COPAGANDA

Periodically and without warning I will ask friends a question: “Have you ever murdered anyone, and if not, why?” It is not a trick question but indeed a serious one. Initially, respondents lean toward deterrent to explain why they haven’t. “Because,” they will say, “I don’t want to go to jail.” Upon reflection, most people voluntarily correct course, rediscover their humanity, and offer some variant of “Because I have no desire to murder anyone.” The same is true, they will also say, of their lack of desire to steal, assault, rape, kidnap, burglarize, or engage in virtually any other type of crime.

America prefers to view itself as a civilized society and, as such, the latter is the obvious, proper, and decent response. Yet judging by its obsession with law enforcement, America acts as if the former is its natural order—that violent crime is but a bad mood away and only the shield, the Glock, and the squad car stand between life and senseless death at the hands of our neighbors. Americans cling to this contrived state of emergency despite decades of research confirming that killing as a primary instinct is extremely rare, a dystopian fantasy compared to the socioeconomic factors that drive people to violent crime. Despite a spike in mass shootings, the actual murder rate was roughly the same in 2018 as it was in 1960, according to crime statistics compiled by the New York Times. That most people have no desire to harm others is also, and should always be, unsurprising.

Where I live, a bumper sticker commonly seen around town reads “Troopers Are Your Best Protection.” It is a specious declaration at best, at worst a cynical attempt to advance the political and economic agendas that come with commodifying law enforcement and the criminal justice system. If data mean anything, prosperity and opportunity, not police, are one’s best protection—yet law enforcement in America is omnipresent. Police are a fixture of the national identity, central to its popular culture and, in post-9/11 America, under the guise of freedom and safety, are emboldened to only further increase their footprint. The land of the free feels occupied by the smothering, militarized presence of police. Police are encouraged—by media-manipulated juries, by a decades-long unaccountability, by supplicant, politicized judges, and, of course, by fear—to ignore or break the law while judges and legislatures endorse propolice, antidemocratic policies. All, presumably, to keep us safe. Though charged with completely different responsibilities, in order to further exploit the fear, police attempt to make themselves indistinguishable from the military, try to look like domestic agents in the War on Terror. As a public relations tactic they have taken a dangerous, divisive job and rebranded it under the reassuring, unimpeachable post-9/11 umbrella of a single, uncomplicated word: heroes.

The public receives these maneuverings with pride. An overpoliced America—in schools, on TV, in train stations, at ballparks—is not considered by the mainstream to be a chilling harbinger of authoritarianism but a source of strength. No other occupation in the country owns as wide a gap between its realities and its public packaging as law enforcement because quite possibly no other occupation owns such distance between its experiences with different slices of the public. For those who are white and middle-class, the police are part of the social fabric, an unquestioned ally. The image of the police diverges almost exclusively along racial and class lines. The white mainstream accepts an image of benevolence, fairness, and justice while those who are black, brown, and poor know firsthand that the police are possibly all of those things but also definitely can be brutal, oppressive, merciless, aggressive, and extralegal. As a defense against criticism and a ploy for bigger budgets and more presence, police departments around the country routinely sell more fear and maintain that ungrateful American citizens are at war with them. If it is true that no occupation in America enjoys as great a distance between fantasy and reality as law enforcement, it is also true that none has spent so much time and money constructing such an illusion of itself. Nor has any other benefited from the assistance of so many powerful enablers—in Hollywood, in the newsrooms, and now at the ballparks—who are invested in sustaining their illusion. There are, indeed, so many ways to tell a lie. Police propaganda may well be America’s favorite.

PRODUCT PLACEMENT

“The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson said in a 1935 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a fine art, and propaganda as a form of government.”

At Fenway Park, for all eighty-one Red Sox home games, a member of the Boston Police Department sits in the dugout. Right next to the players. Another stands in the bullpen. In between innings at Yankee Stadium, more than a half-dozen police officers—not grounds crew or stadium security—ring the field. During an NBA game, a police officer is often stationed in a row directly behind each coach. During timeouts, police guard the court as well. At the end of every football game, pro or college, the two head coaches jog out to midfield to shake hands, each flanked by police officers. None of this is a coincidence. Nor, it should be noted, is it by accident that these officers are virtually always in direct view of television cameras, reinforcing their presence to the audience dozens of times per night. It’s a constant reminder of the ubiquitous threat—even a relief pitcher might be in danger. The messaging is about as subtle as pornography: troopers are your best protection.

