(182) S9E25 C&G Policing Part 2
This episode is going to be a Prepeat episode. What's a Prepeat episode? Well, I already had this episode recorded for a different season and I actually ended up moving the government season ahead of of that season. So it's a repeat since it was recorded for something else, but because I'm actually playing it before it's repeat, it's a prepeat. I don't know.
Derek:But anyway, the article is a good article because it takes a probing look at how we should view the police from a non violent perspective. It argues that there are many complexities to calling the police and often the police are called too easily and without a willingness on our part to be creative and to bear cross. In this episode, I won't get into the nitty gritty of all the intricacies you probably really want discussed. This is more of a bird's eye view of policing, especially for those who can't imagine life without the police. The beginning of the article is a little bit drier, but when you get to the end, like that he gives, the author gives an example where it really helps you to see, Oh, you're right.
Derek:I guess we call police the police way, way, way too easily and we really don't try to build relationships and alternative solutions. And I think that's what a lot of non violence does is it gets the creative juices flowing and it really drives you to find communal, alternative, relational solutions to things that take the interest of all parties and the well-being of all parties into consideration. So even though this is a bird's eye view, definitely listen to it. Maybe skip ahead a little bit if you find the beginning too dry. But I do promise that I will come back and dig into this question later in the season because at the end of the season, we are going to have a number of guests on on the podcast and policing is one of the topics which we're gonna try to to hammer out.
Derek:And I feel like there are other people who are probably better at this than I am. Again, this episode is not really going to focus on trying to dismantle the police and say that, you know, get rid of the police and there's no place for them in government. This one is more saying, hey look, as Christians, can I be a police officer? And can I should I really be trying to call the police on other people? And it takes a first look at that.
Derek:So, just know what it is before you get into it and don't have expectations for something that we're not trying to do in this episode and that the article is not trying to address. For now, I want you to see that policing is one of those things which we which we need in a far lesser degree than we currently have them, and our our calling of them often produces more violence, all because we don't want to do the hard work of community, creativity, and bearing cross. If we can get that through in this episode, I think our next dialogue on the police and getting into the nitty gritty of it will go a lot more smoothly. So, hope you can extend your palette in this episode and enjoy the Prepeat. Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast.
Derek:Today, I am going to bring an article to you from Andy Alexis Baker entitled The Gospel or Mennonites and the Police. So I wanted to to bring this one to you and and saving it towards the end here because my goal is next season to be able to get to government. And I think it I think most people can get to a place where where we would say, yeah, we should have less war and I mean armies by and large do not so great things. I mean, very few wars are are justifiable if any. And okay, I I could imagine living without a big army.
Derek:But when you talk about the police force, which is is kind of a logical conclusion of of non violence, and that's that's really what my journey has been, and I think the journey of most people where like, oh yeah, Jesus was serious about non violence, what does that mean? And you kind of start with personal non violence, like, I probably shouldn't kill people, and then you start to think, well, that means that my country shouldn't have an army, and then that means, the police probably are not a Christian sort of institution either. Does the state really have the power or should a Christian join the state which then enacts the power to harm and kill people? I think this article is a good first look at the issue and I do hope to address this in more detail the season on government. I hope to get into that a bit more.
Derek:So this is just kind of preliminary. It was written in 02/2007 and I received permission directly from Andy via email and such. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. The Gospel and Aglauch. Judging from recent writings and conferences on the topic of policing within North American Mennonitism, policing seems to be one of the cutting edges of social ethics.
Derek:Some of the most influential writers have taken up the task of providing a theology of security in order to offer ethical guidance for those working within the nation state system. Rather than attempting to give ethical guidance to congregation members with an uneasy conscience about calling upon the world's police forces, these writings and conferences have focused instead on how to convince Mennonites that their uneasy consciences are misplaced. Police officers are actually peace officers, say the advocates of policing, so congregations should open up their membership to these newly baptized peacemakers. Further, these theologians have lofty ambitions of solving the world's war problems by using local police as a model for international conflict. This article seeks to challenge well intentioned assumptions about the local police that are the basis for opening up Mennonites to a greater acceptance of police and military forces.
Derek:I will challenge the largely uncritical view of just policing that has not given sufficient attention to the problems local police pose for Christian congregations. First, I argue that North American Mennonites should not be involved in modern police institutions. Violence is inherent in modern policing and the growing tendency of Mennonite congregations to bless members serving in police institutions undermines an ethic based upon the Gospels. As an occupation, policing necessarily involves people in a violent institution, demands they forfeit their freedom to a hierarchical chain of command and constraints imposed by their oath of office, and ask them to participate in an idolatrous view of the nation state as the place where God's action in history is primarily to be experienced and seen. Second, I suggest there may be some benefit in using just war criteria to make personal and congregational ethical decisions about calling upon the police.
