For the first time in a long time, American police departments are on the defensive. They’re on the defense in New York, where, after the NYPD’s open insurrection against the mayor, 69% of New York “voters, black, white and Hispanic” disapprove “of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at funerals for two police officers” according to a Quinnipiac poll – and now, even some cops have started openly airing their disgust with their own union leadership. They’re on the defense in Washington, where they’re “on the hot seat” at President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. And they continue to be on the defense in municipalities across the country, as every new police shooting sparks intense national scrutiny on social and in traditional media.

Police departments usually rely on fear and lobbying to beat reforms back; police reformers can’t let them this time.

Police state apologists will try to sell fear, even though “20 years of falling crime and aggressive policing means that police violence – justified or otherwise – now appears to be a much larger share of all violence,” as Harry Siegel wrote in the New York Daily News. But while fear of crime has fallen as fear of police violence has risen, it’s still hard to argue with the good ol’ fear of terrorism.

After Paris, for instance, Congressman Peter King said that “ The fact is, it’s coming from the Muslim community and it shows that the NYPD and Ray Kelly were right for so many years when they were really saturating areas where they thought the threat was coming from” a reference (and perhaps the start of a call for a return to) the NYPD’s defunct and discredited Muslim surveillance program. Senator Bob Corker said that, after too much handwringing over the CIA torture report, America can “over-hamstring” the law enforcement efforts of the NSA, despite the Patriot Act. Corker – who voted against gun control legislation after the Newtown school shootings – told the National Journal that the way to keep an American Charlie Hebdo “from happening is through outstanding intelligence-gathering,” while Senator Lindsey Graham warned that “I fear our intelligence capabilities, those designed to prevent such an attack from taking place on our shores, are quickly eroding.”

And then, of course, the police and their supporters will lobby Congress. True, a handful of conservatives politicians are questioning policing, and the conservative case for reigning in over policing and incarceration should be a no-brainer – especially as police brutality lawsuits routinely cost New York City alone hundreds of millions of dollars and California annually spends more or prisons than on education.

But lobbying is as hard to argue with as the spectre of terrorism. Police unions, private prison corporations, corrections officers unions and more will spend millions of dollars lobbying to hold on to the billions of dollars of government money which comes their way. This is why one of the most trumpeted recent “solutions” to our policing nightmare has been body cams, which are costly to buy, easy for cops to leave off and require catching new crimes on camera to justify their hefty operating expenses.

The way to combat the fear and lobbying is for activists to keep the pressure on right now – like protestors who shut down I-93 in Boston on Thursday.

Politicians will not change policy or buck the beneficiaries of the security state of their own volition. They only respond to money or pressure, and lobbyists will always have more money than activists. But keeping up the pressure can work, even in unexpected ways.

That’s what happened here in New York City: from the time Eric Garner was killed, activists banged their drums so loud that, when the grand jury refused to indict the officer who killed him, Mayor Bill de Blasio felt he had to respond – and pushed into speaking from his heart, about his fears for his own son. It was a message so human that many parents across America heard it loud and clear while the NYPD could or would not listen to the sentiment behind his words: that parents of “children of color, especially young men of color, [must] train them to be very careful when they have ... an encounter with a police officer.”

Instead, the NYPD union leadership took that common sense, heartfelt advice of millions of parents as an attack on every police officer, turned their backs on their civilian commander, and finally decided to respond by only arresting people when “absolutely necessary.” (Why they were unnecessarily arresting people before de Blasio’s statement was not intended as an admission that he was right.)

That mistake – made on the defense – ironically gave anti-police violence activists exactly what they wanted: less violence from cops, be it of the mortal or mundane variety, and arrests only when “absolutely necessary.” The NYPD’s stunt leaves behind a data set of a time with deliberately low arrests, during in which the city did not burn to the ground, and provides more evidence that over policing has little or nothing to do with lowering crime -- a point recently made in Wednesday’s New York Times and in Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. On the ropes, the NYPD may have handed a key piece of evidence to its sworn enemies that could lead to less policing in the future.

It can feel impossible to protest in the streets when authority figures swear that all that stands between you and terrorism is more surveillance. It is hard to protest in the winter, when no less famous an American than George Washington thought it was a good time of year to retreat and wait for spring. But frozen as we may be, the protesters can’t afford to lose their momentum right now – not as KilledByPolice.net shows that there have already been too many deaths this year, not as President Obama’s task force is starting to meet and not when it and the rest of the government needs to be pushed harder by protesters than it inevitably will be pushed by the forces of war.