> Wojtek:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/nyregion/16-officers-ordered-to-surrender-in-ticket-fixing.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion
> <>
> <> " About 60 off-duty officers crowded in the main foyer to support
> <> their comrades. They formed a human wall, four-deep, between reporters
> <> and the some of the accused officers as they came out of a hallway.
> <>
> <> [WS:] It does not appear so thin, after all.
> <>
> <> Wojtek
>
> Was reviewing Robert Jackall's ethnography of the NYPD recently. Cops'
> self-image is one of big german shepards protecting the sheep. They
> believe that quote, paraphrase: "if it weren't for us, decent people
> could never sleep peacefully at night. We make civilization possible."
>
> ... but I also wonder about something else, about their own fear and
> guilt, ...
>
> Like capitalists who are terrified of the mobs who want their shit, of
> mobs who will tear their flesh apart in anger if they ever have the
> chance, that fantasy is a projection. The cop's nightmare reveals that
> they are feel guilty and ashamed of themselves for dividing the world
> into us against them. I'm sure that, for the more twisted, the chants
> "who do you protect, who do you serve," only serve to unleash their
> anger, the way an abuser hits someone harder when they see
> vulnerability.
>
>
Great post, Shag. Woj, whoever said the line where cops protect cops was
thin? I believe it is usually represented as a wall - ever watch a TV show
where the cops have to deal with IAB? The iconography of the thin blue line
is intended to indicate how the police are few in number relative to the
size of the criminal classes and and good citizens.
Second, as Shag points out and as any decent sociologist knows, Durkheim's key point is that deviance primarily serves to reinforce the normal. The people, then, who are responsible fore reigning in deviance or prosecuting deviants are those engaged most immediately in what sociologists of science call boundary projects maintaining the difference between normalcy and deviance, the difference necessary for the reproduction of society. They have an almost inherent love-hate relationship with the public - omnipresent wolfy threat and blithely ignorant sheep - it's the contradiction of what Simmel could have analysed as the form/type "protector" (and, maybe, he did). There's a way in which OWS - and other movements/actions as diverse as OWS - represent a boundary confusion... they are members of the good sheep-y public working with marsupial-like oddballs, not wolves or sheep (traditionally harmless, just weirdly upsetting). When confusing hybrid groups challenge the boundary necessary to maintain the identity of defenders of the moral core of the realm - an identity predicated on repressing identification with the deviants - the threat is high and reaction likely. Add to this the fact that the demographic background of the police is historically one identical to traditional criminals/deviants and the melding of loathing for those like you who made bad choices to your good ones and "there but for the grace of God go I" and the need to defend one's identity and society's received self-legitimation is intense, no?