Derek:The just war is simply not a home, not at home in the arena of nation state and reframing the language in terms of policing cannot deliver the goods. However, as a guide for more local and personal decision making, it may be useful. In 1999, James Reimer wrote two short articles arguing for the legitimacy of the state and its use of coercive force. God may use state violence, Reimer claimed, to achieve God's ends. Further, if God uses the violence of the state, then Mennonites cannot transform His instrument of wrath into a completely non violent entity.
Derek:At most, they can call it to account for its policing function. Mennonites should therefore distinguish between war and policing. Unlike war, policing is is best understood as protecting the good and restraining the evil with minimum amounts of force. Since the police are in fact a form of peace making, Mennonites can love their enemies in police occupations. Gerald Schlaubach has argued in defense of Christian policing on similar grounds.
Derek:His focus, however, has been ecumenical in nature, seeing just policing as a potential basis for bringing Catholics and Mennonites into closer unity. Schlabach argues that the intent of the Catholic just war position is akin to the logic behind policing. Since Mennonites have traditionally been less resistant to the notion of policing than to that of war, Catholic just word adherence and Mennonite pacifists might find common ground on the question of violence in a framework that focuses on just policing and seek a way forward together. These ideas found a more formal hearing in August 2004 when the peace office of the Mennonite Central Committee sponsored a conference on seeking the welfare of the city, public peace, justice and order. Three basic viewpoints found expression.
Derek:Schlabach and Reimer presented papers defending a just policing ethic in which Christian police could have recourse to killing, albeit only as an exception under carefully delineated criteria. Ted Kuntz, John Rempel, and J. Robert Charles presented papers similar to the Swiss Brethren perspective represented in the Strasbourg discipline. Like Reimer, they recognize the possibility that God may work through the state's limited use of violence. Unlike Reimer, they do not think Christians could participate in the State's policing.
Derek:Duane Friesen, Lisa Church, and J. Darrell Byler present what might be called an optimistic pacifism. In their view, nonviolent direct action has the potential to bring real security if there is the will and creative expertise to implement it. Generating that will by providing evidence that nonviolent policing works is a fundamental task for Mennonites, who at a minimum should always act as if non violent approaches to police functions will succeed in deterring crime. At Peace and Public Order, Security and the Wisdom of the Cross, a collection of essays edited by Schlabach and ethicist Duane Friesen draws unevenly from the conference papers and features several additional contributions.
Derek:The essays generally call upon North American Mennonites to support police forces from their from either the just policing perspective or the optimistic pacifism position. Meanwhile, a position resembling the one historically held by Marpechen or Strasbourg Anabaptists is relegated to a single essay by John Rempel that concludes with some ambivalence about the Mennonite ability to guarantee security for the world, completely missing are any arguments defending the traditional Anabaptist position articulated in the Schleienheim Confession. The Justifiable War Policing poll and the Optimistic Pacifism poll of the debate agree at several points. First, they attempt to translate Christian ethics into terms everyone can understand regardless of faith commitment or place in life. Second, because Christian ethics is good for everyone, Christians ought to witness to the state and take active roles within it.
Derek:The state primarily promotes the good rather than holding off worse evils. Therefore, the state is not outside the perfection of Christ as in the Schleienheim Confession. Despite this agreement, the respective authors employ different moral reasoning and ask different questions from different standpoints. Yet no one clarifies these differences and this produces a pseudo unity. The authors mean different things by peace.
Derek:For Schlabach, peace does not explicitly require the absence of violence. A Christian police officer can justifiably kill someone under strict guidelines, making this action extremely accept his action extremely exceptional. However, most North American Mennonites use the word peace differently. To accept a shift in meaning would reframe Mennonite theology and ethics. In contrast, Wayne Friesen seeks to abolish state and church sanctioned killing in general.
Derek:His views, he views peace as an absence of violence or at least killing for everyone, Christian or not. Similarly, the authors mean different things by Justice. Schlabach's Justice revolves around the Just War Criteria, restraining violence to what is necessary to accomplish goals. But North American Mennonites have not typically seen Justice as a set of criteria that one checks off before unleashing violence. They focus on restoring offenders to community life, which is impossible if the police killed the offender.
Derek:Finally, none of the authors defines police. There are levels of police: local, county, state, provincial, federal, and even international. Does Reimer envision American Mennonites joining the CIA, NSA, or FBI, or Canadian Mennonites joining the RCMI or CSIS? Are these police agencies peacekeepers? Are they just?
Derek:By whose definition? Do they hold back evil? Abundant evidence suggests these agencies unleash evil. In At Peace and Unafraid, Jeff Gingrich claims there is no national epidemic of police violence. He uses data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics to argue that police are the objects of violence more frequently than they use violence.
