Lawn Order

When I was a boy I heard Law and Order pronounced in Midwestern twang as Lawn Order. How could I not be opposed?  Our fanatical neighbors, the Joneses, set a bad example by spending hot summer hours pulling microscopic shoots of crab grass out of their manicured lawns, a ritual my overly competitive father made me imitate religiously. As my hearing and appreciation of the concept grew, I took the default position on Law and Order. Well, the Hollywood-movie and TV-cops-series position. I was suitably impressed by that all-American hero, Jimmy Stewart, as an FBI agent. I even believed that J. Edgar Hoover was one of the good guys. I didn’t personally know any cops until the dumbest bully in high school became one.

In my late teenagerhood, my few brushes with the law were innocuous enough. One midnight when two friends and I were cruising slowly up a dark alley, we found ourselves surrounded by unmarked cop cars. We had been out celebrating my boyhood buddy’s graduation from community college. On our way home we had spotted a dead cat in the street. It occurred to one of us that the deceased should be given, if not a decent burial, at least an open-coffin memorial on the front porch of a girl who had recently broken the heart of a friend of ours. We drove slowly down her street, the instigator holding the deceased by its tail, out the window. It was a dark street and we didn’t recognize the target house. The dead cat carrier was not about to admit defeat. It was his plan and he was determined to see it through. He suggested that if we drove slowly up the alley behind her house, he would somehow recognize it from the rear. The driver, being new to the game, turned off the headlights as soon as he turned into the alley which alerted the cops who, we subsequently learned, were staking out the neighborhood because of an epidemic of hub cap thefts.

One car in front, one in back, both with headlights on high beams, both with red lights flashing, a disembodied Voice ordered us out of the car, hands held high. Next the Voice commanded us to lean against a garage door, hands still high. Plainclothes cops patted us down and searched the car. They found the straw boaters the driver and I had worn on our night out on Gaslight Square, but failed to notice the cat corpse lying somewhere in the alley, perhaps buried beneath a cop car. The cops were relieved that we didn’t seem dangerous. We were white college kids and dressed somewhat better than your average midnight hubcap thugs. Two cops tried on the boaters and did a little shuffling dance, as a third interrogated us about what we were doing in the alley at that late hour, and when that question seemed to be beyond the scope of a community college education, they supplied the answer. Why didn’t you tell us that you had been out celebrating and had to stop and take a leak? They didn’t bother to breathalyze us. The concept of DUI had not yet been conceived. As I said, we were white college kids on vacation, good old boys out enjoying the warm summer night. The relieved cops seemed to enjoy the situation. They cracked jokes and one of the dancers apologized when, attempting an old soft gumshoe, he dropped my boater. Gene Kelly he was not.

The whole incident lasted maybe half an hour. Nothing really happened. We were White working class college kids who lived in a White working class neighborhood. We in no way considered ourselves privileged. We judged our position in society by our economic and educational status, not by race. Had we been Black or Brown and stopped in a dark alley a midnight by White cops…?

By the mid- 60s I heard and read about cops beating up long-haired hippies. I wasn’t sure what to believe. I never had long hair and couldn’t grow a beard if I wanted to, but I was on the side of the hirsute section of my cohort. Intellectually. I didn’t participate in protests against the war or burn my draft card, which is why I could only read about the Chicago convention and the Chicago Seven trial in week-old newspapers. Samo samo with the killing of Fred Hampton. I thought of the dumbest bully in high school and could easily imagine him beating protesters and reporters, with relish. He was a racist, but murdering a Black Panther? I had other issues, survival, for instance, weighing on my mind, and if I thought at all about police racism, I would have thought that being a hippie or anti-war protester or any critic of the dominant culture trumped racism in the minds of brutal cops. The White protesters dominated the news, relegating Black victims to interior pages. Then I moved to Philly, just in time for the spectacle of White cops strip searching Black Panthers in the street. A photo made the front page of the morning paper, which I read the day it appeared. Any illusions I had about the city of Brotherly Love vanished when the Police Chief was elected Mayor.

