How Violent Police Culture Perpetuates Itself
Danielle Cohen June 16, 2020


The past month has shone a long-overdue light on police brutality, and, along with it, a whole range of alarming attitudes that seem to pervade police forces across the country. It's not just the aggressive responses we've seen to nonviolent protest—officers are refusing to wear masks in the middle of a pandemic, as union leaders brandish their badges on national TV angrily demanding they be treated with “respect.” The idea that there is something rotten at the core of police culture is rapidly becoming commonplace.

“Black communities have been talking about this for decades,” said Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at UT Austin who’s spent the last five years observing police precincts across the country in an effort to understand the mechanisms driving our nation’s policing crisis. Sierra-Arévalo believes many of the systemic problems with policing stem from what he calls the danger imperative—a long-held conviction shared among all policemen that their job places them in immediate and very acute danger.

“A fundamental feature of police culture is this preoccupation with danger and violence,” Sierra-Arévalo says. This conviction is instilled the second recruits enter the academy and reinforced at every level, leading officers to understand their lives as constantly threatened by the civilians they’re supposed to be protecting. “Your number one priority is ensuring your physical safety, the physical safety of other officers, and then the public. In practice, it ends up becoming a hierarchy: officers must ensure their own survival before they can do anything else.”

Often this obsession manifests in overblown reactions to minor offenses directed at officers. Sierra-Arévalo points out that last summer, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second largest police union in New York, responded to a string of incidents where civilians doused police officers with water, claiming the buckets could have contained acid or bleach. “The only way that makes sense,” he says, “is if you believe that any sign of resistance whatsoever is a harbinger of doom to come, and indicative of a potential attack.” This type of exaggeration will sound familiar to anyone who watched NYPD commissioner Dermot Shea seemingly jump to conclusions to assert without evidence that a pile of construction debris miles from any major protest had been stashed by looters to threaten the police.

A key piece of this mentality is an obsession with officers who have died on the job. Trainees in the academy and beyond are repeatedly shown videos and told stories of fellow officers killed in the field, leading them to believe it could happen at any moment. Most departments have a memorial wall front and center displaying every officer that’s been killed in the history of the department. Less formal reminders include officers wearing bracelets and sporting tattoos honoring dead colleagues, much like military commemorations. The message is clear: officers die on the job all the time, and anyone could be next.

The reality is that policemen are actually safer now than they have been in the last 50 years. Fewer than 57 cops are killed each year, and that number is going down, even as the number of officers in the field increases. Policing is a relatively dangerous job, but less deadly than working as a roofer or driving a cab. Garbage collectors are killed at twice the rate of police; fishermen are more than eight times as likely to die on the job. The undue emphasis on officer deaths, Sierra-Arévalo explains, tells cops that they’re putting their lives on the line every time they step onto the job, thus “ignoring 90% of police work, which is actually more akin to very poorly equipped social work.”

Other symbols underline the idea of policemen as unappreciated heroes risking their lives in the name of justice, like the Punisher logo Sierra-Arévalo saw on water bottles during his ride-alongs. Some use “Bad Boys” as their ringtone because it was the theme song to COPS, which was canceled just last week as part of America's reckoning with the glorification of police culture. Another logo of a skull with a sheriff’s hat, often accompanied by crossed pistols à la Jolly Roger, pops up on clipboards, stickers, and in tattoos, sometimes next to the words “We conquered the West.” “This is all indicative of a deep-seated understanding,” Sierra-Arévalo explains, “of ‘our job is dangerous, we are crime fighters above all else, and in order to do this job, we must be prepared to use force.’”

The mentality that police are constantly in critical danger then gets shored up at the federal level through the transfer of military equipment to local precincts. While this gear has been flowing into departments since the 90s, it caught a spotlight in 2014 when officers were photographed barreling through the Ferguson protests in MRAP vehicles designed to withstand land mine explosions. “The presence of this stuff confirms for officers just how dangerous their job is,” says Sierra-Arévalo.

On a social level, the structure of police units also fuels the opportunity for these beliefs to be reinforced by fellow officers. Andrew Papachristos, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, has found that use of force actually spreads throughout police units via social networks. He and his colleagues used records from the Chicago Police Department to trace misconduct, mapping social and professional networks through which they could track the spread of violent behavior. They found that officers who fire their gun most often occupied the most central nodes of those networks.

“Our studies show that there are quite a few bad apples, but what actually happens is the rest of that phrase: they spoil the bunch,” Papachristos says. Since the structure of policing is built on a series of networks—patrol partners, districts, units—the so-called “bad apples” have ample opportunity to spread misconduct. And since the unions’ extravagant efforts to protect policemen make it impossible to fire officers, those with complaints filed against them end up getting shuffled around between districts, presenting more and more opportunities for “infection.” This is all before you consider the informal social networks—friends from the academy and former districts, family members—that help bolster the same behavior.

The sheer amount of reinforcement might explain why no reform has yet been able to curb, let alone eradicate, the rampant displays of violence and aggression, that fall largely on the shoulders of Black and brown communities. “The departments that I’ve observed have de-escalation training,” Sierra-Arévalo emphasized, on top of procedural justice and implicit bias training. “This is something about policing itself. This is a story of inherently flawed people and inherently flawed systems that set them up to engage in miscarriages of justice.”



A Minneapolis Police Officer Opens Up About the Toxic Culture Inside the Department

“The mentality that we’re in a war, and the culture of ‘us versus them,’ starts in the academy”

Originally Appeared on GQ