Derek:But this position is untenable. The headline on a statistics box asks, What do we know about the police use of force in The United States? The answer which Gingrich does not acknowledge is that we don't know much. Police secrecy, refusal to collect detailed data, and refusal of serious independent study have hampered accurate knowledge. The same government study gimmick used also claims that.
Derek:Quote, Finally, there are some aspects of police use of force about which we know very little or next to nothing. The information that is most critical for policy decisions often is not available or is very difficult to obtain. Such is the case with police use of force. The issues that most concern the public and policymakers lack the kinds of reliable and solid information that advance debate from the realm of ideological posturing to objective analysis. The statistics are based on individual departments' voluntary reports.
Derek:This methodology creates many problems: gaps in statistics because states and counties do not report, officers modifying reports, knowing community groups and criminologists track such information, undocumented violence swept under the table to avoid a paper trail, and statistical distortion because citizens under report police violence. Since the data itself does not move debate from the realm of ideological posturing to objective analysis, it is premature and dubious to use it to justify the police as peacemakers. The bottom line is that police officers are trained to kill. The police are militarized. The strength of Slabach's proposal is that it reframes justifiable war language in terms that could limit war.
Derek:Although Schlabach and others including John Howard Yoder rightly emphasized the difference between armies and police, they overstate the differences in ways that make us forget that for Christians, neither the regulated killing of policing nor the unregulated killing of war is acceptable. Further, just policing fails to see how the state has blurred the line between policing and warfare. Police language reveals something of this. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates told the LA Times that quote, If we have people who smoke a little pot or snort a little coke, who simply want to go out and party and use drugs, I think they ought to be taken out and shot because if this is a war on drugs, they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Police wage a war on crime, a war on drugs with zero tolerance, for all sorts of activities.
Derek:These phrases are not merely symbolic, they reveal that the police are less restrained than Schlabach or Friesen concede and that the police have a warring mentality. The New York Police Department boasts of being the tenth largest army in the world. It has machine guns, aircraft and armored vehicles, chemical weapons, military style clothing. It possesses a military like hierarchy, paramilitary units specializing in extreme violence, SWAT teams and riot squads, sophisticated surveillance equipment. It is not accountable to the public.
Derek:The list could go on. Various scholars have noted that in the post Cold War era, the war on crime replaces the arms race. If this is correct, the same logic that led to the arms race has been at work in American policing institutions. This is not the language of restraint. Of course, pacifists would welcome a strict use of justifiable war thinking, but the change in terminology does not change the violence, it only renames it.
Derek:In the end, a corpse does not care if the killer was doing police work or playing soldier in war. The result is the same and disregards Jesus' example and teachings of non violence. There's a deeper narrative of violence within police activities than the authors in At Peace and Unafraid have so far conceded. Because they do not define police, they fall prey to an ideology in which modern police institutions appear to be ancient servants of the common good. Jeff Gingrich narrates the the rise of the modern American police as a model imported from England in response to rising crime rates.
Derek:Yet if other historical movements are any guide, institutions never arise from a single cause, but from complicated processes involving economic, political, social and ideological factors. Fear of crime cannot in and of itself explain the existence of the modern police because such violence are not unique to modern times. Previous societies did not develop police in response to similar problems. In October, William the Conqueror imposed Norman Law upon the Anglo Saxons in Britain. Norman Law revolved around the Frank Pledge and held an entire community responsible for infractions.
Derek:In this system, every Shire had a sheriff or Shire reeve, those whose main duties were as estate managers. Crimes were prosecuted when a private citizen brought a complaint against a person. If an offender fled, the sheriff organized a posse commentatus to apprehend the person for trial. If the posse failed to apprehend the person, the community had to pay a fine. In December, the Statute of Winchester codified a new volunteer night watch system to supplement the sheriff.
Derek:Volunteers' responsibilities included extinguishing fires as well as various hygienic and administrative tasks. When someone shouted the hue and cry, the statute required every male over 15 years old to assist in the situation. In the fifteenth century, a constable similar to the Shireave under the Normans began to coordinate the Watch and received a small stipend from the king. About this time, rulers and kings began to see the justice system as not only a revenue source, but a way to impose their rule and increase their power. The Watch system evolved over several centuries in relationship to political changes, resistance to the government, and the intentional erosion of communal authority and loyalty in favor of new state formations and war making enterprises.
Derek:European policing was a byproduct of the state's war making abilities. Security and police evolution had little to do with common good. This system of constables, sheriffs and watches was directly imported into the American colonies. Boston established the earliest watch in 1636. The city chartered the watch for run of the mill tasks to ensure community safety such as inspecting suspicious persons, firefighting, maintaining street lamps, and managing stray animals.
Derek:The primary task of the Watch was not crime prevention. At best, it represented a response system like modern day fire departments. The Watch volunteers and conscripts did not wear uniforms, were unarmed, and managed many activities, the least of which was crime prevention. These characteristics are exactly opposite to those of a modern police department. The first modern American police agencies evolved from mixing the watch system with the need to control immigrant and slave populations.