During the 2018 season Major League Baseball teams hosted nearly fifty “Law Enforcement Appreciation” nights in stadiums around the country. The NBA, NHL, and NFL do the same, staging some form of “Heroes” acknowledgment between periods, demanding that tens of thousands of paying customers thank police. Across the major sports, where the public looks harshly at black athletes and says it wants sports and only sports and none of life’s political or social complications, more than one hundred nights a year—nearly a third of every calendar year—are dedicated to honoring law enforcement. Police are not only honored as heroes but, like the military, receive ticket discounts from every sports team in America. These discounts are not available to nurses or schoolteachers or mental health professionals but to people with guns, and sometimes the catchall of “first responders,” which sometimes includes firefighters and EMTs. Discounted tickets are available to police for NCAA games, Disney theme parks, hotels, Broadway theater tickets, and hundreds of other products and services. The sneaker company Reebok offers a 20 percent “Heroes discount” to law enforcement.

Two weeks before Christmas 2018 the website dealhack.com published the Dealhack First Responder Discount List—in their words, “a quarterly survey of brands that offer discounts to first responders.” From eyewear to hotels, sports to housing, insurance to travel and cars, the website listed the 165 companies that offer the sweetest deals to the cops, a thank you for their service. Once one peels back the layers, the harsh reaction to Colin Kaepernick becomes clearer. He wasn’t just supporting black people. He was challenging the monetizing of the cop/corporate state.

On December 10, 2018, the Hollywood trade website Deadline.com reported that NBC had begun development on Conway, a new crime drama about a detective who wakes from a coma and finds he has “exceptional cognitive abilities.” The headline, “Vin Diesel to Produce Cop Drama ‘Conway’ in Works at NBC,” continued a tradition of police-as-entertainment that dates to the earliest days of television, perfected now by the glutting of cop dramas, cop buddy movies, and cop faux documentaries. Now, cops are superheroes. Several early shows of the 1960s, such as The FBI and Dragnet, like the later Cops, were written, funded, and controlled by active law enforcement. The FBI was created as a recruitment tool for the bureau and also a powerful vehicle to improve the FBI’s public image while it secretly infiltrated organizations and surveilled and killed American citizens. As racial tensions rose during the 1960s, Dragnet projected a clean-cut alternative to the skull-cracking reputation that the Los Angeles Police Department owned in the black community. The Washington Post described the show’s relationship with the notoriously racist LAPD chief William Parker and with department “publicity wizard” Stanley Sheldon as “accepting stringent censorship from the police department in exchange for story ideas, logistical help, and a patina of truth. That bargain would help create America’s first enduring cop drama and a model for police storytelling for decades to come.”

That bargain created the template. An industry followed. A 2016 Oxford Research Encyclopedia report stated that more than three hundred police dramas have aired on American television since 1950. The police, living in the background in other Western countries, are principal actors in America, with film and television being used to win over the public, burnish law enforcement’s reputation, and align dissent with criminality. Whoever the heroic police fought on the screen—pimps, pushers, murderers, black nationalists, antiwar protesters—were the villains to the public sitting on their couches across America. Invariably, the sustainable villain is black, and as black people began to ask for things, the more villainous they would become. The more visible black people became in the real world, so, too, did law enforcement become more visible in the new medium. The two went hand in hand. The police became a television colossus, financially and culturally. The black people did not receive royalties.

It is money well spent. The embedding of police not as a neutral force, not as an unfortunate necessity, but as a force for good permeates not only pop culture but real life in America. Being the friend, the confidant, the basketball coach, the problem solver on screen affords them the inherited, positive characteristics that protect law enforcement from its own real-life misconduct, its racism, its corruption, and its murders. The police owe their reputation not nearly as much to good works as to a nearly three-quarters-of-a-century-long public relations machine played out over the airwaves. Their rehabilitation is a priority, protection of their reputation a must. “Whereas police are humanized through the use of actual names and portrayed as courageous defenders against the hordes of the criminally insane, the voice of the citizen-suspect is given little credibility,” reported a 2004 study in the Western Journal of Communication on the long-running television show Cops. “In Cops, requests for clarification of the reasons for stops are dismissed and met with increasing aggression by police.”