I had an early mid-life, not crisis, but evolution brought on by the news reports about the FBI’s Cointelpro and studying history at an inner city community college. I corrected a long-standing error by evicting J. Edgar from the Hall of Fame and placing him in the Hall of Shame.

In my San Francisco period I joined protests. Pressed against metal barriers at protests, I quickly learned not to rest my hands on the barriers when I witnessed a sociopathic cops smack resting hands with their nightsticks. I put that down to a few sadistically smiling bad apples, California cousins of Southern Sherriff Fatwhiteman. And I can’t say that I condoned throwing handfuls of marbles on the street to sabotage the mounted police. My sympathies were with the horses.

Getting beaten by a federal cop accelerated my evolving position on Law and Order. I no longer adhered to the few-bad-apples, high-school-bullies-who-became-bad-cops hypothesis. I believed that the system, from the politicians, the police chiefs, and the police unions, preferred and protected the high school bullies. Hell, even Hollywood glorified them: think Dirty Harry. Or any number of violent anti-hero-yet-hero cops on the silver screen.

One cool San Francisco morning, I reached the federal building soon after the protest began. The cops had just violently pushed a few young women off the front steps. I walked up a few steps and turned my back to the building, replacing the recently evicted. Suddenly a cop moved in front and Dolores Huerta’d me.  Fortunately, I had armored myself against the cool morning with a wool sweater and an insulated vest. I didn’t end up with a ruptured spleen, like Dolores, but I was in pain. Great pain. I doubled over and I believe that several cops pushed me down. In any case, I lay on the steps and passively resisted, mostly because the pain and the gasping for breath occupied my thoughts. The cop who D-H’d me stood over me and went to work on my rib cage with his nightstick, walloping me three or four or five times. My armor prevented any breakage, limiting the damage to a few cracked and bruised ribs. The cops zip-tied my hands behind my back. Although my thoughts were concentrated on my painful parts, I was aware enough of my wrists to keep the zip-tie handcuffs from being too tight—something I had learned during previous arrests. The cops raised me up, none too delicately, and hauled me inside the building the protesters and I were trying to blockade. They took me to an empty room on the ground floor, and dumped me on the industrial gray carpet. I could have slipped my hands out of the handcuffs, but I was afraid that would only annoy the cops and result in even more pain. I painfully scrunched over to the nearest wall, and slouched against the wall. As all movement was painful, I did my best to remain motionless. For several hours. I was alone in an empty, silent room. I meditated and hoped the sociopath who DH’d me was on a long break playing pinochle with his buddies instead of breaking bones of my buddies outside.

The cops finally remembered me. An older cop, a latino, pudgy and with a benign expression came in. He helped me stand up. He couldn’t help but see and hear that the process was painful, and he expressed a certain sympathy. He marched me out into a large corridor and onto an elevator. As we climbed to the top floor, he said that he knew that the demonstrators outside and I weren’t dangerous criminals, that we weren’t the enemy, and he even liked some of us. When we reached the top floor, the doors opened, other uniformed cops looked in, and the demeanor of the friendly cop did a 180. He instantly donned the tough cop persona and pushed me abruptly and painfully into the room and then into a cell, telling me in a harsh, commanding voice to shut up and get in there. The other, younger, tougher bullies looked on approvingly.  

I stepped out of the federal building and onto the deserted steps and sidewalk late that afternoon, tired, hungry, and in pain. I went to a nearby café where insult was added to injury: Lingering protesters told me that Ben n’ Jerry’s had given free ice cream to all the demonstrators shortly after I had been arrested. I consoled myself with the thought that they were probably flavors I didn’t like.

That was all so last century.

This century the Black Lives Matter movement has taken center stage and the mainstream media has finally noticed that white cops kill Blacks at a remarkable rate, and not just in the South. It made me realize how privileged I was as a White man when the cops stopped me in a dark alley late the night of the dead cat contraband. That childish prank could easily have escalated into an atrocity had we not been White.