Derek:Each region had its own flavor of policing. In the South, the modern police developed out of patrols organized to catch runaway slaves, monitor their social behavior, restrict their movement, and thwart revolt. Early on, enforcement was the duty of all citizens, but enforcement proved difficult, so legislators mandated for federal troops, state militias, or county conscripts to staff the patrols. The conscription system monitored black movements and behavior, and allowed poor whites to vent their frustration on black slaves. These patrols carried out their assignments in the same manner, armed with guns, ropes and whips.
Derek:They guarded countryside roads to verify traveling slaves had a valid pass. The patrolmen raped women and generally harassed, threatened and abused any black persons, especially those without passes. The main restraint on outright killing was the economic value of the slave. Other duties included searching slave quarters and dispersing illegal slave gatherings. As the nineteenth century neared, the patrols focused on preventing infractions instead of punishment for rules already broken.
Derek:For our present purpose, the noteworthy aspect of the patrols are that they were accountable to public law, and that their main goal was preventing revolt instead of reacting to it. In 1785, the first modern police force arose out of the slave patrols in Charleston, South Carolina called the Charleston Guard and Watch. This department had a distinct chain of command: uniforms, sole responsibility for policing, salary, authorized use of force and a focus on preventing crime. According to one member, the unit's main responsibility was keeping down the niggers, which it did with terrifying precision, crime and black were synonymous. Over time, similar departments emerged in other cities.
Derek:Likewise, Northern Police Departments were not designated to curb crime, but a social class, the dangerous class. For example, the 1834 City Marshals Report in Boston included a detailed list of police functions such as enforcing traffic and building regulations, but did not refer to crime or to criminals at all. Instead, vices such as drinking and vagrancy occupied the document. In fact, Boston had only one murder from 1822 to 1834. This scenario repeated itself in many cities.
Derek:Thus, Northern Police did not arise as a response to crime, but from ideological differences between rich and poor. Northern Police Departments were also tied to political consolidation. For example, in the nineteenth century, appointment to a New York City police post was a political affair at Tammany Hall, tightly controlled and sold to loyal clients. The police promoted voter turnout, monitored voting stations, ignored ballot stuffing, and beat citizens who voted against the current administration. The policemen learned to back the regime in power because newly elected regimes customarily fired existing police and placed them with their own loyal clients.
Derek:This explicit political activity coupled with increased arrest for petty offenses amplified the power of the city rulers. This narrative takes more complex features into account than simple cause and effect between crime and police. Economic, ideological, and political reasons converged as the primary motivation for developing police agencies. If North American Mennonites want to appeal to history to claim the police are essentially a non violent thin blue line between order and disorder, they need to be clear how this has historically unfolded and whose order and interest the police have served. Contra Schlaubach and Friesen, there's little reference to a common good in the history of modern police.
Derek:The police were not on the side of positive peace where people reconcile with one another, but on the side of those who paid them. The police did not result from inevitable forces of history, but from calculated moves to maintain social stratification. Mennonites should be cautious because history does not vanish but materializes in the present. As police historian Eric Monachin wrote, The historian must preserve a radical doubt as to the need for police, thus ensuring that the proper energy goes into accounting for their existence. The police are an alternative community to the Church.
Derek:John Howard Yoder, following Roland Bainton, argued that fourth century Christians allowed military service because they found the soldiers' administrative duties, including policing, acceptable. Yet no theologian prior to that century condoned military service and police occupations. Rather, all Christian writers denounced the job. The Apostolic tradition, an influential third century church order, represents attitudes towards the police. Quote, A catechumen or a believer, if they want to be soldiers, let them be excluded because they distanced themselves from God, end quote.
Derek:The problem was ecclesiological. Policing created distance from God and the church through which God acted. This was the core reason early Christians banned police occupations. One allegiance would be to the Roman Empire, not the Church. Because early Christians rejected violence holistically, not legalistically, They saw violence as intrinsic to other issues like idolatry and oaths.
Derek:They rejected police oaths because oaths stifled the freedom of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon baptism. In the oath, a person swore to uphold a false story, to see and hear something other than the Word of God, and because part of a community based on different ethics than the Gospel. However, the Council of Arles in 03/14 reversed this position and threatened members with discipline if they left the police force in peacetime. Acceptance of police thus bridged the gap for acceptance of war. Likewise, the modern oath of office is part of police initiation rites.
Derek:Consider police initiation rites in comparison to ancient Christian initiation. A prospective police officer is first examined. What is his or her background? Is the person mentally and physically fit to join the fraternal order? Those passing scrutiny enter the catechumenate police academy, for indoctrination into the order's faith and disciplines.
