Not Pynchon but the making of Bigfoot, so to speak. the militarization of cops.

[Mark Kohut]

The beginning of a long review of two books in the LA Review of Books:

uck the Police: Are We Done with Traditional Law Enforcement?

By Adam Greenfield <https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/adam-greenfield>

98

0

2




JANUARY 2, 2018

*I.*

WE OWE the notion of a centralized force dedicated to maintenance of the
public order to no less a personage than the Sun King himself, Louis XIV of
France, who in 1667 issued an edict creating a lieutenancy of police for
Paris. Louis evidently intended to replace the medieval city’s crazyquilt
of rudimentary law-enforcement measures with something a little more
consistent and predictable.

The notion of a standing law-enforcement body eventually made its way
across the English Channel to that other early modern megacity London,
where in 1749 a judge and author named Henry Fielding convened an office of
six men at his Covent Garden magistracy. Authorized to apprehend
lawbreakers and deliver them to Fielding for trial, these were the Bow
Street Runners, generally regarded as the prototype of the modern
professional police force. But they were not yet a patrol force. That
distinction belongs to the Metropolitan Police, organized by Sir Robert
Peel under Parliamentary charter in 1829, and it is with this formation
that law enforcement in the Anglosphere assumed much of its present shape,
with all the familiar paraphernalia of precincts and uniforms, ranks and
badges, beats and beat officers.

There matters more or less remained until 1950, when the newly appointed
chief of police in Los Angeles, William Parker, undertook a reorganization
of that city’s force that made use of lessons learned in World War II
counterinsurgency operations, and somewhat more distantly from the American
occupation of the Philippine Islands. In what Mike Davis has referred to as
one in a series of “pathbreaking substitutions of technological capital for
patrol manpower,” Chief Parker’s LAPD dispersed its officers across the
octopic sprawl of the city in a supple, responsive grid of mobile units
dispatched via radio. In these radio cars, the LAPD seemed to be everywhere
at once, overmastering an urban topology determined by the
internal-combustion engine like no other in history.

And here another long period of conceptual stagnation enveloped law
enforcement, at least in the United States. Despite having been tasked over
the past two decades with the front-line responsibility for homelessness,
school safety, and the management of mental-health crises, and very much
despite the occasional vogue for well-intentioned reforms like “community
policing,” the archetypal contemporary American police force remains much
as Parker envisioned his LAPD. Pleased to regard themselves as a “thin blue
line” — the phrasing is another of Parker’s innovations — between polite
society and the red-in-tooth-and-claw savagery an unpoliced community would
otherwise surely descend to, the United States’s patrol officers now hunker
down behind the tenets of a “warrior” mentality, explicitly embracing the
virtues of paranoia and instantaneous, overwhelming response to situations
(and people) perceived as threats.

Increasingly militarized, in large part through the so-called 1033 program,
a federal initiative that transfers war-surplus materiel like automatic
weapons and armored vehicles to public-safety departments at zero cost,
they maintain a sullen, wary, often hostile distance from the communities
they are formally chartered to protect and serve.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20180107/c6c15cb9/attachment.html>