Would Jesus Defund the Police? He Drowned the Pigs
By: Joel Nihlean
Tags: Politics, Police, Christianity, History, BlackLivesMatter

Who do the police truly serve?

Many will no doubt insist that police in the United States are different. And they are, in a way, but not one that matters in a material sense. In ancient Rome, there was no distinction between soldiers and police. Legion was law enforcement.

Police as a separate entity from the military is a novel feature of the modern state. Police in the United States were formalized from slave patrols in the South. And in the industrialized North, early police officers were tasked with breaking up labor strikes against unjust and dangerous working conditions that put profit over people’s health, safety, and wellbeing.

In the bigger picture, Legion or police is a distinction without a difference.

Like first-century Roman soldiers, cops today are professionals with a job to do. The tools have changed — riot gear, semi-automatic weapons, tear-gas, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, armored vehicles, clubs, and surveillance technology have replaced Bronze Age armor and broad swords — but the mission is much the same.

Twenty-first century policing depends on the myth that we live in a fair and meritocratic society — a world with a level playing field where we all have an equal chance at success and a happy life; a democratic country where we all have an equal say, and the state serves us all equitably. Spoiler: This has never, ever been the case.

The reality is that prosperity and safety are secured for an ultra-wealthy minority — and the system itself justified — by demonizing and brutalizing those on the short end.

At the end of 2019, the wealthiest 11 percent of the world’s adults owned more than 80 percent of the wealth. A permanent underclass of have-nots is a necessary feature of a capitalist society, and it’s ultimately a threat to its legitimacy, too.

The threat is resolved, at least partially, through neoliberal responsibilization in the guise of the rhetoric of freedom of choice. This isn’t entirely different that the first century Judean concept of societal ills being punishment for sin.

In the 21st century, poverty and all its related ills are framed as the results of poor decision making, not a lack of real options or opportunities. We hang debt, hunger, and hardships around the necks of the exploited as a personal failing, a sin.

With this transubstantiation of societal failings into personal responsibility, the ruling class absolve themselves of any guilt or accountability for benefiting from or maintaining this misery. Together, these forces of demonization and criminalization work to justify and hold this arrangement together, creating scapegoats and enemies of the marginalized.

The open secret in law enforcement is that police don’t prevent crime, they respond to societal failure. Police maintain this unjust system by containing the damage and chaos it causes in communities on the losing end of the political, economic and social arrangement. The reality is that policing is the management of have-nots. It’s governing by criminalization.

Jesus is an abolitionist

In 2020, police killed more than a thousand people in the U.S. Black people were more than twice as likely to die at the hands of the police. And nearly 99 percent of officers who use lethal force are never charged with a crime. But is it really any surprise that the apparatus of American state violence with roots policing slaves and laborers continues to use lethal violence with impunity?

Like the man possessed by Legion, communities and activists have tried everything to restrain and reform the police, but they are too strong, too well armed, and unbound from the consequences of the violence they bring to the communities they patrol.

The police cannot be reformed because control through violence is their job — to punish and kill

Policing isn’t a problem of individual police officers. The problem is not an otherwise good and just system spoiled by a few bad apples. The Pigs were pigs not because of who they were individually, but because they were possessed by the servants of an unjust system — Legion of an empire.

We can’t reform or redeem the institution of policing as it stands. Programs that have cops playing basketball with kids at the park or creating viral dance videos with LGBTQ kids won’t change things. It doesn’t matter if an individual cop isn’t screaming the n-word at a black family during a no-knock raid. It doesn’t matter if the cop is female, can speak Spanish, or is black themselves.

The police cannot be reformed because control through violence is their job — to punish and kill — when the pressures of social coercion fail. Change means driving the legions out of communities and into the depths of the sea.

It would seem that the work of Jesus — the work of the church — has no room for the police officers who do not renounce policing, betray the ruling class, beat their weapons into life-cultivating plowshares, and turn the labor to truly serving the community.

The goal of “Defund the Police” isn’t about a punitive snatching of funding from the cops. It’s more than just investing in projects of service and mercy.

It’s about subverting the interests of the most powerful, wealthy ruling elites — capitalist priorities that clash with the emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical well-being of everyone and everything else, including every animal and plant, the soil and water, even the very air of the beloved creation.

Defund the Police is about changing the world.