Derek:The catechesis can last several months. At the training's end, catechumens are examined to ensure the training has changed them sufficiently. In the final initiation rite, the competences swear allegiance to the state. The leader places the city or state seal upon the new officer who has given a new mission to the world. This comparison is not flippant It recognizes the police as a religious practice that we are predisposed to ignore as unimportant.
Derek:Police initiation rites situate the convert within a sacred community with stories that shape the adherent's belief, belonging, and behavior. The Fraternal Police Order shapes the beliefs of converts, narrating the world for them. For example, police often explain behavior in terms of free will and conspiracy theories, have a police martyrology and inculcate values that color the police's worldview. Order is the key value they uphold. The concept of order shapes their sense of belonging in a special way.
Derek:It is a subjective concept that puts the police at odds with most of society because people who do not belong to the police are threats to order. It makes police profoundly conservative and hostile to radicals. This viewpoint ruptures their loyalty to other primary groups like family, church, class, and even race. This belonging shapes police behavior. Rodney Stark has shown that most police violence does not occur by individual officers out of sight from other officers, but with other officers present or in police buildings.
Derek:Police violence is a group activity usually covered up by other officers. Individual dissent is met with disapproval and ostracism. For example, in response to the NYPD policy of arresting homeless people for sleeping outside, one officer refused and the department disciplined him. NYPD spokesperson John Timoney said about the case, quote, You don't get to make an individual decision in the department, and if he doesn't agree with the policy, he can let the police commissioner know in writing. And then, if he doesn't like the answer of the police commissioner, he can quit.
Derek:It's that simple. Friendship beyond the sacred police community is difficult at best, and this poses significant challenges for officers to undergo church discipleship and accountability. Mistrust of society, odd working hours, common feelings of isolation, constant interaction with problems, police sub societies from burial associations to clubs to social service agencies, and honor codes to name just a few problems, create significant social barriers for officers to have allegiances with other groups. These social barriers, coupled with the theological narratives, indicate that police occupations distance a person from Jesus and his eschatological community. So for example, Duane Friesen is unrealistic to assume that Mennonite theology can override the deep subculture of the police, allowing North American Mennonites to be both Jesus' disciples and police officers.
Derek:We cannot serve two masters. This critique of the loyal police makes it difficult to imagine how the concept of policing can chasten Christian just war thinking. Only as a platonic ideal can policing deliver on the promise. If the original intent of just war thinking was policing, then the latter is a subset of the former and must overcome significant barriers. For example, the just war tradition was most at home in Christendom, where people believed they had a divine obligation and duties towards one another.
Derek:Even when within this setting, the just war tradition, which functioned as just policing, rarely prevented war. Our world, however, is very different from the world of Christendom. Nation states do not have a common theology or ideology and no accountability to a comparable umbrella organization. The United Nations cannot prevent conflict because international law has dull teeth. Yet even in the UN, if the UN could police the world, who would police the UN?
Derek:Further, several member states have carried out wars such as the Korean War, calling them police actions. It seems the world has attempted the just policing concept. It is yet to be credible. Despite its shortfalls, the concept of just policing might have value for local ethical decision making. Mennonite recourse to an armed police intervention violates the Gospel call to non violence in a way that only committing actual physical violence can equal.
Derek:Recent thinking about policing can raise the problem to Mennonite consciousness. If the authors we are discussing had kept a two kingdom theology rather than envisioning how they can influence policy, they could have focused attention on how congregations and their members could apply the concept of just policing to their own lives. First, however, the question of whether to call the police at all must be answered. The answers depend upon whether one holds to one Kingdom theology or Two Kingdom Theology. An Anabaptist version of One Kingdom Theology claims that Christ is Lord over all creation.
Derek:Thus, there is one ethical standard for all people regardless of time, place, or creed. The state and its police is then the servant of Christ and human beings can and should use it to help set up the reign of God on earth. The police are merely a part of the peacemaking enterprise of God's Kingdom. This is problematic. First, the Biblical record does not support it.
Derek:The history of Israel's attempts at security through a centralized state is narrated as an utter failure. In fact, first Samuel eight makes it clear that from the beginning, the Israelites call for a king like the Gentiles ultimately rejects God Himself. The rest of the Old Testament is commentary on this initial warning. From the most spiritual of kings, David, to the wisest, Solomon, the Hebrew Scriptures narrates a succession of wars, murders, rape, enslavement, and idolatry. Nevertheless, in At Peace and Unafraid, Lydia Harter locates the theological roots for engaging in security in the Wisdom Literature instead of the prophetic tradition, yet she ignores Ecclesiastes, the culmination of Wisdom Literature.
Derek:Coelette speaks from experience as a king. He denounces the position as an exercise in wicked greed. He speaks further on about security, Do not curse the king, do not curse the rich in your bedroom, for a bird of the air will carry your voice, or some winged creature will tell your words. This is state security in the Hebrew record, self interested expansion of domination and wealth. Unlike themes of labor and wealth in Ecclesiastes, this warning remains unmitigated God's wise people will shun these positions and seek to be something else.
