Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

act in minor or symbolic ways to keep the crowd in line. Negotiation with theGood Cop starts to look more attractive, as does playing by the rules. This, inessence, is the strategy of political terrorism. The threat of violence is madeclear at every turn, and a politically useful climate of fear is carefully developedin order to control the population.ll7 Terrorism and co-optation are thus subsumedunder a single system.This is something we should learn to expect: the strategic use of both theGood Cop and the Bad Cop to control and, ultimately, to neutralize dissent.ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGESIf the 2000 Democratic Convention is any indication, it would seem that the biggestchange since 1968 is the broadened range of tactics available to police. Police commandershave gained the ability to restrain officers when a Good Cop approach is inorder. This is made possible by organizational changes connected, both historicallyand conceptually , to the process of militarization.Historically, the federal government prompted the development of NegotiatedManagement: the approach was shaped by the various commission reports,Supreme Court rulings, the development of the National Park Service permitsystem, and the availability of crowd control training at the U.S. Army MilitaryPolice School.llS (In this respect, local police have followed a course similar tothat of the National Guard, which was militarized after the 1877 strike wave.) Thisnew training was specifically designed according to the recommendations of theKerner and Eisenhower reports. I 19The Negotiated Management model arose at the same time and from thesame sources as the militarization of the police. To make sense of this, it isimportant to understand that militarization does not only refer to police tacticsand weaponry, but also to their mode of organization.120 The Kerner reportargued for it explicitly:The control of civil disturbances ... requires large numbers of disciplinedpersonnel, comparable to soldiers in a military unit, organized and trainedto work as a team under a highly unified command and control system.Thus when a civil disturbance occurs, a police department must suddenlyshift into a new type of organization with different operational procedures.The individual officer must stop acting independently and begin toperform as a member of a closely supervised, disciplined team.121In short, it is military discipline that makes Negotiated Management a possibility,restraining the individual officers while maintaining the potential for acoordinated attack. This requires careful planning for the operation itself, and ahigh level of discipline among the officers so that each one acts according to theestablished plan.122 Hence, militarization may increase the organization's overallcapacity for violence, but may decrease individual acts of brutality, owing to ahigher level of discipline. 1 2 3Previously, individual acts of brutality were tolerated or encouraged asa means of controlling the population through terror. But this approach canbe limiting, as it renders negotiation and co-optation unlikely. Militarization195