyle Rittenhouse, an armed white man carrying lethal weapons, through police lines before and after he killed two marchers protesting the shooting which paralyzed Jacob Blake. They also provided water, and expressed appreciation, to members of a right-wing group of armed counter-protesters. The besiegers of Congress on 6 January 2021 reportedly included several police officers.
Alarming is the disproportionate numbers and unequal distribution of those arrested and the disparity in the disposition of their charges. Relatively few right-wing protesters were arrested, but most had their charges sustained. A comparatively far larger number of left-wing protesters were arrested on trumped-up—that is, false—charges in deliberate violation of their Constitutional rights of free speech, assembly, and petition. In almost all of hundreds of such cases, the charges were quickly dropped or dismissed—clear evidence that the arrests were legally unsupportable.
This record of arrests strongly suggests that the truth of police charges mattered little; supporting their political interests mattered much. This devaluing of truth in making false arrests is an essential fact about police conduct in dealing harshly with those whom Trump has attacked severely. By accepting Trump’s false accusations of criminal behavior by groups which he has targeted for verbal attacks and physical abuse, Republicans imply tolerance of false charges and police violence. Their acceptance of lies about big things like “stolen” elections implies acceptance of lies about lesser things, like targets of bigotry or opponents of policy. They are signaling tolerance of police misconduct if it serves their shared political interests.
The increasing convergence of the political stances and sympathies of Republican politicians and rank-and-file police officers must raise concern that convergence and conspiracy will evolve into collaboration, with the police acting as the party’s enforcer. Because Republican have accepted the denial, disregard, or distortion of truth, police forces know that already well-established practices of police misconduct—improper stops, illegal searches, excessive force, and false arrests—will go unpunished. They will continue to use them to intimidate, inconvenience, or incarcerate people viewed as opposition. Republican rule will lead to a police state.
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Dishonesty and the tolerance of dishonesty, measure the moral rot in a society. German civilians, themselves antisemitic in all the little ways, readily accepted the big antisemitic lies of the Nazis which led to book burnings, the Nuremberg Laws, and the concentration camps. They heard speeches, watched newsreels, and saw violence against Jews. In a famous picture, an officer pointing a pistol at his back, a young Jewish boy holds his hands up; German sidewalk onlookers watch with callous indifference. Soldiers sent their families photographs of atrocities against Polish and Russian Jews. Only after defeat and disclosure did millions of German civilian onlookers—some of whom betrayed Jewish colleagues or neighbors to the Gestapo—claim to have known nothing about the fate awaiting the Jews in the Final Solution. The self-praising pretense is that, if they had only known, they would have resisted. Still, the lie: they knew, they did nothing when they could before the Nazis took over, and feared doing anything after they did.
Las Cruces has its own variants akin to pre-Nazi Germans, the people indifferent to or tolerant of police dishonesty and misconduct. City Councilors have talked little and done nothing about, and local media have done little to address, police reform after local demonstrations responding to George Floyd’s murder. “Eight Can’t Wait” got the gate. Only after a long struggle did City Council get a police auditor under contract to exonerate the LCPD—hardly a step toward reform. They have chosen to avoid details of, and learn lessons from, LCPD dishonesty and misconduct in my case. In one instance, Councilor Johana Bencomo and columnist-commentator Peter Goodman showed their affinity for avoidance. I invited both to zoom a meeting between City Manager Ifo Pili and CoP Miguel Dominguez, and me; both heard Pili assure me of an apology detailing LCPD misconduct and Dominguez say that he wanted to follow up with me on reforms; and both learned that neither man kept his promise. Both knew that LCPD and Law Office personnel lied at almost every opportunity. Yet neither followed up with me or has said or done anything about these broken promises and lies. Bencomo has offered no resolution or ordinance for police reform, and Goodman, who interrupted me to assure me that Pili had met my demands, has ducked having me discuss the issue on air. Neither cares that Mayor Miyagishima has broken his promise for me to present my case to the OIR exonerators.
Such indifference to truth and promise-keeping prepares for lies, first little, later big, and their consequences. Switch perspective: Pili and Dominguez know that these and other pillars of the Progressive Council and the Progressive caucus are indifferent to dishonesty and misconduct in the city’s legal community. They have been thus assured that police reform is mere political bark without political bite. If Trump Republicans elect themselves to control the country, it will be too late to matter if the Bencomos and the Goodmans of the country come to regret their part in the demise of democracy, with “oh, if we had only known!” self-exonerations. Going along with it dying, they will get along just fine with it dead.
Fortunately, other city governments in more important cities are making some effort to reform the police. That effort has to do more than confine attention to lethal bigotry in police departments and officers. At a time when democracy itself is under threat from the Republican Party, reform must emphasize the depoliticization of the police, the claw-back of authority from police unions, and the re-establishment of government control and oversight, through legislated requirements for honesty, transparency, and accountability. For its part, Las Cruces will be content with CoP Dominguez’s blather.
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