What The Hell America!

Over the dozen years I spent covering the police as a beat reporter in Los Angeles, I came to realize there are two kinds of officers: showboaters and real cops.

The showboaters strut around and talk tough. They think they know a lot but they don’t. They get in your face when you turn up to cover a story and wax poetic about bad guys, knuckleheads, and gangsters. They praise blanket measures, crackdowns, sweeps. I had to learn how to get past them and find my way to the real cops, who tend to be quieter but know more.

America is having a showboater moment, summed up by federal agents imprisoning alleged immigrant gang members and shipping them abroad. To make itself look strong, the government plays up the danger they pose. Meanwhile, it shrugs off the unglamorous work of following due process and avoiding mistakes.

Read: The terrible optics of ICE enforcement are fueling a Trump immigration backlash

I’ve studied murder in America, so I have no illusions about gangs and what confronting them takes. In an online database of deadly violence, I chronicled more than 900 murders in Los Angeles County in a single year, and in my 2015 book, Ghettoside, I followed the patient investigative work that ultimately brought to justice the killers of an LAPD detective’s son. I’ve seen the death and suffering that gangs inflict on thousands of Americans every year. And I find it infuriating that so many people, particularly on the left, seem to diminish America’s homicide crisis. I understand the desire for a magic wand to make it go away.

But any idiot can pull off a police state. That isn’t innovation.

Governments that imprison indiscriminately and ignore due process have been known to post extraordinarily low murder rates: In the late 2000s, Syria’s dictatorship reported a criminal-homicide rate half that of the United States. Eliminating crime isn’t difficult if you eliminate freedom.

But that ain’t the business, to borrow a phrase I often heard in South L.A. True policing means fighting crime within a constitutional system—safeguarding freedom and security at the same time. This is more sophisticated than mere goonery, and it takes a legal sensibility. Real cops aren’t just security guards, scarecrows, or social workers. They are legal professionals on par with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges. In the homicide units I observed for more than a decade, I never heard a detective complain about shepherding a case through the courts. They knew it was an integral part of the job.

Real cops don’t skirt the rule of law; they wield it in defense of the weak. This ethic prevails even when the victims themselves are criminals, which they very often are. Most gang violence is the result of members attacking one another, and many victims have rap sheets as long as those of their assailants. Showboaters divide the world into bad guys and good guys, but that distinction falls apart when applied to gangs.

And the flashy roundups they favor are in sharp contrast to the way real cops work. The latter are subtle and focused; they don’t squander limited resources on nonviolent or low-priority targets. The Trump administration claims to be focused on gang members, but even that can be too wide a net. When I was reporting in California, the gang members listed in the old state database outnumbered annual gang-related homicides by more than 100 to one. That’s because only a small fraction of gang members were actually shooting people. The rest were lesser criminals, opportunists, hangers-on, partiers, teenagers seeking protection or just trying to fit in. I know of some boys who joined gangs under threat—and a few who were murdered because they refused.

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Real cops go after the killers and shooters, of course, but they try to win over everyone else. They work the weak links—gangs are full of defectors—and they give victims and witnesses the backing they need to stand up, stripping gangs of the power they derive from intimidation and coercion. The most successful cops assemble a quiet army of “friendlies,” many of whom have lost family members to gang violence or been victims of it themselves. These officers receive more tips and have more success getting witnesses to cooperate. Their police work allows people to rely on the protection of the law rather than protection rackets run by gangs.

Neither the political left nor the political right lends much support to these kinds of efforts. Conservatives have long been too giddy about showboating. They reach for hammers when they should reach for scalpels. The current right-wing preference for federal intervention, indiscriminate sweeps, and emergency declarations will undermine the efforts of real cops who already face skepticism in many of their communities. The last thing they need is to be perceived as invaders.

Many on the left, meanwhile, disparage any solution that relies on enforcement—a position that can’t adequately respond to the suffering of victims. A popular leftist line of thinking even holds that the only actual problem is moral panic or fear.

Americans are right to be outraged by criminal homicides, though, including the fraction that illegal immigrants commit. The country has a real murder problem that has been neglected for too long, and certain groups, particularly Black men, have paid a disproportionate price.

But showboating isn’t the answer. Any goon can impose repression. Real cops impose the law. That’s the kind of toughness we need now.