None of this would carry much importance if the public were able to relegate what they see of police on the screen to the realm of entertainment, but studies of the effect of flooding the airwaves with police dramas show that large numbers of Americans shape their image of law enforcement from television, whether notorious reality shows like Cops or clear fictional dramas such as Law and Order. Studies reveal not only that Americans often form favorable opinions of police from television but also that cop shows are where they learn how police departments function. “It’s the best recruitment tool for policing ever,” Randy Sutton, a retired Las Vegas police officer, said about Cops. The Western Journal of Communication study on reality-based police dramas concluded that “even as violent crime rates decline, these programs may encourage fear by over-representing violent crime. By promoting a fear of crime and the image that minorities are responsible for most crime, these reality programs may serve as justification for harsher penalties and even police aggression toward citizen-suspects.”

Television conditions Americans to accept wide ranges of force used against suspects. It is a symptom more than a cause, of course, because this deadly farce is not merely the result of cop buddy movies. The numbers reinforce the attitudes that play out every day, on juries, at parties, over dinner: the childish need for justice to be uncomplicated. A study appearing in the 2015 issue of Criminal Justice and Behavior on the effect of police dramas on the public reported that only one in ten respondents believed police used force when making an arrest, but when police did, 79 percent believed the suspect “deserved it.” The study also reported that 63 percent of respondents believe police “rarely or never” coerced false confessions from subjects. The study concluded that “watching crime dramas increases the probability of believing the use of force was necessary by six percentage points.” They’re living in fantasy.

Meanwhile, in real life, the numbers shatter families. The Washington Post reported 995 people were killed by police in 2015, 963 in 2016, and 987 in 2017. That’s 2,945 people in three years. Those years saw videotaped recording of police killing Daniel Shaver, Terence Crutcher, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling—with police being acquitted of wrongdoing in each case. On April 11, 2015, the Washington Post reported, “Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged.” A June 2018 Gallup poll concluded that 54 percent of respondents reported a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in police, third behind the military (74 percent) and small business (67 percent). None of the next twelve categories garnered even 40 percent confidence. The American Bar Association reported twenty-nine wrongful-conviction rulings in 2017 involving police extracting false confessions. It’s a small number—unless you happen to be one of them.

HEROES

A few weeks before dealhack.com listed the companies offering the best police discounts, four St. Louis Police Department officers were indicted for beating a protester during a demonstration a year earlier. The protester was black and defenseless and, according to FBI investigators, complied with officers’ commands before they threw him to the ground and beat him with their nightsticks. One officer kicked him in the face, swelling his jaw so severely he could not eat for weeks. The man suffered a two-centimeter hole in his face from the beating, which was described in the police report as a “cut on the lip.” In text messages, the officers bragged about illegally beating protesters, with the added bonus of being able to do so without fear of being recognized because their riot gear did not include their names. “It’s gonna be a lot of fun beating the hell out of these shitheads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart,” one text read. Afterward, another texted, “It was a blast beating people that deserve it.” They were cops. They could abuse citizens and they knew it. They were heroes. In 2016, Gallup reported 80 percent of white respondents surveyed said they had a “great deal” of respect for police in their area. One of the officers involved in the beating texted another to make sure “an old white guy” was present whenever they beat a protester. Old white guys always trust the police, they knew. The three officers were indicted for their assault. A fourth, another officer who was in a relationship with one of the assailants, was indicted for lying to investigators, and all four were indicted on another count of covering up the assault.

It is possible, probable even, that the officers would have gotten away with all of it and none of the charges would have been levied if not for the fantastical appearance of bad luck—Hollywood-movie level, Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night–level bad luck—for the cops. The black man they pummeled happened not to be some faceless, rightsless nobody of another untrustworthy black man but instead was the St. Louis PD’s own Luther Hall, a twenty-two-year veteran of the force who happened to be working the crowd on an undercover assignment. The alt-weekly Riverfront Times reported that Hall told investigators his fellow officers “beat the fuck out of him like Rodney King.”

