On Good Cops and Bad Cops:

There’s a part of me that wants Derek Chauvin to go to jail. For as long as there have been police, police have been getting away with murder. It would be nice, just this one time, if an officer did actually go to prison for unjustly taking someone's life. I say just this once, but since 2005 just 35 cops have been convicted of a crime related to an on-duty shooting. Only three of those convictions were for murder. So it’s not like it's never happened before. 

There’s another part of me that wonders what the point of all this is. Chauvin was on the force for 19 years and accumulated 18 complaints over that time. Of those 18 complaints, 16 were closed without any disciplinary action taken. One of those incidents that earned Chauvin a professional reprimand was when he and a fellow officer pulled a new mother out of her car without explanation, leaving her infant and dog alone. He received a sternly worded letter. Chauvin’s 18 complaints in 19 years were a lot, even for a police officer. And yet he was still gainfully employed by the Minnesota Police, allowed to legally inflict violence on the public at his discretion, and thus was in a position to kill George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. Whether or not Derek Chauvin goes to prison for murder will have little effect on the system that enabled him to commit the crime for which he stands trial. 

When Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd the situation grew into something larger than either man. Other high profile incidents of police brutality had sparked protests. But what happened in the wake of this particular state-sanctioned murder was unprecedented. Protests spread around the country and eventually around the world. And they did not stop when Chauvin was arrested. It seemed like a breaking point had been reached. People were coming to realize that reforming the police was a woefully inadequate solution to the systematic extermination of Black and brown people. People in more mainstream contexts began to argue that the police need to be defunded, and their blood money put to better use in the communities they have terrorized. Better still, the police need to be abolished and replaced with some kind of new institution designed to actually serve communities rather than simply occupying them. Buildings were burned, bodies were brutalized; such destruction and violence is customary when attempting to radically change the social order. 

The trial of Derek Chauvin is just about Derek Chauvin--a violent sociopath who constantly sought conflict both in his job as a cop and his side gig as a club security guard. One of those proverbial bad apples, you see. Putting Chauvin in prison (if that is what indeed happens) is a victory for those who want a better and less racist police force. This is proof that the system can work. Justice can be had for those who are victims of state violence. If the inciting incident of injustice is caught on tape that is. 

The system is working. Just like it has always worked. And that is precisely the problem. In July of 2020 the New York Times published a piece about Derek Chauvin’s life up to the event that put him at the center of a revolution. There are details about his early life in a home broken by infidelity and divorce. He didn’t stand out in school and he was really eager to be a cop. He was a loner and didn’t really get along with others. Perhaps the most ink is spent on his marriage to a Laotian immigrant, the couple’s desire to live beyond their means, and the time when a Minnesota beauty pageant accidentally revealed how little the Chauvins really knew each other. The piece reads like the profile of a serial killer or mass shooter. Which makes a bit of sense when you remember that a lot of mass shooters start out as domestic abusers and cops commit acts of domestic abuse at much higher rates than the general public. The piece takes special care to note that the people around him noticed a particular antagonism toward Black people.  

What this particular piece about the life of Chauvin and the path that led him to killing George Floyd doesn’t mention is the three other officers who aided and abetted his crime. Nor do they try to explain how Chauvin was allowed to remain on the force despite his precipitous record of negative interactions. 

A similar NYT piece delves into the life of Alex Kueng, the biracial rookie officer who first attempted to arrest George Floyd on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. While Chauvin joined seemingly out of a desire for power and the ability to wield it over others, Kueng signed up to be a cop because he thought he could change the culture of policing from the inside. This decision would alienate him from his Black family and friends. For all his good will, the path of being a police officer led him to the exact same place as Derek Chauvin: suppressing the dangerous classes on behalf of capital and standing trial for murder. It’s important to recognize that Alex Kueng did not want to be a cop because he hated Black people. Likewise, the shop owner that called the cops on Floyd has expressed deep regrets for the way things worked out. But those good intentions are completely immaterial, because the job of policing is to occupy and suppress marginal people. You can’t reform it from within. It's like attempting to reverse the tide of the ocean by splashing really hard. 

There are two competing narratives here. Derek Chauvin is exactly the type of racist police officer who typically does not face justice for unjustly distributing violence. One narrative says that if he can be convicted and incarcerated for George Floyd’s murder then that will represent a real step forward for the project of ending racialized police violence. On the other hand, we have Alex Kueng, a man who sincerely believed that by working within systems of oppression he could be part of the solution. Most of the attention has been focused on Chauvin (even before his trial began), mainly because the image of his nonchalant demeanor while slowly choking a man to death perfectly captures the fungibility of Black life in the eyes of police. Not to mention the grim irony of killing a Black person by kneeling on him, after the act of kneeling became synonymous with protesting police violence. But we do not lack images of white police expressing an explicit lack of concern for Black life. The story of Alex Kueng is perhaps the more important one to tell.

There’s a certain kind of well-meaning liberal who will cheer the conviction of Derek Chauvin or decry his acquittal, depending on the outcome of his trial. This particular kind of liberal believes in the fact of systemic racism but sees it as the product of racist individuals like Derek Chauvin who exist within the system and make the necessary work of policing harder for genuinely decent cops who just want to keep people safe. Decent cops like Alex Kueng. Of course, it’s hard to determine who was being kept safe by arresting someone for a counterfeit $20 bill. That is, it’s hard to understand that if you believe the role of police is to protect people. When you understand that their role is to protect capital, it makes much more sense.

So as much as I want Derek Chauvin to go to prison, I don’t think I wish the same for Alex Kueng. He made a mistake--not on that fateful day when he was just doing what the job he signed up for, but when he joined the ranks of the police in the first place. He believed in the liberal myth that individuals can determine the social output of systems. It’s a crime that a lot of us are guilty of, even if the harmful effects of that belief are less tangible and explicit.

Prison doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t bring George Floyd back to life, and it sure as shit isn’t going to make policing a less violent and oppressive institution. What it does do is provide a pressure relief valve for the tensions caused by a fundamentally inequitable society. The same impulse to want Chauvin to be branded an aberrant individual and locked away from society is the same perception of justice through law and order that killed George Floyd. And for Alex Kueng, it is the cruel punchline to the joke of wanting to be a  “good cop.” 

This is the reason we say that “all cops are bastards.” It doesn’t mean that all cops are just like Derek Chauvin. Rather, most cops are like Alex Keung: bastards, not by personal disposition but by participation in an institution that does the work of bastards. And that, my friends, is my fear in all this. I’m afraid that when we look back on the protests of 2020 and what comes next, all we will think about is Derek Chuavin, whether he is convicted or not. He will become the poster child for everything that is wrong with policing, and the conclusion will be that if we can eliminate the Chauvins from the ranks of the police we will have meaningfully addressed the problem. But the very nature of policing attracts people like Chauvin, and more often it creates Chauvins out of the raw material provided in the form of people like Kueng. The structure is the problem, not the people who operate within it. 

The problem was always bigger than Derek Chauvin. The problem will remain bigger than Derek Chauvin, whether he’s imprisoned or not. The police and those who depend on police to protect their power are counting on you to forget that.

ACAB.

Solidarity forever.