I grew up largely feeling safe around police officers. I have no doubt that this was born of the fact that I have a lighter skin tone (despite being somewhat of a mixed bag, ancestrally speaking).

It came as a surprise to me, upon growing older, that other people did not have the same feeling regarding our law enforcement agencies.

Rather than feeling safe around the police, they felt the need to be constantly on guard, to forego their rights in order to appease the authorities, and to accept feeling dehumanized if it meant less chance of being wrongfully arrested, or worse, outright murdered.

I had inherited a classic, one-dimensional, “good guys versus bad guys,” narrative that didn’t really penetrate beyond the surface of what was happening in this country when it came to our police force, especially in the domain of race.

My preconception was that there were bad guys — usually criminals — that needed to be fought against by the good guys — usually cops — and that this was all there was to it.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe there are dangerous criminals that need to be dealt with.

But as I‘ve gotten older, I’ve come to question whether or not that is the real goal of our police force, or if it has been twisted and perverted into something more sinister — an arm of the ruling class, which benefits from sowing racial divisions and creating a culture of “law enforcement” that relies principally upon the threat of force and the concept of authority to maintain “law and order.”

It’s hard for me to not see the widespread violence in this nation as being in some way connected to the brutish appearance of our police. If our answer to the problem of human error is always to punish, imprison, and kill, rather than to understand, rehabilitate, and reintegrate, can our culture ever become less violent?

I suppose I’m digressing at this point. The larger focus of this post is on why it is in no one’s interest for the United States to have such a militarized police force. No one is made safer by an institution that is accountable to hardly anyone and that, at any moment, can turn on its own citizenry.

Most defenders of our police force lean or fall strongly on the conservative side of the spectrum. Their argument is that without a police force, things would descend into anarchy, and criminals would rule the day.

They are likewise quick to wield the more emotional argument, painting our boys in blue as heroes putting their lives on the line in order to protect and serve.

I think there is some truth to that perspective. I’m not so radical as to suggest that merely putting on the uniform of a cop makes one oppressive or evil. I always believe that individual choices matter more in the day-to-day scheme of affairs. We can always choose how to conduct ourselves and whether or not we take the attitude of being of service to others versus wanting to put ourselves above them. I do believe some cops can be thought of as heroes and that there are undeniably good cops serving on the force.

But even good cops in a bad system are limited in how much good they can do. Even good cops can’t make up for the pain caused by the bad ones. Even good cops are held back and restrained — usually by their superiors — in exactly the same way that the rest of their fellow citizens are.

Let’s really think about this.

Whether you fall on the left or the right, politically speaking, who actually benefits from a police force that is becoming more and more militarized?

You can fret over doom and gloom scenarios coming from right-authoritarian-fascists or left-authoritarian-radicals all day long. The fact of the matter is, if we have a militarized police force that is accountable to no one other than who is higher up on the governmental food chain, it can be converted into a more thorough instrument of oppression in an instant.

It doesn’t really matter who does the oppressing. It can come from the right or the left. What scares me is that we have an institution filled with people itching to carry out violence against the civilian populace, having all the tools, weapons, and equipment to do so, that is just waiting for the right time or the proper excuse to do it.

All forms of authoritarianism have something in common: a ridiculously militarized police force that can imprison or outright murder dissidents and “keep the peace” through the threat of violence.

So what are we to do?

It would seem to me that the far more reasonable course of action would be to de-militarize our police force so that it no longer operates as a paramilitary organization.

Here’s where people often throw their hands up in protest.

“How are we going to be safe if we don’t have a bunch of cops running around with guns and armored vehicles, keeping order?”

First of all, there is something to be said about the hysterical attitude some people have towards society and law enforcement’s role in keeping the peace.

By and large, most human beings are peaceful throughout their day. There are dangerous people we have to watch out for, sure, but what humans have revealed over and over again is that they prefer to live in harmony and in love with one another.

I have yet to see any evidence that without such a ridiculously locked and loaded police force that all the citizens would suddenly lose their moral footing and begin to behave like savages.