Derek:Second, Monistic Theology merely replaces two Kingdom dualisms with a secular one. In At Peace and Unafraid, the MCC Peace Theology Project team writes of the Kingdom of God as an all encompassing reality. Therefore, the state and its police have a life giving purpose. God works in the world's institutions for good purposes and we are invited to participate in God's transformative process to deliver the world from bondage and inaugurate Shalom. This story parallels Liberalism's story of the modern state as making peace between diverse people under the its Catholic umbrella.
Derek:The nation state is a peacemaker over against civil society. This is dualism and it is a story of salvation. The state arose to save people from disorder and chaos, from prior violence. Thus, the police are one of the main branches of the state as peacemakers. Several recent authors have explicitly stated this.
Derek:The problem is theological and soteriological. Two competing narratives differ about what it means to be saved in this world. One Kingdom Theology does not take the reality of sin seriously enough. When it advocates that Christians take positions of power, it fails to take into account either the reality of the temptation to dominate or the reality of evil. Even non violence becomes a mere technique when divorced from the theological presuppositions of Christian faith.
Derek:Thus, we can have a non violent state, but whether that non violent state will be totalitarian on the order of Huxley's Brave New World is the question. However, Two Kingdom Theology claims that until Christ's return, the world must organize itself in ways that turn evil and violence in on itself. The world needs police to do this and these police need to carry lethal weapons. Traditionally, this theology has claimed that the state is a servant of God and ordained by God to carry out His wrath. Most of the problems that can arise with this theology, Quietism and Conservatism, come directly from this notion that God created and uses the modern nation state and its police as a special entity.
Derek:One solution is to replace this notion with another option. Fully scriptural and theologically sound, the modern state and its police is a creation, not of God but of human beings, that has taken on a demonic life of its own which humans do not control. It has no special place in God's plan. This theological viewpoint frees and perhaps obligates Christians to embody their own narratives, free from both state fetishism and police mythologies. The police do not save us in the large picture, they enslave us to demonic forces.
Derek:Perhaps just policing criteria could help free us from enslavement to a false ideology. Rigorously applying just war criteria to calling the police could raise the threshold for bringing the police into situations. It may seem strange to use these criteria, especially after I rejected the idea that they are useful for limiting the state's violence, and argued that the difference between the police and military is not great. Yet my argument was only that when applied to the state, these criteria are hollow because the system is not directed towards an end, but towards effectiveness. Christians working within that system will be subverted by the techniques and loyalties the job demands.
Derek:The most urgent task is to set out ethical criteria for people who may find themselves in a situation where they must decide what to do about violence or an offense. So I'm outlining the Just War criteria for them to consider before getting the police or military involved precisely because the police and military are unable to apply these criteria very well and are inherently averse to making that kind of decision honestly. However, the individual and church community must be able to think things through without resorting to calling the police as an intuitive response. There certainly will be situations where Christians will need to call the police, but the idolatrous character of the police is unlikely to change if Mennonites direct them from on high. Nevertheless, the just war criteria might be useful on the church and individual level.
Derek:However, I will focus mainly on a few negative examples because it seems the error most Christians will make is not being too cautious about calling the police, but being too quick to do so. Before calling the police, asking questions about legitimacy can be useful. Do the police have legitimate authority over those they would be called upon to stop? In whose eyes would legitimacy matter in various cases? Some youth, especially urban youth, view the police with sudden deep suspicion and vice versa that calling the police could make problems worse.
Derek:There may be neighborhood leaders who are more legit who hold more legitimacy in the eyes of the youth and therefore could help alleviate situations without the police. The Just Cause guideline also applies. Calling upon an armed police force because of nuisances is not an instance of just cause. In Christian reflection, a just cause forsakes self defense. In Just Policing guidelines, calling upon an armed police force can be just only if it is for the sake of another.
Derek:For example, to help find a lost child or a person with developmental disabilities. There are also instances in which calling upon the police is merely an administrative matter. Intentions must be right. John Howard Yoder distinguished between objective external intentions and subjective internal intentions. And calling the police is the intention to inflict harm on, punish, or humiliate another person.
Derek:The only valid reason to call in the police is to restore peace. For Mennonite business owners, if a shoplifter is caught in their stores, how does calling the police restore objective peace? It is possible that one could have an objective intention to punish and humiliate another person rather than to gain peace. When someone violates our personal living space through burglary for example, we can easily fall into a subjective desire for revenge and malice because of the emotional shock such violation causes. Under both intention and just cause, the primary question is whether there are more redemptive ways to deal with an offender than the police and criminal justice system allow.
