ACAB, Explained

All Cops Are Bad

All Cops Are Bastards

All Cops Are Bullies

All Cops Are Bullshit

You get the drift. It can stand for a few things. But they all mean the same, sweeping judgment. Police in their current form, regardless of the personal makeup of the force or its location, are all bad. For society, for our citizenry, for themselves. Allow me to explain why such a prejudicial expression is precisely accurate.

It’s not American for starters. It was recently re-popularized by our pasty skinhead cousins overseas in the 70s. Jolly Ol’ England. The Island Mistress. And it was around for roughly 100 years before that. But it works perfectly well for an American movement when you swap out the “copper” for “cop”.

Strap yourselves in, dear readers, because I am going to attempt two insanely hyperbolic analogies to try and get my point across. One will involve Nazis. The other, slavery. To be clear: I am not equating police officers to Nazis or slave owners. Sure, there are Nazis on the police force. And yeah, ok, one of the first forms of policing in America was to round up slaves. But let’s not quibble over that now. Instead, focus on the role that police officers play within a system.

Nazis did not exist in a vacuum. They were part of a fascist system that evolved over time. They didn’t just show up on day one with death camps and dreams of world war. Slave owners were the same: agents within a system. Nazis and slave owners did not exist within a vacuum. They lived and breathed in the real-world with the rest of us. And, like us, they participated in the American system. This is a system that has evolved over time with different roles being played by different actors. To this day, the chief influencer in virtually every form of power within our system is a white man. From politics to wealth acquisition, white people have a monopoly on having. (Do I need to post the links or can we accept this is true? @ me if you need to be schooled on reality.) The system relies upon white supremacy to inform how a veneer of control is maintained, or as the Tanning Cream Dream likes to say, “LAW & ORDER”, just like the TV show.

All Cops Are Bastards.

Do not personalize the statement. I am not talking about your uncle Donnie who walks a beat in the Big Apple. Maybe he’s a fine man who goes to church and does stuff in the community. Maybe he even rescues animals in his spare time. Donnie could be a perfectly nice man without ill-intention in his heart. But the question I have for you is this:

Were there “good” Nazis? Were there men like your uncle who were generous, thoughtful, loving fathers that also put a swastika on their arm every day? Almost certainly you could find instances of people going along with Nazism as a form of self-preservation, people who reviled what other Nazis did but felt compelled to protect their family. There may have even been Nazis who opposed the lethal means Hitler used. A medium Nazi, if you will. People who dug the fascism but felt Adolf got a little carried away. There probably Nazis of all stripe and color. Well, not color. They were definitely all white but there was probably some diversity in thought amongst them. But does this qualify them as “good” Nazis?

How about another doozie?

Were there “good” slave owners? Thomas Jefferson (Tommy J to his pals) owned slaves and he’s got a monument AND a college. He’s on money. He’s a revered thinker and founding father. Yet he owned people. He raped them and fathered children with them. And this from a dude who “argued against race-mixing because black people were ‘inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.’” Square that circle, Jefferson apologists. But back to the question. Were there “good” slave owners?

No matter how intelligent, thoughtful, kind, genteel, and considerate of a person a slave owner might have been, because he was an active agent within a system of slavery, his role was unjust and immoral. Under what conditions and circumstances would it be acceptable to allow slavery again? What restrictions for cruelty could we pass that would satisfy enough people to allow its establishment once more? None. Because the system itself is corrupt and immoral it taints all the fruits it produces. There is no “good” slaveowner because the system of slavery itself is immoral.

Like fascism and slavery, modern police officers are agents within a system that is motivated by the ideals of white supremacy to maintain the status quo. They are not direct actors in the same sense as cops and southern plantation owners, but by participating in a corrupt, immoral system, their position is, by default, corrupt and immoral. The individual person is irrelevant to the system. In fact, we have systems precisely to erase individual thinking. The lever goes up and the ball goes down. White = right maintained by might.

Part of the reason why this system appears invisible to white people is that they directly benefit from it and are rarely impacted negatively by it. That’s part of why it’s so insidious. It is seeing the forest for the trees and requires a larger perspective than the individual agent can offer.

All Cops Are Bad.

All Cops Are Bastards.

Not because the dudes wearing the badges are bad. But because they are the tools of an oppressive, abusive system that seeks to maintain white supremacy by any means necessary. So next time you see or hear someone talking about a bad apple, remember the poisonous ground from which it grew.