Courtesy of Adam Scotti via Flickr under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Severe incompetency, Hollywood-esque power fantasies, and murderous outgroup mentality are characteristics that police in the United States have repeatedly employed in a number of situations. However, a recent development worsened the situation when officers filled a Texas courthouse in Harris County to intimidate a judge from reallocating police budget, a behavior consistent with gang tactics. This event justifies the existing notion that the current state of the police is a paradise-like ideal for most street gangs; protected from the law, wielding fancy military toys and feared by commoners, all while having no regard for morals or education.

This stunt came as a result of the ongoing conflict between Democratic Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and her Republican incumbents about the county’s budget for 2023. Hidalgo’s position has been to use funds for other social services, which would require reallocating the $1.4 billion police budget that made up a third of their $3.3 billion general fund last fiscal year. Alex del Moral Mealer, Hidalgo’s Republican challenger, whose position on law enforcement is to further fund them, shared a tweet with a picture showing hundreds of policemen outside the county courthouse hours before the meeting started. The Houston Chronicle noted that Judge Hidalgo was booed by the officers.

This is not the first time law enforcement have used these tactics in an attempt to manipulate the law to their advantage. In fact, the law often defends police hooliganism and general lack of morals. It’s relatively unknown by the public that the Supreme Court ruled that police have no obligation to protect citizens or have any knowledge of laws. Historically, the most detrimental ruling, introduced at the height of the civil rights movement, prevented qualified immunity from being evaluated under the Fourth Amendment. Naturally, this was abused and led to police being protected from the consequences of their own violence, especially against people of color.

Police unions have been hard at work to prevent qualified immunity from being repealed. The rationale was that policemen would face bankruptcy and homelessness. They argued that the profession would become barren. This makes it clear that officers have to rely on qualified immunity to maintain their jobs, indicating that the goal is to protect them from being brought to justice instead of maintaining justice.

Additionally, qualified immunity is a terrible band-aid for the lack of meaningful training and rock-bottom standards for joining. According to the Department of Justice, officers get around 21 weeks of training, and only around 168 hours on firearms, use of force and defense tactics, 21 of which is spent on de-escalation. Though the data is from 2013, the consistency of killings indicate that there has been little to no change in the lack of quality in police training.

Lawmakers have been working to repair these flaws in police training. As expected though, the police retaliate even when it is only the slightest threat to their status quo. Officers have responded to these attempted reforms frequently through intimidation and the halting of emergency services. This is primarily in response to the controversial “defund the police” sentiment, despite law enforcement budgets often reaching more than a third of city budgets annually. It is no surprise that these retaliations are meant to maintain their crude militarism mentality, making police reform considerably more difficult.

Police desire for militarization alone burns the “few bad apples” argument. Needing such equipment implies that they expect to engage criminals in military style combat and utilize intimidation tactics similar to those of a gang. This goes to show that law enforcement views the members of the community that they are supposedly meant to protect as the enemy. While there are indeed individuals out there that are capable of professionalism, decency and upholding justice, the police actively retaliate against these types of officers. These actions continue to delegitimize law enforcement as they maintain their position using tactics they condemn from criminal entities.

The police are a primary component of a system that propagates institutionalized racism and class inequality, and they’re using criminal tactics to do it. Unless officers hold respectable morals, are de-militarized and held accountable, police academies and departments persist as breeding grounds for government-backed hoodlums.