Derek:Criteria of proportion are also important. Sometimes people call the police not to use their violence to win compliance, but for merely administrative purposes, such as in a car accident. These sorts of calls are usually routine, but they can be complicated by factors such as the immigration status of one of the drivers, or a lack of insurance. While examining the role of insurance, lawsuits, automobiles, and related issues is beyond the scope of this article, these aspects need to be revisited constantly. Even routine calls can lead to disproportionate responses by the police in the state.
Derek:Should we refuse to call on the police after a car accident when we have good reason to suspect the driver is an illegal immigrant? Calling the police would put that person in danger of deportation. Would calling in the police be proportional to the damage done given the knowledge one has? Would that be a just cause? Have all other options been exhausted so that calling the police is a truly last resort?
Derek:In many cases, the trigger reaction is to phone the police unnecessarily. Recently, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary had a visitor on campus. Peter went door to door asking for money to feed his small children or his hungry mother, or to buy diabetes medication for his grandfather. At first, students were unaware he asked around campus with different reasons for begging money. People invited him into their apartments, fed him and gave him money.
Derek:After a week or two of this, students realized they were being duped. Peter had a drug habit and was homeless. When a staff person found out about the situation, students received an email instructing them to call the police anytime Peter came onto campus. This clearly was not a last resort response. The students had Peter fed and given him money.
Derek:Calling armed presence to remove him after all this would have been cruel. Students including single persons and parents of small children held a meeting where attendees expressed a desire to handle this matter without the police. The students discussed a proportionate way to handle Peter, and after some discussion decided that calling the police would not likely help him with his drug problem. Therefore, it was not a just cause. Some were against calling the police in principle.
Derek:Others thought students and faculty could have a higher threshold for calling than for a beggar who merely disrupted daily routine. Students appointed two male members to deal with Peter anytime he came onto campus. The next time he did so, they told him about the meeting and that he was wasting his time scamming money from students. They candidly told him that they knew he had a drug problem. Residents would therefore offer him only phone numbers of places he could get help.
Derek:Peter left without a problem. Clearly, students were able to raise the threshold of the seminary in general for calling upon an armed force. This is a situation where thinking through the matter in terms of criteria helped lessen dependence upon an armed force to solve problems for Mennonites. Nonviolence training can also help with last resort. Nonviolent techniques, however, cannot guarantee peaceful outcomes.
Derek:Thus, nonviolent training is inadequate and one-sided if Mennonites do not also teach the discipline and discipline each other on the way of the cross. Suffering instead of calling upon bigger guns for protection, witness through willingness to suffer for justice, peace and reconciliation is one of the most honored practices in Christian faith. After the police have been called, we must take responsibility for the consequences where possible. If Mennonite institutions, universities, congregations, and others must involve the police in their property, they could appoint someone to escort the police on the grounds and have an explicit policy of at least demanding the police leave if they become abusive or threatened to draw their guns. In addition, administrators could at least request that the police leave their weapons at the gate.
Derek:This would reassert the kingdom authority on a given territory. This approach has historical precedent within Christianity. Medieval law decreed certain times and places where people could not use or bring weapons. Revitalizing this ancient tradition in North American Mennonite institutions formal rules of operation could be helpful. On the other hand, we must also realize that once the police are called, much of the situation is out of our control.
Derek:The police can and will do as they see fit. Making the above criteria explicit in such discussions can help us work through the dilemma of a non violent community in a violent world. However, the temptation will be to use these guidelines haphazardly. Just War Criteria have justified whatever war the state wages. Similarly, applying these criteria to the police could easily give a blank check to the police and to Mennonites to call them in.
Derek:We must always remember the potential for violence and killing that the police represent. Because they do not represent a common good, we must give an account for calling them. Was it justifiable? Did it meet the standards that just policing criteria impose? Often Mennonites may have a vested material interest in police intervention.
Derek:As the earlier critique argued, police generally represent the interests of those with more wealth. Perhaps then the best way to lessen our involvement with the police is to devalue wealth and live modest, simple lives. While it would not completely disentangle us from ever calling upon the police, it would considerably diminish the temptation. What kind of people can make the necessary moral discernments? If Mennonites merely click off criteria before dialing 911, then the criteria will would function no better than they do in Congress or the White House.
Derek:These guides from moral discernment require discipleship and rootedness in a community committed to following Jesus' way of non violence. Time and again, the criteria have proved deficient because they were treated as a technique rather than a requirement for discipleship. Do Mennonites currently have the necessary congregational life to form people able to make such discernments? Are we building character and virtues rooted in discipleship? The guidelines presuppose practice of taking regular systematic moral inventory of our individual and corporate lives, confessing our sins, and making amends.
