The slogan ‘ACAB’ (All Cops are Bastards) has been around a long time. It’s at least 100 years old, and was once used by gangsters and mobsters. More recently, anarchists and punks took it up. And yet more recently, ‘ACAB’ found a home among certain leftists and progressives.
I think it has its uses. But I have to admit, I find ‘ACAB’ as misleading as helpful.
‘ACAB’ and US Political Rhetoric
Why?
Let’s start with the rhetorical role the slogan plays. Lots of liberals (and some conservatives) push some version of the ‘a few bad apples’ approach to the police. They claim some officers – not very many, and mostly officers like the ones who killed George Floyd – are the real problem. The rest of the officers remain innocent, or at least not very harmful. And so, they push reform measures aimed at cleaning the barrel of bad apples. They push things like body cameras, restrictions on police use of force, police review boards, and so on.
Leftists respond – quite rightly! – that the problems with policing run much deeper than all this. It’s not really a ‘bad apples’ problem. Leftists advocate for deeper measures, ones that get at the role police play in communities and in capitalism. Governments use police to write tickets and generate revenue, clear homeless people from public areas, enforce eviction and gentrification, form a substitute for providing real mental health services, and so on. Leftists want to get the police out of all that.
In short, most ‘problems’ police solve have solutions that shouldn’t involve the police at all. Usually people who don’t carry guns should solve them. Often social service agencies. But getting rid of the ‘bad apples’ wouldn’t change any of that. Liberal reform proposals fall roughly into two camps: the ones that don’t work, and the ones that would involve the police doing the same things, but doing them more nicely.
As Clear as Mud
So what does ‘ACAB’ have to do with any of this? In theory, leftists pulled out ‘ACAB’ in order to emphasize that all police officers remain a part of this deeper system. Even when police officers behave nicely, even when they do very nice things, they remain part of a deeper system that evicts people from their homes, enforces private property rights, puts people with mental illnesses into systems of punishment, and so on. This holds even when the officers make lots of friends in the community.
The trouble, though, is that almost no one hears any of that when they hear ‘ACAB.’ A subset of leftists with a deeper background hear it that way. But to the other 98% of the population, leftists just sound like very confused liberals! Leftists sound like they’re trying to generalize the liberal ‘bad apples’ theory to include all cops. And that doesn’t lead anyone to look at the deeper social role of policing. Rather, it leads them to think that leftists are just really big individualists (all individuals!).
In short, by using ‘ACAB,’ we’re often just letting liberals (and even some conservatives) define the terms of the debate. It lets them keep the focus on individual officers. It lets them ignore the social role of policing. And it lets them keep sharing those cute videos of officers helping kids – and all manner of copaganda – to promote the myth that police departments constitute an asset to the community.
And so, if we want to shift the focus from individual officers to the social and institutional role of police, ‘ACAB’ often fails. I find that ‘defund the police‘ does the job more effectively (though not perfectly).