This century we have also seen a resurgence of violent White supremacists, resentful of being relegated to the wings. Although the Hooverless FBI tried to alert the previous administration of the danger of home grown neo-Nazi/White supremacist terrorists, that administration and Conservatives in general, yawned and expressed sympathy for the fine people on both sides. Whites training with military weapons in the countryside were not as concerning as unarmed BLM protesters in largely peaceful protests. The Law and Order sloganeers did manage some outrage when a federal security guard was assassinated during a BLM protest in Oakland, CA, but decided it was old news when we learned that the assassin was a Boogaloo Boi trying to incite a new Civil War.  

Especially after the murder of George Floyd in the great northern state of Minnesota, the defund-the-police movement gathered steam. While I have great sympathy for the defund-the-police movement in general, specifically, I am opposed to the misnomer. Some overzealous activists, a few, might be in favor of completely defunding the police, but most, including me, want to renovate or overhaul or (add the verb of your choice, but not reform, please, which usually leads to meaningless changes) the police, top to bottom, root out the whackos and high school bullies zealously defended by the police unions, take away some of the military grade weaponry, create a national data base of police violence, and reassign some responsibilities, such as decomposition events of mentally ill persons, to trained mental health professionals, or to teams of cops and shrinks. I do not want to completely defund the police. When a man was mugged in front of my house, I called the cops.

And really, overhauling our criminal justice/law enforcement system is pro-Law and Order.

Presently, I find myself in a surprising position on the Law and Order issue: I seem to be more pro-Law and Order than the vast majority of today’s Republicans who seem to have abandoned Law and Order as one of their bedrock principles. I applaud the Capitol police who heroically fought the January 6^th insurrectionists, buying time that allowed the Vice President, Representatives, and Senators to flee to safety. I mourn the injured and dead Capitol police who valiantly defended the rule of law. Republicans want to make a martyr of the insurrectionist who was killed trying to lead the mob into the House Chambers. Progressives assist the FBI in tracking down the insurrectionists. Republicans, well, to be fair, the Republican Party, claim that the insurrectionists who threatened to hang the Vice President and trashed the Capitol, smearing shit on the walls, were “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Although a protest veteran with a substantial rap sheet, it never ever occurred to me to spray bear spray into the faces of cops, beat them with flag poles or fire extinguishers, or charge them and push them back with their own metal barriers. Not even the cop who beat me up. It never ever ever occurred to me to smear shit on any walls. Not since my potty training days. It seems that I have been too ignorant to realize that those were legitimate forms of political discourse.

Although more Law and Order oriented than today’s Republican party, I confess that I am, at heart, somewhat Weak on Crime. I’m not in favor of putting people in prison, not to the extent that has led to our prison-industrial complex. I believe in repentance, redemption, and second chances. Even third or fourth chances. I am in favor of putting some criminals in prison: Sloganeers and screamers who dabble in treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors, from Nixon (Paris Peace Talks) to Reagan (Iran hostage negotiations and Contragate) to Trump, (Ukraine-gate and the January 6^th Insurrection), all those who cynically scream about the war on crime, who claim to be tough on crime all the while committing serious crimes of their own, they belong in prison.

I could go on and on, but I do have some restraint. About three weeks into their trial (not at the end as depicted in the film), Dellinger of the Chicago Seven (not Hayden as depicted in the film) attempted to read off the names of nearly 5,000 servicemen who had died in Vietnam during the trial. I don’t remember reading about that at the time, which for me would have been in another week old newspaper, but I knew about some of those names before Dellinger did. In any case, Judge Hoffman did not let Dellinger get very far (contrary to what was depicted in the movie). My own judgment will stop me after listing the names of a select few who died while we talked the talk about stopping police brutality, but failed to walk the walk: Rodney King, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, Breona Taylor, George Floyd, and on and on…