Derek:They require structure for confession and accountability to an amends making process. If we Mennonites could rigorously embody these guidelines, we could model their faithful, credible use for Christians outside our own tradition. Thus, the criteria challenges us to live up to our own ecclesiology and our missional strategy. Unless we do so, we have nothing to say to a wider world. Because of the idolatrous character of the police, because police represent a threat to Church order and in the spirit of the early Christians and Anabaptists, Mennonites should ban police occupations for all current and potential members and do so with the historical recognition that the police have served as the bridge for wider acceptance of warfare, idolatrous collaboration with the state, and further breakdown of community discipline and life.
Derek:Keeping a skeptical distance from this principality and power would strengthen our ability to discern when it is justifiable to call upon the police. God might or might not choose to use police violence against itself for good, but only God is wise enough to subvert it. God's people are not. Far from resigning police agencies into the worst possible hands, Mennonite non participation leaves them in the proper place, in God's hands. Our job is to call people to come out from among them and be separate.
Derek:Wow, I love this piece. I know that the author definitely aims this towards Mennonites, but there are lots of people in the nonviolent community who Christian community to whom this would apply, I think. So let me just highlight a couple of the things that I think are important. I love the story of Peter and the guy who came on campus and was begging for money. It was a beautiful story, and I think it depicts what we try to emphasize over and over again, is non violence requires creativity, it requires thinking.
Derek:Just like when we discipline our kids, I know it's so easy for me to just do the easiest discipline. Yeah, go sit and time out. Okay, wait three minutes, all right, get out of time out. That's not discipline, that's retributive justice, that's punishment. I'm just making them sit there, I'm not teaching them anything.
Derek:I just get upset and discipline them. And not discipline, judge them, whatever you want to call it. True discipline takes a lot of commitment and patience and time and thought and creativity. And that's what nonviolence says, it says, We will not resort to the easy way, to just harming. Our desire is for all people, even our enemies, even those who might seek us harm.
Derek:We are going to help them in the best way possible. And so with Peter coming on campus and instead of calling the police and just having him thrown in jail, pointing him to places that can help him in seeking his well-being, and that's just, that's beautiful. Told a similar story back in the Consequentialism series of when we were in Romania and we had somebody steal our credit card and take thousands of dollars. And we could have called the police, but this individual was a Roma woman and she had five or six kids. What good would have calling the police have done?
Derek:I mean, she knew that we were Christians, she knew that we had given her things in the past and that we'd helped her. By calling the police, it would have made her children motherless, probably parentless, I don't think she really had a husband, and it would have shown her that our $2,000 4 thousand dollars whatever it was, was more important than she was. And she had an opportunity that day to see forgiveness and love and patience. Calling the police would have done, not only would it not have done her any good, it would have harmed her, I'm convinced. Now maybe our love and forgiveness didn't ultimately bring her to a saving knowledge of Jesus, I don't know how he'll use that in the future, but I think that was the first and maybe only time she saw true forgiveness and the extent of love that she did, as she's used to a community that takes advantage of each other, and a community that's retributive.
Derek:And that brings in the other point that the author made, which is we need to teach non violence, we need to teach that discipline, but that comes hand in hand with another discipline. You don't learn to do non violence without learning to also bear your cross. As a part of allowing Peter on campus and talking to him, Peter could have gotten mad and flown off the handle and he might have tried to be retributive himself and harm people. That's possible. And with with our situation in Romania, we weren't sure if the credit card companies were going to cover things because it was kind of our fault that our money was stolen because we didn't have our credit cards locked up and the person who stole it was working for us and we continued to have a relationship with.
Derek:We didn't know if we were gonna be responsible for those charges and we were willing to take that hit. And so, yeah, bearing your cross a it goes hand in hand with learning to be non violent. So I loved what the article pointed out pointed out how it takes a very Yoderian approach, which is Yoder all the time says, Hey look, I wanna pick on just war theorists because I'm so glad that people are at least trying to mitigate war and limit it. Like, I can appreciate that. I hope they do it consistently, but I'd be happy with a consistent just war theorist, much happier than the alternative.
Derek:And so here, the author's just saying, Hey look, at worst, I can I can handle it if you call the police, if if we deal with the police, if you take a just war type of approach to it, if you really put it through the ringer before calling the police or deciding to become a police officer, that's great? Maybe not great, but I can stand it more so. Other than that, I like the history of the police. I'll link some great resources. The End of Policing is good.
Derek:There's also a podcast which is not a Christian podcast, it's called Behind the Bastards, and they go through in much much more detail, but basically the same thing that this author points out as to the history of policing and how how the police have been used, and up to modernity and and what's going on today. Policing is definitely a tough issue, and I think in large part it's because it's an issue that hits the closest to home. Some of us have maybe called the police or been in a situation where we considered calling them and all of us want to have that readily available for us because our lives and our things are very important to us and more important to us than the lives of our enemies. So this article gives you a lot to think about and I hope you enjoyed it. Definitely check out check out more stuff from Alexis Baker here.
Derek:That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.
