I was talking with a someone about whether you should always help the police prosecute serious crimes, up to and including rape and murder, even if you know that the police system is corrupt. I said that I would support the police in prosecuting a murder, but I didn’t think that this was a slam-dunk obvious moral conclusion. This was my response to them.

I don’t have a super strong take about what the correct answer is here, only that there’s a moral dilemma to contend with at all.

I

Let’s start with this hypothetical:

Let’s say you live in a slum in Chicago. The neighborhood you live in is controlled by a gang. Police officers mostly don’t go into your neighborhood, because the gang has a tight hold on it.

The primary activities of the gang are selling crack, and extorting protection money. That’s their main business model. There are a bunch of grunts, but the top guys in the organization get pretty rich this way.

That business model entails maintaining control over their territory. So if someone else tries to sell crack in your neighborhood, they’ll scare him away, and if he comes back, they’ll kill him. And a lot of violence is bad for business, so if someone not in the gang is roughing people up, the gang will typically threaten them, drive them away, hurt them, or kill them. (If a member of the gang kills someone unnecessarily, they might get reprimanded for being stupid, but probably not much more than that.)

If someone is murdered by a non-gang-member, the gang won’t do much of an investigation. But usually it’s pretty clear who did it. And depending on who was killed, killing someone on gang territory represents a challenge to the gang’s power, and so they’ll probably find and kill the perpetrator, in retribution.

The gang is a major “social institution” in your neighborhood. They’re the closest thing to an organization of law and order that’s around.

I claim that it is NOT obvious that if someone is murdered, you should help the gang find and kill the perpetrator.

That might sometimes turn out to be the best available option, especially if the killer seems really dangerous. But helping the gang is basically siding with one set of murderers against another. And by helping them you’re adding whatever social weight you have to their legitimacy as the Schelling norm-enforcement institution.

Probably if the gang suddenly got a lot weaker, such that they stopped being the Schelling “biggest force around”, things would get locally worse, as a bunch of smaller gangs would make a play for the power vacuum. There would be more violence, not less, until eventually you’ll settle into a new lower-violence equilibrium where there’s some other gang that’s dominant (or maybe a few gangs, which have divided and staked out the old territory). 

But that the collapse of the gang’s power would be locally bad, doesn’t make it obvious that supporting them is the moral thing to do. 

II

That’s one hypothetical. Now let’s try on a different one.

Let’s say that literally all of the above circumstances obtain, but instead of a gang, it’s the local police force that’s behaving this way.

Let’s say you live in a slum in Chicago. The neighborhood you live in is controlled by the local police department. Police officers from other jurisdictions mostly don’t go into your neighborhood, because this local police force has a tight hold on it.

The primary activities of the police force are selling crack, and extorting protection money. That’s their main business model. There are a bunch of grunts, but the top guys in the organization get pretty rich this way.

That business model entails maintaining control over their territory. So if someone else tries to sell crack in your neighborhood, the police will scare him away, and if he comes back, they’ll kill him. And a lot of violence is bad for business, so if someone who’s not a member of the department is roughing people up, the police officers will typically threaten them, drive them away, hurt them, or kill them. (If a police officer kills someone unnecessarily, they might get reprimanded for being stupid, but probably not much more than that.)

If someone is murdered by a non-police-officer, the police won’t do much of an investigation. But usually it’s pretty clear who did it. And depending on who was killed, killing someone on their territory represents a challenge to the department’s power, and so they’ll probably find and kill the perpetrator in retribution.

The police department is a major “social institution” in your neighborhood. They’re the closest thing to an organization of law and order that’s around.

It is maybe an important difference between the first hypothetical and this one, that the gang wears police uniforms. But I don’t think it is much of a cruxy difference. If we blur our eyes and look at the effects, the second scenario is almost identical to the first. It’s only the labels that are different.

If it seems morally incorrect to side with the local gang in the first hypothetical, then it seems morally incorrect to side with the police in the second. That an organization is called “the police” is rarely cruxy for whether they deserve our support as a bastion of civilization.

III

That was a hypothetical. Now let’s talk about some real historical cases.

Let’s consider the sheriff of a small town in the South around 1885.

The primary function of the Sheriff is maintaining white supremacy. He does that in a bunch of ways, but most notably, he goes around arresting black men on extremely flimsy legal pretext (“loitering” or “vagrancy”, if the man goes into town, for instance, or for failing to pay debts that he was forced to take on), and sometimes no legal pretext at all. He and the local judge sentence the black man to hard labor, and then sell a contract for that man’s labor to one of their buddies, a man who owns a mine up-state.

The black man will probably spend the rest of his life doing forced labor for that mine-owner. Every time the end of his sentence is coming up, he’ll be penalized for some infraction that will necessitate extending his sentence. That way, the mine can continue to extort his labor indefinitely.

The Sheriff, the Judge, and the mine-owners all make a profit from this.

Sometimes people from the North come down and observe this system. Some of them are appalled, but no one wants another Civil War, and there’s a balance of power in the federal government that lets the Southern states govern themselves how the choose. So no one stops this, even though it’s definitely illegal by common law and by US federal law.

Sometimes, when a white man is murdered, the Sheriff will do an investigation and punish the perpetrator. But often, they’ll probably scapegoat and lynch a black man for it, instead. But, I presume that he does (at least sometimes) do basically appropriate law-enforcement work, arresting and prosecuting white criminals, approximately according to the law.

This really happened. For decades. 

(If you want to know more you might check out the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. I think there’s also a PBS documentary. I don’t know if it’s any good.) 

This seems to me to be much worse than a police force that is primarily selling crack and extorting protection money.

That Sheriff is the only game in town for law and order. He is legally empowered by the local government. But the local government is so corrupt and evil as to not to be morally legitimate. I don’t think it deserves my support.

If there’s a murder, even if I trusted that the Sheriff would find and prosecute the perpetrator instead of a scapegoat, I might not want to evoke (and thereby reinforce) his authority, which is not legitimately held.

IV

Now let’s talk about today.

Here’s some stats that I could grab quickly.

• American prisons are famously inhumane. Inmates are regularly raped or killed.
• One out of three black men go to prison in their lifetimes.
• 44% of all the people in American prisons are there for drug offenses. Some large fraction of those are for the victimless crime of smoking weed.
• 5% of illicit drug users are African American, yet African Americans represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses. African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites. (source, which I didn’t factcheck, but these numbers are consistent with my understanding)
• As of October 2016, there have been 1900 exonerations of the wrongfully accused, 47% of the exonerated were African American. (same source as above.)
• It is normal for arrested black men to be threatened into making plea bargains, even when they’re innocent. It is normal for arrested black men to fail to receive due process.
• A Nixon aid said explicitly that the war on drugs was a way of targeting black people:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (source)

This…does not look Just to me. This looks like a massive miscarriage of justice

If a person looks at the past history of how black people were treated by law enforcement, and looks at law enforcement today, and notices that the current crimes are being perpetrated by the same institutions that perpetuated the earlier evils, and they conclude that current US law enforcement organizations are immoral and illegitimate and shouldn’t be cooperated with…

Well, I can see where they’re coming from.

It seems to be a pretty live question whether the typical police force, or the criminal justice system as a whole is better conceived of as basically a gang, extorting and exploiting the marginalized fractions of society, or as an imperfect institution (as all institutions are imperfect) of Justice. And depending on which it is (or if it’s some more complicated thing), I’ll have a different view about whether it’s a good idea to cooperate with the police.