On September 15, 2018, eight thousand Massachusetts residents were affected by a gas emergency that set off explosions and cut off power in sections of the northeastern part of the state. Using a computer screenshot, state police posted a map to Twitter of the affected areas, warning residents to evacuate at the smell of gas. The screenshot included, inadvertently, a bookmark of several organizations, all of which were politically left, one of which—Mass Action Against Police Brutality—was directly committed to police reform. Less than thirty minutes later the post was deleted but it was too late. The Massachusetts State Police, notoriously secretive and already under investigation by the state for fraud, attempting to destroy payroll records, and other infractions, had tipped their hand: they were spying on left-wing groups under a program that monitors and collects information “relevant to terrorism and public safety.” This at a time when even the FBI was on record confirming the alarming rise of white nationalist groups in the country. The New York Times, laughably if not for the gravity of the insult, even published a lengthy story on November 3, 2018, detailing how, amid stoking by the Trump White House, law enforcement “failed to see the threat of white nationalism.” The Twitter gaffe explained it: the cops were surveilling the wrong people.

Three weeks after the Times piece, the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against the San Francisco Police Department for racially profiling black citizens during undercover drug arrests. The SFPD had had its own text-messaging scandal involving its bias against black citizens in 2011 and 2012, when white police officers joked about “burning crosses” and called biracial children “half-breeds” who were “an abomination of nature.” Earlier in the 2018 season, on July 26, the San Francisco Giants held Law Enforcement Appreciation Night.

The list of similar actions by police across the country is virtually endless, whether it is based on a calendar year or a century, from Jackie Robinson testifying to Congress in 1949 about the reality of police brutality in black communities; to the oppressive tactics that led to the formation of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s; to the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases in New York in the 1990s; to high-profile shootings in the Black Lives Matter era such as Chicago Police shooting seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald sixteen times; to racial profiling by police, whether in St. Louis or San Francisco or Boston. After killing unarmed, unthreatening, and sobbing Daniel Shaver, fired Mesa, Arizona, police officer Philip Brailsford appealed to receive a pension under a PTSD medical claim. The claim was approved in July 2019; Brailsford was rehired and his firing rescinded. Under the terms of his pension, the city of Mesa agreed to pay the twenty-eight-year-old Brailsford $31,000 per month for the rest of his life, provide a job reference of “neutral,” while covering up to $3 million for any potential legal fees or civil settlements filed against him for killing Shaver. If justice were real, Philip Brailsford would be a murderer as well as a killer, and if he lives to the average male life expectancy of seventy-eight, the state will have paid him $2.5 million, but no amount of body-cam videos or racist text messages or egregious payout settlements shifts the attitude toward police that the mainstream clings to with a childlike fidelity. Policing in America is not an occupation. It is an ideal.

THE GLUE OF WHITENESS

What, it must be wondered, is so valuable that these truths, fatal to virtually any other profession, are tolerated, protected, and justified when exposed regarding police? Nearly three thousand killings by police over a three-year period—several of unarmed citizens and captured on video—with a less than virtually nonexistent conviction rate of officers. Evidence that policemen are often aligned with white nationalist organizations. False confessions. Fraud. Illegal surveillance. Billions paid out in civil settlements. The National Center for Women and Policing reported in 2014 that 10 percent of American families experience domestic violence, but for police officers’ families, the number is two to four times higher, one of the highest rates in the nation, though given the issue’s national coverage a first guess would be that the highest rate involves black football players. Though steroids are largely associated with sports, there is a culture of anabolic steroid use among police, as documented in University of Texas professor John M. Hoberman’s searing book Dopers in Uniform.

This is the evidence, not conjecture or theory, of an institution facing enormous challenges, one in desperate need of reform and oversight. The reality repudiates the public relations. The transgressions, as widespread as they are disparate, explain at least in part the existence of the propaganda, for actual police-work is neither clean nor often heroic. After an officer with the Cleveland Police Department killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice within two seconds of encountering him in 2014, the department paid his family a $6 million settlement of taxpayer money (without admitting wrongdoing, of course) and then publicly and shamelessly said the family should donate the money to charity. Killing a child, then painting the survivors as greedy lottery winners, isn’t quite the appropriate selling point for Cleveland Indians Law Enforcement Appreciation Night.

In April 2019, USA Today reported that over the previous decade, eighty-five thousand police officers had been investigated or disciplined for misconduct. “Officers have beaten members of the public, planted evidence and used their badges to harass women,” the report read. “They have lied, stolen, dealt drugs, driven drunk and abused their spouses.” The report documented more than two thousand examples of “perjury, tampering with evidence or falsifying reports.” Twenty officers were the subject of at least one hundred allegations each but remained on the job.