Our species has never done that. We’ve always more or less had some system of order or a set of cultural norms that keep us working together, most of the time.

We wouldn’t ever have survived as a species if our will to empathy and compassion wasn’t stronger than our will to hatred and violence.

We have figured out better and better forms of justice through blood and sweat over the thousands of years that we’ve been here, and we are only continuing that very same process today by questioning whether or not we really need to fear the people that are supposed to protect us.

Here is where people may ask for alternatives. “Sure, it’s horrible,” they may say, “But doesn’t it have to be?”

I don’t think so.

There are a lot of interesting ideas about how to reform our nation’s police force. I’m a Bernie Sanders supporter, so I will share what his platform has to say on the matter. The following quote is taken directly from his platform page:

“The people who serve our country as police officers deserve our gratitude and respect. As a country, though, we are asking them to do far too much. As human beings, we all share common vulnerabilities, and we all share basic needs to live a stable and dignified life. “In America, we have not made the necessary investments to secure a strong enough social fabric to ensure that people’s basic needs are met. So, in lieu of addressing problems directly, we ask police officers to address every societal issue that results from the tears in the fabric, whether it be mental illness, addiction, homelessness, or poverty. We ask these overstressed police officers to fill roles they are not trained or equipped for — doubling as social workers, conflict negotiators, and medical responders. Last year, more police officers died of suicide than in the line of duty. We need to shift our emphasis toward solving problems in ways that don’t rely on policing and incarceration as a first option by supporting alternative strategies to make individuals and communities safer and healthier. “In other ways, we must hold our police and sheriff’s departments to a higher standard. And we must end harmful policing practices like racial profiling, stop and frisk, oppressive “broken windows” policing, and the militarization of police forces — all of which actively undermine public safety and community trust in law enforcement. Widespread use of excessive force, including deadly shootings of unarmed civilians, undermine the integrity of and public trust in the police. Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of the police meant to protect and serve our communities, must not be tolerated.” — Bernie Sanders Platform

Something that should be noted in his wording here is that Bernie is highly aware that policing our communities is a stressful job. So stressful, in fact, that it is probably too much for any one person to handle.

There is something compassionate about the way he wants to deal with the problem. He understands that violence, mental illness, poverty, and systemic injustices all have some relation to each other and that it shouldn’t be the job of a militarized police force to doll out a “one size fits all solution” to the problem of criminal justice. All too often, that leads to errors in judgment or outright instances of murder that cause a tremendous amount of pain for everyone involved.

Turning our police force into more of a community organization that works directly with other types of individuals — such as social workers, therapists, counselors, and things of that nature — is a great place to start. We may be a long way off from living in a society in which cops don’t need to carry some form of weaponry on their person, but we certainly don’t need them to rely so heavily upon violence in order to keep the peace.

How can we start doing this?

We can do a better job making sure that communities police themselves. This doesn’t necessitate radically deconstructing our law enforcement agencies and building them from the ground up. Something as simple as allowing officers that are actually from the neighborhoods they police would make a tremendous difference. In that way, the locals and the officers have a more intimate relationship with one another, understand the particular issues facing that neighborhood better, and therefore would be far less likely to resort to violence when dealing with one another.

I’m someone that gets deeply spooked by authoritarianism. I’ve been a huge history buff since childhood. I used to sit on the sofa with my grandfather — who served in World War II — and watch History Channel documentaries about Nazi Germany and the atrocities they committed.

I don’t like seeing anything that even closely resembles that in my own turf. We don’t need a police force that scares the living hell out of us. We need officers that we can trust and that understand the need to use violence as a last resort.

And I don’t think it matters what side of the political spectrum you are on. Libertarians, for instance, have long been voices on the right that have talked about the dangers of allowing any one institution too much potential to inflict violence.

If authoritarianism is to come — either from the right or left — all of us will equally regret that we allowed our law enforcement agencies to become what they are.

There is a better way. We can and should support initiatives to reform our police and move things in a more compassionate direction.