It is not simply power that prevents the public and the corporate machine from challenging law enforcement. (The Catholic Church was an equally if not even more powerful institution and yet has not recovered from its breaking of the public trust and quite likely never will.) The critical difference, beyond the one-liners-and-ammo formula of Hollywood cop-buddy movies, beyond the Blue Lives Matter police union intimidation, and beyond all the post-9/11 hero talk, is what the idea of law enforcement means to white mainstream culture. Policing is the glue of whiteness. Like the white American identity, which has never reconciled with the bloody and murderous roots of its empire, the police propaganda smothering the culture asserts an inherent goodness. Police are good, even when they kill, even when they break or flout the law, even when they roll tanks into Ferguson or occupy minority communities dressed as if they are invading Aleppo, which makes their transgressions forgivable. The same is true of whiteness, when it first appeared on the shores of a brown nation, when it isolates and then displaces to gentrify, when it annexes land, appropriates resources, and colonizes and then leads humanitarian efforts. Its presence must always be concluded to be a positive one. The myth of police as essential to goodness and not to whiteness must be protected as vigilantly as one protects the flag. For if it is not, and law enforcement, justice and whiteness are coupled, as the black and the brown know they always have been, then neutrality crumbles. The government, the law, the Constitution, and the commitment to equality are no longer objective and they must then be seen as the black person sees them—as the enforcement arm of whiteness. Heroism falls apart. The entire idea must be reconstituted.

Conversely, if police allow themselves to be the enforcement arm of whiteness, then who is the natural target, the obvious threat? It is the nonwhite. Black people have found themselves the targets of a particular phenomenon: white people (white women primarily) across the country calling the police on them. Whether it’s a white woman calling police on a black female student napping in the Yale library, an employee calling police on two black friends awaiting another at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, or a white woman phoning police on a black family barbecuing in an Oakland park, the message is that black people do not belong in public spaces. When they are in public they are being watched not only by police but by average citizens who have chosen to aid in the policing. In 2019, a woman photographed a black Washington, DC, transit worker eating on the Metro, taking the time to tweet her bosses demanding the woman be disciplined.

Black presence suggests threat and becomes an unintended consequence of the War on Terror’s “If you see something, say something” mandate. Taking this slogan to its natural conclusion, if the public is enlisted as agents of the state, their actions will reflect their fears, and their fear is black people. If the public does not believe black people belong in common, everyday American spaces without tight monitoring, then black people, like the Boston Marathon bombers or ISIS sympathizers, become the threat. The police become the personal protectors of the white public. They will be asked and expected to remove black people from spaces that white people do not believe African Americans have a right to share.

Calling the police on black people is an extension of the public and police’s willingness to believe in black criminality, which has long been used by white perpetrators of heinous crime. In 1990, Charles Stuart infamously murdered his pregnant wife in Boston and blamed it on a black male. In 1995, Susan Smith drowned her two children and told police a black man killed her children after a carjacking. Two weeks before the 2008 election a twenty-year-old John McCain campaign volunteer named Ashley Todd claimed a black Obama supporter had attacked her and scratched the letter “B” into her face. In each case, law enforcement acted as the perpetrators had hoped, rounding up black suspects, quick to believe in black malfeasance as credible. Black people were used as the bait by the white perpetrators for one reason: they knew that at a first glance, and sometimes a first glance is all it takes, it would work. Existing while black.

Yet within this dynamic, when white people believe the law is designed to protect only them, and when they know they can act upon this belief at will, brazenly dialing 911 whenever they feel a black person has forgotten his or her place, the idea of white benevolence disintegrates as quickly as the neutrality of law enforcement. Whites can view themselves as both the conqueror and the asset that must be protected. Police are the occupiers, ready at a moment’s notice to enforce the will not of justice for all but of whiteness.

Without the pretense of fairness, the nostalgia of the self-made fantasy, of police pulling themselves up and out of the lower class through the virtue of aiding justice becomes, finally and inevitably, ridiculous. Police is so tied to whiteness because it was the pathway to the American dream. Law enforcement provided one of the earliest opportunities for so many whites, especially big-city Italians, Poles, and Irish, to rise from immigrant to American. The blue-collar police and fire departments represented their path to legitimacy, to assimilation, built their middle class. It is how the Irish graduated from disorderly to white to hero. It is how the Italians transformed from criminal to white to hero. Just as with the military, there is nostalgia in the dynastic qualities of law enforcement, of how the son followed the father who followed his father into the business, the myth of gallantry maintained, that a valuable and noble trek from the Old World to the New was being completed.

It is a story darkly revived in post-9/11 America, except the inherent goodness of police transformed from the old Officer Friendly archetype into that of vigilant superpatriot. The former offered the melting pot a chance that community belonged to all people. The latter is a snarling defense of whiteness, patriotism, and xenophobia so deeply embedded into the culture that law enforcement now is cultivated as a patriotic business partner with professional sports leagues. One must ask: If Colin Kaepernick had taken a knee for global warming or education reform, would his industry and his country have lashed out so ferociously, so permanently?

Telling a different tale—that the Irish and Italian cops in Boston and New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore (not to mention Chicago and San Francisco), joined the American middle class by beating niggers over the head, by maintaining economic dominance over them through graft, corruption, and prohibiting them from joining police and fire departments in large numbers, only to come home and beat their spouses—would not spawn many enthusiastic TV shows. If the heroes weren’t heroes, the nostalgic, self-made-immigrant story dissolves and the badge loses its appeal and becomes, as it has been for black people all along, something to fear.

UNRAVELING

Consider, then, what deconstruction of the police and its TV/movie/ballpark propaganda machine would do for black people. It would humanize them while indicting the untold hours of cop programming. It would mean that black people weren’t lying after all. So many people, even without attending funerals or having their applications to the police academy rejected, have always known this to be untrue, that the stories of the Old World peasant arriving at Ellis Island with two dollars and a dream still placed them miles ahead of the richest black person because their impediments were not forever statutory. A pathway to becoming American existed, gave the immigrants hope. It gave them life. All they needed to do was work hard.

How, one wonders, now that there are black people, too, who can move to the suburbs, who can become cops, who can join the hero story as long as they stick to the script, has the space between us remained? We, those integrated members of the middle class, grew up side by side with our white friends in the same economic climates, our parents earning roughly the same money, trafficking ostensibly in the same postracial world. We saw the same viral videos and relied on each other’s assumed decency, and, while watching the latest dashcam videos of another citizen shot unnecessarily by police, shared the same outrages. We thought we did.

Yet after the beers are cracked and another log gets tossed onto the fire and the subject turns to policing, not the horror of the black teen getting shot but what to do about it and who is actually responsible, the gaps grow wide and the silences long and the good white friends, the allies, will make nervous, bold jokes about how the police treat black people and how ridiculous and stupid Barbecue Becky was for calling the cops on black people. It is their nod to their black friends that they’re in on it, that they get it and are among the good ones equally horrified by Walter Scott being gunned down by Michael Slager in South Carolina. Yet “getting it” and doing nothing to stop it is not much help to anyone.

Besides, everyone, in their own way, is “in on it,” including the black people who give their own frustrated nod to the stories of driving while black but don’t quite believe they are actually the target, not because they believe they are immune but because they, too, know fear, are sick of black kids doing stupid shit, scared of guns and crime, and when they’re scared they believe that troopers, and not improved economic conditions, are their best protection. They, too, want to buy in to the power of the police state. It is how delusions thrive. No entity is more “in on it,” of course, than the police themselves—the responsible ones who say just enough to sound reasonable and do just enough to thwart any hint of reform and who maintain solidarity with the rest of the force that threatens to withhold services because Beyoncé criticized police in a song or several Cleveland Browns once took a knee because the cops killed Tamir Rice. The people, the ones who are living under the increasingly occupying hostility of police, the ones who know firsthand the parts of the job—the ticketing quotas, the stop- and-frisk harassment, the revenue-generation imperatives, the text-message snickering about beating niggers over the head and getting away with it—that are never shown in the movies or on Blue Bloods, CSI, or Hawaii Five-O or mentioned during the Houston Astros Law Enforcement Appreciation Night, also knew something else from the hero worship post-9/11: their nightmare continued, increased, for the police were even more brazen now that they were no longer considered blue-collar city employees but the first line of the national domestic defense. The police even wear camouflage now, desert camo. In the middle of an American city. If there is a military-industrial complex, and surely there is, there exists also a police-industrial complex, and it demands obedience. All of this is necessary, we are told, to keep us safe. There are, as the feminist writer Rebecca Solnit wrote, many ways to tell a lie, and one of the best ways is to entertain the people who are listening to it.